Stephanie Davies

Why organisations work with Stephanie Davies

• A working method that gets cynical adult audiences to engage with behaviour change without the eye-rolling that usually accompanies culture training.
• A track record on hard conversations, with a programme at HSBC training more than 500 leaders to handle performance and feedback without flinching.
• A point of view on engagement grounded in published psychology, set out in her book Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter (Crown House).
• Two decades inside corporate culture work across HSBC, Nespresso, Nando’s, and government, so the content lands as practitioner advice rather than commentary.
• A delivery style that holds the room. The comedy training is a tool for retention and recall, not a gimmick layered on top of the content.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO of Laughology, founded 2006.
• Author of Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, Crown House Publishing.
• Master’s-level training in psychology, focused on humour and organisational performance.
• Designed and delivered performance-conversation training at HSBC for 500+ leaders.
• Culture and behaviour programmes with Nespresso, Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and UK government departments.
• Regular columnist for Training Journal; previously an award-winning stand-up comedian.

Biography

Most culture programmes lose the room in the first ten minutes. Adults arrive sceptical, the language is corporate, and the behaviours being asked of them feel performative. Laughology was built to solve that delivery problem. Stephanie Davies founded it in 2006 to pair applied psychology with the craft of stand-up, and uses humour as a mechanism for behaviour change rather than as decoration.

The substance sits behind the style. Her book, Laughology: Improve Your Life with the Science of Laughter, sets out humour as a thinking skill, drawing on positive psychology and the cognitive research on how laughter shifts perspective and learning retention. Her master’s-level work in psychology runs through the firm’s programmes on engagement, leadership behaviour, and feedback.

The client list reflects the practical bias. HSBC commissioned performance-conversation training for more than 500 leaders. Nespresso brought her in to strengthen retail leadership. Nando’s, Virgin, O2, and government departments have used Laughology for culture and behaviour work. Across these, the brief is consistent: get people to commit to a change in how they behave, not just understand why it matters.

That practitioner record is what distinguishes her in a crowded happiness-at-work category. Most speakers in the space arrive from coaching, HR, or pop-psychology. Davies arrives from a working comedy career and a psychology specialism in humour, with twenty years of corporate delivery behind her.

Key speaking topics

• Workplace engagement and culture change
• Psychology of humour at work
• Performance and feedback conversations
• Behaviour change in large organisations
• Leadership development and team culture
• Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace
• Resilience and positive psychology

Ideal for

• CHROs and people directors running engagement or culture change agendas.
• L&D and OD leads commissioning leadership, feedback, or behaviour-change programmes.
• Boards and executive teams looking for a substantive culture session that an internal audience will actually engage with.
• Conference organisers programming a keynote that has to do real work on a wellbeing or culture theme.

Audience outcomes

• A working model of humour as a behaviour-change tool, not as entertainment.
• Language and techniques for running performance and feedback conversations without avoidance.
• A clearer view of what drives engagement at the level of daily behaviour.
• Practical positive-psychology techniques for resilience and team morale.
• A session people actually remember, which is the precondition for any of the above changing behaviour.