Stay ConnectedMAKE WORK BETTER. Eat Sleep Work Repeat is the best podcast about workplace culture – it’s been listened to millions of times.
Bruce Daisley brings a curious mind to discussions about our jobs and the role they play in our lives.
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This is a podcast about making work better.
You can find all of the previous episodes on the website.
Here we go, two little things today to make you feel more brainy. It’s Blue Monday in the UK today - the day when we’re told it’s the most miserable day of the year - when we hate our job. By listening to these experts you’ll have some guidelines how you can make work better. They give solutions but I think once you listen to the data you’ll work out what to do yourselves.
Firstly something that might not seem directly connected to people in work initially but it’s about loneliness. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brigham Young University. We start talking about the problem of loneliness in society and we go on to consider how loneliness is growing in work.
Next I wanted to talk to two researchers who have set about investigating if working long hours - or working harder leads to greater workplace success. The authors of the paper are the brilliant Argyro Avgoustaki from ESCP Europe and Hans Frankort from Cass Business School
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If you're looking to get a job sometime in the next decade - and that includes almost all of us - there's a very high probability that you're going to be exposed to a psychometric test. As they become enhanced by AI and made more scaleable via apps these tests are going to go everywhere. So what are the implications for what work is going to look at.
This episode I'm looking into the evolving nature of recruiting and how its changing to accommodate the latest science and also innovations in technology. Firstly I'm going to get my hands dirty testing one of the new evolving candidate testing apps that are starting to emerge. Then I'm chatting to Rich Littledale and he is a chartered psychologist who previously worked at a leadership consulting firm and now helps start ups with their strategic people challenges.
Read more about PeopleUp - Rich's firm
Just a reminder that all of the episodes are live on the website Eat Sleep Work Repeat.
Rich Littledale runs a company called People Up. In the show he mentioned a blog post - you can find it here.
As Rich there says most orchestras have now introduced blind auditions and in fact most them use carpeted stages to avoid the sound of shoes. Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias
https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Goldin_Orchestrating%20Impartiality.pdf
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Rob Briner is an professor of organisational behaviour at London Queen Mary’s University - he's rated the top HR thinker in the UK. This is a brilliant chat. Very much essential listening for anyone interested in HR but also worth listening for those of us who sit thinking ‘what do HR actually do?’ or what should we do to improve things round here.
We talk about ‘evidence based management’ - which you can find out more about here: The Centre for Evidence Based Management. I’d researched it but he explained it way better. He ends up giving me his take on work culture and lots lots more.
Rob outlines some of the pitfalls that any of us make when we set about fixing work. He also explains the challenges of psychology - discussing something called 'the replication crisis' about large scale studies.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Following up the discussion with Andy Rhodes this week it's a second episode about the police. My original plan was to edit both of them to get one episode about the profession but both were too good to chop up. So I want to flag that It's kind of about work culture but also kind of just a brilliant chat with a fascinating person. Consider it as a box set with the other police episode. When it gets into its flow it covers dog shows, walking buses and all manner of brilliance.
Stevyn Colgan joined the police after a bet from his dad - which he explains. I was put on him by our last guest Andy Rhodes who told me about ways they used dog shows to reduce the tension on council estates. Rather than chop it down to just cover the way that Stevyn led innovation in the workplace I've just left it intact. He's too interesting for me to butcher the chat.
Stevyn is the perfect example of a multi level life via his illustrations he became friends with Douglas Adams and ended up being a writer on the TV show QI. He wrote a book about his police problem solving unit work called One Step ahead. He's actually just published a novel called a Murder to Die For.
I'm not gonna lie we spent ages one summer evening sitting in the pub garden of a Amersham pub. My intro is me reminding him about this podcast but the chat it provokes is quite interesting.
If you want to learn more sign up for our newsletter at eatsleepworkrepeat.fm - thanks for listening.
Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This is the first of two episodes on the police this week. One on dealing with stress in 'blue light' professions, one on how to be creative in stressful environments.
Andy Rhodes is the Chief Constable of Lancashire - and has responsibility for the wellbeing initiative in the UK police force. He talks through the challenges of policing under pressure. What do you do to stop police profiling people they encounter? The answer starts with how you treat them at work. I think you'll be inspired with the lead that Andy is taking.
To hear more about the evidence based approach to wellbeing in the police go to the Oscar Kilo website.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re talking work culture in different ways for the next few episodes. The next two episodes after this are in the police force. But today’s guest is the best selling author of the year - Adam Kay. This is Going to Hurt : Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor has sold over a million copies. It’s also won the readers’ choice book of the year this year. So there’s a chance you’ve read it and if so you will love the discussion with Adam Kay because he takes us into the working environment in hospitals. If you’ve not read it I could not recommend this beautiful, funny, principled book more.
Adam explains in the book that the title Junior Doctor is a touch misleading - everyone who isn’t a consultant is titled a junior doctor. He is successful comedy writer who wrote the book 7 years after leaving the health service after a terrible terrible day at work. He wrote it because he found underpaid overworked health workers being politicised by the vampires who run government. Specifically the multi-millionaire former health secretary who claimed that in some way that doctors were greedy. The book is the funniest thing you’ll read this year and we covered that but we also talked through the working culture in hospitals.
US listeners will know that the issue of single payer health care is a hot topic in the US - in the UK we have the NHS and it’s worth saying as Adam says it is a source of national pride. We just need to fund it properly.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I joined Adam for a chat at restaurant in West London.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How can painting the walls of a company change their culture? We explore with Jez Groom today's guest.
An episode this week on behavioural science. It was prompted a little by discussions with Seth Godin and others. It was thinking can you change the culture in organisations by the way you engineer choices available to people - and I’m speaking to a behavioural scientist about these things.
First a bit of background - we discuss a reading list in the show and I’ve included it in the show notes but it’s worth giving you an intro. One of the best books I love on behavioural science is YES by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini.
In that book they spend chapter after chapter going through how the language that we use to invite people to do things has a big impact on what they subsequently do. TV shopping channels used to say ‘operators are waiting to take your call’ but they realised that that language made customers envisage rows of idle call handlers waiting for any sucker to buy something. So they changed it to ‘if lines are busy please try again later’. Similarly hotels evolved the notes about towels that you see when you stay as a guest. A lot of these things are built on the principles of influence made famous by Robert Cialdini.
The authors split hotel rooms, half with a note saying please recycle your towel by hanging it up, the other used social proof by saying ‘most guests at our hotel help the environment by reusing their towels’. They looked at the results. The people who got the social proof message were 26% more likely to recycle their towel. They found that they could easily improve on this by using principles of reciprocation - saying the hotel would make a donation if they reused the towel, and then further by saying ‘to thank you we’ve already made a donation’. And a weird specificity ‘by saying the majority of the people who used THIS room had reused their towel.
So if decision architecture can play a part in these things, can it make an impact on work. There may be decision architecture around your office. Maybe there are fewer waste paper bins than before - or you’re encouraged to use different recycle bins that are further away by the company alerting you to the benefits of these things.
Today’s guest is Jez Groom who runs the behavioural science company Cowry Consulting.
Jez told me at his old company Ogilvy they’d realised they could make breakthroughs in this area when they had introduced a hand stamp on the hand of workers in a food manufacture plant. No matter how much workers were told they needed to wash their hands to prevent kids getting ill or transferring dirt. But only 60% were doing it. They introduced a stamp a brown coloured e coli virus bug. It took 30 seconds to wash off. The bacterial count tumbled but most of this was kept after the 3 weeks of them doing it. The stamp had changed behaviour.
Find out more about Cowry Consulting
The books we discussed
Yes! 60 Secrets from Science of Persuasion
Pigeons getting variable rewards
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Seth Godin has been one of the world's freshest thinkers since before the internet was on solid food.
After a first career packaging books, he then rose to his own fame creating permission marketing.
His blog is many people's favourite stop on the web bus route picking up a million passengers every day.
We use his latest book This is Marketing as the model to bring to reinventing your workplace culture. What's the way to use his influence strategies to improve your job?
The chat is brilliant and goes everywhere. Clearly Eat Sleep Work Repeat isn’t a marketing podcast but everyone can learn something from Seth.
Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fm
Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fm
This week's episode features the iconic Teresa Amabile - she's a professor at Harvard Business School. Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University.
If you're interested in her work this YouTube clip is a great start point.
Before the chat with Professor Amabile we talk through the news in work culture this week. Here's the explosive article on Netflix:
You can pre-order The Joy of Work at Amazon.
Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dan Cable is the author of the life affirming and brilliant Alive at Work - one of the most inspiring visions of what work could look like. The discussion covers big themes of purpose and motivation but brings simple practical tips. What are the simple things that any of us could do to our induction processes at work? How could we encourage our teams to bring their selves to work.
I mention two articles. One by Sarah O'Connor in the FT and this one by Josh Hall about compulsory wellness.
You can get in touch with Bruce here on Twitter. All of the previous episodes are available on the website EatSleepWorkRepeat.fm
Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.
Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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