Aside from sleep, work is where we spend most of our waking hours over our lifetime. How we experience work is how we experience a considerable amount of our lives, which is why managing the meaning we derive from work is essential to our overall life satisfaction. Knowing how your workplace works is how we can begin to make it work for everyone.

Most of us want more meaning at work and badly. A 2018 study by BetterUp surveyed 2285 American professionals and found that 9 out of 10 employees, regardless of their job level, tasks or salary, are willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning at work. Moreover, participants were willing to forego 23% of their total future earnings (almost as much as people spend on housing) to have a job that gave them meaning! 

On this weeks episode I am interviewing my friend and New York Times bestselling author Eve Rodsky on how we can find greater meaning in life and work.   

Eve Rodsky

Find Your Unicorn Space

How Work Works

The degree to which we feel like we belong at work depends on the nature of our relationship with our workplace. We don’t often think about our job as a relationship, but it is, at least in a sense. Your job is a reciprocal relationship. You exchange your time, energy, and expertise for money, advancement, and fulfilment at a basic level. The exchange can happen only if both parties trust each other, which is why I refer to the relationship between workplaces and employees as a trust exchange.

The challenge we have today is that so many people don’t trust their workplaces, this is why we see the rise of quiet quitting or the lazy girl jobs phenomenon. People want to come into work do the bare minimum and go home, because workplaces are not meeting their needs beyond a paycheck.

The problem is next to sleeping, work is where we spend the most number of hours over our lifetime. We cannot afford to not care about work or ignore our need for meaning and belonging. Our experience of work makes up a huge proportion of our experience of life.

Michelle King

How Work Works

The publishing industry is notorious for a lack of diversity. In 2016 The Bookseller examined the lists of the UK’s most established publishing houses and found that there were fewer than 100 books published by authors of colour.  

In 2021, out of a total of 4,017 authors and illustrators featured across 33 catalogues from the UK’s top five publishers and selected independent presses, 2.5% were Black British, when compared to the overall output.  

These numbers speak for themselves. 

In this episode I am interviewing my friend and three times published bestselling author Minda Harts on how to write a book and get it published. We will also be unpacking how to tackle inequality in publishing.  

I really think we all can play a role in either perpetuating or tackling the inequality in publishing through the books we purchase the content we consume. All of our choices either disrupt or contribute to the inequality in publishing. If we truly want to consume the best content, then we need to level the playing field so that all the talented voices can be heard.  

Minda Harts

Michelle King - How Work Works

It's that time of year again; companies are adding new graduates to their ranks and training them, much like they always have. According to a National Association of Colleges and Employers report, despite a slower job market, hiring projections indicate that companies plan to hire 4% more graduates in 2023 than in 2022. While employers continue hiring graduates, many are unaware of the specific skill gaps graduates face and what managers can do to solve these challenges.

Companies often sell the idea that an employee’s potential is determined by the skills they can list on a resume, but this isn’t true. Just take a look at the way companies promote employees within an organization. Every year, managers will meet to discuss which employees have the potential to move to the next level. Leaders will debate people’s different skill sets to try and achieve consensus on the final list of candidates for future leadership positions. What leaders are assessing isn’t the technical or soft skills an employee has; instead, it’s their ability to learn on the job.

In this weeks episode, we share what skills graduates need to thrive in the new world of work but to maximize their potential we need graduates to take ownership of what they learn and how they learn it.

How Work Works

Tool kit for advancing your career

Based on my work, I know for sure that at one time or another, most of us have lost our belief in work. We have felt the pain of being excluded from informal networks, the stress of trying to keep up with the pace of change, or burnout after putting in countless hours to get the next promotion, only to be overlooked or disillusioned with cut-throat corporate cultures. We are tired of accepting the myth that individual advancement must come at a cost to ourselves and the people we work with. 

Aside from sleep, work is where we spend most of our waking hours over our lifetime. How we experience work is how we experience a considerable amount of our lives, which is why managing the meaning we derive from work is essential to our overall life satisfaction. Knowing how your workplace works is how we can begin to make it work for everyone.  

Michelle King

How Work Works

According to the most recent “Women in the Workplace” report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, the gap between men and women leaving their jobs is the largest it has been since the report was first published eight years ago.  For every female director who is promoted, two women at the same level of seniority choose to quit. The report states that women are leaving companies that fail to deliver on “the cultural elements of work that are critically important to them.”

Culture is our lived experience of work, and for women today, the lived experience of work isn’t great. For example, the Women at Work report by Deloitte published this year finds that 10% more women are experiencing; harassment, microaggressions and exclusion at work compared to a year ago. Overall, this is an increase from 51% to 59% of women. 

To understand how pervasive toxic cultures are, Charles Sull, cofounder of CultureX and Donald Sull, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX analyzed the language that 3 million U.S. employees used in Glassdoor reviews to describe their employer between 2016 and 2021.

What they found is a gender gap in men and women’s experiences of toxic workplace cultures. Overall Women spoke more negatively than men about most elements of culture, including work-life balance and collaboration. The largest gap between the genders however, is for toxic culture, which they define as a workplace culture that is disrespectful, no inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive.

On todays episode Charlie Sull joins us on the show to discuss these issues.

Even if employees don’t quit, employees in toxic environments are more likely to disengage from their work, exert less effort, and bad-mouth their employer to others. Sustained exposure to a toxic culture increases the odds that employees will suffer from anxiety, depression, burnout, and serious physical health issues.

Given the impact toxic workplace cultures can have on our mental and emotional wellbeing, it is important we understand how to solve this issue.

Here Charlie shares what we can do.

Action One: Be nicer to people - dilute the toxic culture.

Action Two: Report toxic behaviour to HR, if you witness it or it is happening to you.

Action Three:  Take reliable data to senior leadership and keep talking about it to ensure senior management realize that this is a problem and place the item on the agenda of the CEO.  Don’t lose your voice.

CultureX

For most people we want feedback at work, but it is also something we dread. Unless feedback is actionable and helpful, it just feels like unnecessary criticism or a way for organizations to try and get people to fit into toxic workplace cultures.

In the HBR article entitled Women Get “Nicer” Feedback — and It Holds Them Back authors  Lily Jampol, Aneeta Rattan and Elizabeth Baily Wolf shared how their research finds even if their male and female employees perform at exactly the same level, managers tend to prioritize kindness more when giving feedback to women than when giving the same feedback to men.

Across a series of studies, we asked more than 1,500 MBA students, full-time employees, and managers based in the U.S. and the UK to imagine giving developmental feedback to an employee who needed to improve their performance. The employee was described in exactly the same way to all participants, except that half were told the employee’s name was Sarah, while the other half were told the employee’s name was Andrew. We then asked the participants about their goals going into this conversation, and while they all said they wanted to give candid feedback, those who were told the employee was named Sarah were significantly more likely than those who were told the employee was named Andrew to prioritize being kind as well. This was true regardless of the gender or political leanings of the person giving the feedback: Whether they self-identified as male or female, liberal or conservative, our participants consistently reported being more motivated to be kind when giving feedback to a woman than when giving it to a man.

Joining us on the podcast today is Lily Jampol, Partner and Head of People Science and Services at ReadySet and Aneeta Rattan, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School, where we will unpack all things feedback related.

In their article for HBR, Lily, Aneeta and Elizabeth share that constructive feedback is essential for anyone’s growth. Most of what we learn at work – around 70% happens informally and on the job. We learn through the feedback we get, it is literally how we develop our social and technical skills.

But as a manager, it can be challenging to get the balance right between being kind but also clear and firm.

Given the important role that feedback had on an employee’s development, engagement and performance, we need leaders to understand how to get it right. Here Lily shares four actions we can use to improve the feedback we give:

Action One:

Create a culture of feedback systems and behavioral approaches.

Action Two:

Establish common touch points so early intervention takes place when employees seem to be struggling.

Action Three:

Prepare your feedback sessions, what are the three things you want to get across in your feedback?

Action Four:

Review the feedback which has been given, take an audit to use for future feedback sessions.

Lily Jampol

Aneeta Rattan

For many people International Women’s Day has lost its way. It is too readily used by corporates as a day to provide lip service to gender equality and women’s advancement at work.

But women don’t need one day of celebration, we need companies to take action every day to remove the barriers to women’s advancement and fulfillment at work.

Without action it is too easy for men, women and all individuals to become fatigued, disengaged and disillusioned with efforts to advance gender equality.

To prevent this, we wanted to share our list of dos and don’ts to help people celebrate IWD in a meaningful way.

Joining us on the show today is guest host Selina Suresh. Selina works with Michelle at The Culture Practice and she also worked for UN Women in New York and Nepal.

We need workplaces to look at the ideal worker behaviors they reward, endorse and support that create cultures of inequality at work. We need workplaces to make significant, meaningful efforts to change their cultures, so that they work for everyone.

Often around IWD time, you might hear a few men say, what about men?! Why don’t we have a day specifically dedicated to men’s advancement? Well that's simple, men already dominate most leadership positions, they don’t face the same degree of discrimination and marginalization that women do. Workplaces already work for men. The real reason this question is asked, is all too often IWD initiative's can forget about men, and the important role they play in advancing gender equality at work.

Action: Don’t get sucked into performative events or platitudes or pink merchandise (no matter how enticing it might appear)! Recognize that this day was created by advocates and for advocates dedicated to advancing women, all women in all areas of life. It’s a day of meaningful action and the best way to celebrate it is by challenging yourself to do more.

Visit https://onehundredactions.com/ use these actions to make change today.

Every year companies spend about $8 billion on DEI initiatives in the United States, according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.

With all this money and attention given to DEI efforts we need to ask ourselves an important question: Who benefits?

A 2019 report entitled Being Black in Corporate America: An Intersectional Exploration released by the consulting firm Coqual, finds that black professionals are more likely to encounter prejudice and microaggressions than any other racial or ethnic group.

They are less likely than their white counterparts to have access to senior leaders and to have support from their managers.

Yet few white professionals see what their black colleagues are up against. 65% of black professionals say that black employees have to work harder in order to advance, but only 16% of their white colleagues agree with that statement.

The study also finds that black professionals are more likely than white professionals to be ambitious, and they are more likely to have strong professional networks.

In this episode, Lanaya Irvin, CEO at Coqual, explains Coqual’s report findings in more detail. 

Coqual recently launched a study around black talent in the UK.  We saw a similar perception gap.  There's this material gap in perception that makes overcoming this, these hurdles of retention, development, advancement that much more difficult.  This happens because the gap between what employees are experiencing and what their peers or their managers understand or believe, is really wide.

The starting point is recognizing that we must account for all areas of difference and different lived experiences in understanding inequality and addressing the issues it creates.

Here Lanaya shares with us three actions we can all use in bridging this gap:

Action One: Lift up the ideas of others in order to foster a sense of belonging.

Action Two: Have clear expectations around how you can advance or gain promotions at work.

Action Three:  Embrace all differences of those around you whether it be a person’s skillset, their unique contributions to work or their challenges.

Lanaya Irvin

Coqual

Research is telling us is that hybrid working is something most employees want, it does increase our productivity because we don’t have to commute, and most companies are likely to keep it in place, but it comes at a cost.

We need to be aware of these costs so we can manage them. Hybrid working does increase stress, loneliness, isolation, and disengagement. In many ways it is culture eroding. That doesn’t mean we get rid of hybrid working. I believe it is here to stay. Rather it means we need to be aware of these challenges so we can take action to solve them.

The consulting firm Deloitte has for the second year released its Women @ Work 2022: A Global Outlook report, a survey of 5,000 women across 10 countries The survey provides a unique glimpse into the lives of women in the workplace amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The responses from around the globe made it clear that women’s “everyday” workplace experiences were having a detrimental impact on their engagement and that the pandemic was having a severe impact on women’s lives and careers, including their work/life balance and wellbeing.

Emma Codd, Global Inclusion Leader for Deloitte joins me on the podcast today to discuss the report’s findings in more detail. We discuss the issues women face with hybrid working, flexible working and overcoming the barriers to their advancement at work.

Emma states that women that work in a hybrid manner which was around half of the respondents that can work in a hybrid way, of those respondents, 60% said they'd experienced exclusion in the past year.  Around 50% said they weren't getting the access they needed to leaders which we all know how important sponsorship is for anybody that is in an underrepresented group is so important.  Suddenly that's not there anymore.

Emma states there are four questions every organization globally should be asking; often only needing tweaks to resolve the outcome, but still action taking place:

Question One: Does your culture allow employees to feel safe when asking for flexible working? If not, how can it change?

Question Two: Do all employees feel connected?  If not, why not?

Question Three: Do all employees belong? Why do employees feel isolated?

Question Four: Does each employee have equal access to support?  How can this access improve?

Deloitte Women @ Work 2022 Survey

Emma Codd

Making a career change is important because outside of sleep, work is where we spend the greatest number of hours over our lifetime. Work plays a huge role in shaping our identities, relationships and sense of belonging.

On today’s podcast we are joined by Sarah Wittman, Assistant Professor of Management at George Mason University’s School of Business, who has conducted research into how work shapes our identity. In her article for Harvard Business Review she shares how thanks to major shifts in the labor market, workers are switching organizations, functions, and even industries much more frequently than past generations. Consequently, our sense of self at work is constantly changing too.

We do tend to be on these career treadmills. What can I get? What's the next position? All of these other things. And even when we're jumping industries, we say, okay, this is a great opportunity for me. I'm going to be increasing maybe my status, my pay etc, maybe my work life balance. But when we really get down to it, I think we need to take into account that identity long angle. Identities, if we want to define them, are these self-definitions; what we use to describe ourselves. This can be personal characteristics, such as, I'm hardworking.  Or it can be role related. I am a professor or relational. I'm also a spouse, I'm a teacher, I'm a mentor. Or when we talk about the gender angle, it can be social identities.  When we think about what comes with us, and this is where lingering identities come in, it's essentially what do we carry with us when we leave one job and enter another?

Managing our work identity is important, especially when you are looking to change jobs or careers.

In addition to using the VME (Value, Meanings and Enactment) framework, Sarah says there are three actions you can take to ensure your success in a new role, company or career path:

Action One:  Understand your current work identity well enough to use it as a filtering device for available opportunities.

Action Two:  Only pursue job opportunities that offer a good enough match for your identity.

Action Three:  Understand how your identity will change in your new role.

Changing careers or jobs can be difficult. To give yourself the best possible chance of success you have to assess if the job will add and enable your sense of self.

Sarah Wittman

George Mason University