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Brigid Schulte is a journalist and writer who brings a reporter's ear for stories to her exploration of modern work.

Over the course of a decade Schulte has talked to people about the impact their jobs has on their lives - and has explored any hope that we might be able to make this better.

Her new book, Over Work and paints a hopeful image of how we might fix the toxic elements of our jobs.

One of the examples is about Intel, who in 2013 experimented with a new initiative styled Freelance Nation to bring some of the upsides of gig work to a professional knowledge work environment. It proved hugely successful and yet they decided to scrap it.

Buy Over Work

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Colin Ellis is a consultant and author who spends his time working with organisations to improve their culture. He's turned his attention to why some companies go bad in a new book Detox Your Culture. He talked me through what has gone wrong at the likes of ITV's This Morning, the CBI, The Ellen Show and Boeing.

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How can any of us build a more effective team?

Owen Eastwood is one of the world’s most in demand performance coaches, with a focus on team culture & leading. Owen has worked with some of the most successful sporting sides in the world. He also works with corporate teams wrestling with similar themes.

Last year I talked to Owen about his work on belonging and identity but I wanted to pick his brains on the biggest challenge for modern leaders - how to build a stronger team.

Buy Belonging

Follow Owen on LinkedIn

Owen talks me through his step-by-step approach to building better teams - starting with the toughest starter question that most teams never tackle.

takeaways

• Determine whether a team is necessary for the desired outcome
• Clearly define roles and expectations within the team
• Recruit talented individuals who can contribute to the team's success
• Establish effective communication channels within the team
• Consider the challenges of being part of multiple teams in the corporate world Individuals have a choice in shaping the team's identity and should be selfless and committed to the team's purpose and desired outcome.
• A high-performing team is one where individuals consistently perform at their best and have a culture of excellence.
• The environment plays a crucial role in enabling or disabling team success, and teams should create an environment that fosters innovation and energizes individuals.
• Teams should regularly reflect on their environment and identify and eliminate factors that hinder performance.

For a full transcript see the website.

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How important is a happy workforce? According to Mark Price, the former boss of Waitrose, it's the main thing that leaders should be thinking about. Make your workforce happy and the profits will follow. Mark's new book is Happy Economics.

To prove it Mark cites his experience running the supermarket chain, when with a goal of workers happiness he made it the fastest-growing, most profitable supermarket in the UK.

The original purpose of the John Lewis Partnership, as laid out by the very same John Lewis , was to uphold the happiness of the people who worked inside the organisation.

Mark's new book is Happiness Economics. Mark's book makes the assertion that the quickest way to business success is to focus on creating happy employees.

This is genuinely a brilliant listen - and one that you might benefit from reading the transcript of - you can get the transcript here.

While I got real value from the book, I actually found the conversation even more enlightening. It challenged some things I believed and I found myself reflecting on it for the day afterwards. I think there’s a clarity in the conversation that the book lacks at times - I think it’s the challenge of books to be honest. We’re so used to ideas being visually backed up that when we’re paging through 200 pages of words the emphasis is often lost. Maybe they work best together.

Mark has a clear 6 stage framework for making a happy, productive workforce laid out in his compelling new book Happiness Economics.

• Reward and recognition
• Information sharing
• Empowerment
• Wellbeing
• A sense of pride
• & Job satisfaction

Mark's company is WorkL. You can take their surveys and see their data on that link.

Key takeaways

• The happiness of employees is crucial for driving productivity and increasing profits
• Managers play a vital role in creating a positive work environment and should focus on training, recognition, and coaching
• Leadership should involve setting a clear plan, making employees feel valued and important, and maintaining optimism about the future.
• Well-being initiatives should go beyond tokenistic measures and address underlying issues in the work culture. Employee happiness is crucial for workplace culture and productivity.
• The six key drivers of happiness at work are reward and recognition, empowerment, sense of pride, line management, career development, and job satisfaction.
• Implementing these drivers effectively can lead to improved well-being, productivity, and business performance.
• Building a positive culture is essential, and companies should focus on measuring and improving employee happiness.

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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

You might think an episode about improv comedy might be a stretch for a podcast about making work better. But in fact as Kelly Leonard explains today the skills of improv comedy are the most important ones that will determine our success at work. 

Kelly helps to run Second City, the world's famous famous improv comedy club - he believes that improv skills can teach us about what we need in work going forwards.

** TRIGGER WARNING ** includes one brief mention of poetry

Check our Kelly's book

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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

In the 2000s a book called Fish! A remarkable way to boost morale and improve results became a bestseller. A small book, it was often used by companies accompanying a video of the same name. Together the two told a story of the culture of the fish market in Seattle, a noisy, bombastic place, but a place that was filled with joy. I first encountered Fish when a firm came to pitch to me when I was working in publishing. They told me that their culture was Fish. 

There are a few things that stood out from it. The idea of intentionally designing culture isn’t new but this seemed to be explicitly linking culture, emotion and mood. 

There were 4 principles of Fish

• Play
• be there
• make their day
• choose your attitude

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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

This is the second episode about rituals - the first one is next to it in the podcast feed, it's an interview with Kursat Ozenc about how rituals can be used to create culture. This episode goes into real life examples.

Claudia Wallace talks about Crisp Thursday (Connection)

Andy Puleston talks about Pizza Meetings (Connection) and Leaving Speeches (Change)

Dan Pink talks about Friday Night Experiments (Creativity)

Biz Stone talks about Hack Week at Twitter (Creativity)

Dr Heidi Edmondson talks about Ten at Ten (Performance)

Heidi has a wonderful new book out - Darkness in the City of Light

You can also hear the original episodes that each of these extracts came from by click the links above. I have to say that those whole episodes are worth revising. For example, Andy Puleston talks about how effective the culture was at Radio 1 when it was a series of affiliated tribes and he articulates the role that buildings play in shaping cultures. Each episode teaches something special.

 Andy Puleston is now Director of People & Culture at Circulor, an award winning technology business.

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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

Kursat Ozenc is a product designer who he teaches at Stanford university, He teaches on the subject that we can all learn from which is the idea that culture can be designed. The specific tool he uses to design culture is the creation of workplace rituals. 

Kursat's Substack newsletter

Kursat's first book is here and the second, on virtual meetings is here.

The reading list for Kursat's course is here

Kursat’s book includes the suggestions that: ‘The rituals in our life show what we care about’. Critically then creating rituals demonstrate what our culture values.

Kursat gives five use cases for rituals: 

1. For change
2. Creativity
3. Performance
4. Conflict
5. Community

If you like this episode you'll also like the episode that accompanies it - which goes into depth about specific rituals that companies have used. Listen to that episode here.

A full transcript of the episode is at the website.

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Flow is the state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity “that nothing else seems to matter.”

Presence is to be in a flow state of connection with others.

Here’s the last discussion about the Happiness Track

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Emma’s new book Sovereign

HBR: The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy

HBR: Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive

Today is the first of series of podcasts about an idea that needs more consideration in our workplaces. The idea of presence.

Emma Seppala is a psychologist and lecturer at the Yale School of Management – she also runs the Women’s Leadership program there. I first spoke to Emma about 6 years ago when I came across her book the Happiness Track. The hypothesis of that book was in many ways the sweet spot of this podcast: the notion that if you make workers happy then they do their better work. Emma had a new book out this week called Sovereign and it felt like a great reason to have a new conversation. 

The conversation leads into the next block of podcasts which are all about the idea of presence. Over the last 4 years we’ve seen discourse from CEOs about wanting workers back in the office but in many ways they’re putting things the wrong way wrong. A lot of us find ourselves making our way into work and sitting on video calls all day. Or having headphones on because its so noisy. We got home at the end of the day thinking ‘what was the point of that’. 

When bosses say they want us to be present in the office, what they actually describe is something different. They talk us about us interacting, having ideas, watercooler moments. Bosses say they want us to be present in the office, but what they really want is presence, for us to be in each others company.

For me presence is related to flow

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Today’s top episode goes to the heart of an issue that a lot of people raise with me.

They say ‘where do you start when changing a culture’.

To some extent it’s what the episode about the hospital trust in Barking was about, going in and changing the culture of a huge organisation.

I saw one of today’s guests Darren Ashby speak at an event - talking through the specifics of how his company Business Four Zero tried to change the culture of Tesco. Business Four Zero are one of a group of organisations who work with leaders to change company culture. I know there’s a few of these firms. I attended a dazzling event by one firm called Scarlett Abbot in this field about a month ago. 

Darren is joined by Atif Sheikh as they talk through the specifics of what they did with firms like Electronic Arts, Aviva and Tesco. They’ve turned some of their work into a book which you can buy here.

Some of the things that stood out for me:

• What’s the number one thing you look for in a high performing culture? How internal are they? How much time are they spending on themselves vs the outside world?
• Only 28% of workers say they are connected to purpose
• Culture is what are you committed to as group - emotional commitment of what you want to create
• Values - before you define your values know that there are 6 core values shared amongst everyone (sometimes called the 6 Pillars of Character - Trust, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship). These should not be your differentiator. These are universal basic expectations. You need to define something differentiating
• Leaders' role is to bring energy: Satya Nadella told Microsoft’s execs: ‘find the rose petals in the field of sh*t’
• So how do you elevate a culture? They introduce 2 or 3 critical behaviours that elevate a culture Might be ‘be kinder’ And they build a process of how you might enact those behaviours

For example Intercontinental Hotel Group

• Had switched from being a hotel owner to a franchise business
• CEO needed to remove silos
• What did they need? Too many people in the business didn’t understand how they made money - it made spending decisions hard. So they focussed on ‘think return’
• Additionally it had become complacent, so they decided to ‘move fast’
• Finally they agreed to ‘talk straight’ with each other

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Isabel Berwick is a writer and podcaster who focusses on the evolving state of modern work. I’ve celebrated her podcast Working It many times here

(here’s her specials on the 4-day week for example, or her special on meeting-free days was essential listening). I love its ability to react rapidly to the biggest news stories of the moment and to drop a snackable episode midweek.

I talked to her about her opinions on modern work, going deep on the rapidly changing world of employment and where we’re going next.

Isabel has a brand new book out, The Future Proof Career, which she says is for everyone who doesn’t read books about work but wants to be better at navigating it.

Recent episodes you might have missed

• The importance of trust at work - and why it's on the decline
• Charles Duhig on how to be a supercommunicator in your job (and your home life)
• Can improvements to culture fix a broken NHS trust?
• The Big Ange effect at Tottenham Hotspur
• Frances Frei on the importance of training managers

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