The Secret To Loving Your Work with Bruce Daisley | E66

Key Takeaways

you were the vp of twitter obviously donald trump has just been booted off twitter permanently what do you think about that there's a 70 year long study out of yale university looking at what the the secret of longevity and happiness is and the secret of longevity and happiness is work the thing we spend the majority of our lives doing today's guest is an expert on exactly that how can you be an expert on work bruce daisley spent the last five to ten years studying what makes work joyous what makes it miserable how we get burnt out and what matters the most when it comes to work he's been named one of the most influential londoners in the uk has been named as one of the most influential britons in the united kingdom bruce daisley's book the joy of work became the best selling business hardback book in 2019 he has his own podcast so he's one hell of a talker as well and as the world has transitioned over the last 10 months to this zoom-centric remote working lifestyle i think now is a great time to ask ourselves the question what makes work enjoyable how can we get the most out of work how do we avoid burnout and how do we maximize our motivation bruce has the answers so without further ado my name is stephen butler and this is the director ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself bruce you were you wrote a i feel like that's an understatement you wrote a smash hit book about work called the joy of work and i've seen this book absolutely everywhere it's been an absolute phenomenon so you know considering the fact that the world has fundamentally shifted over the last nine ten months because of this pandemic and the way we work has changed so much i wanted to get your view of this remote working zoom um sort of working culture that has now been forced upon us just before i let you answer i'm gonna give a little sentence around around my take on it i hate it um and when when in march when we were forced out as a ceo for business to tell my employees that we're gonna be working from home and we have this amazing office which gives us all this community um i know that about 50 of my workforce liked the idea but i 100 hate it for a number of reasons what's your take so i think at the outset i shared some of your reservations brony brown talks about this thing which is collective effervescence and it's a it's a good way she's she's coined to turn for something you see quite a lot in social science that even the introverts amongst us actually quite like being around people in in some scenarios and we get far more of our energy from the tribe were in and the people were surrounded with then would probably admit and so when it first happened look the defining thing about work for me is laughing every day i if i laugh every day and i you know in the organizations i've been in they've been at times incredibly stressful we've had you know at times when i was at twitter there was just for good reason there was like big headlines demanding stressful scenarios but either the sort of the dark humor that you find in those moments or the moments of levity that you can just get if you're around people that you trust soldiers talk about this or firefighters talk about this you know you can find human and i used to love that so the idea of shifting to a world where somehow we're plugging into the matrix and we were losing that camaraderie that kinship that we get from being around other people i wasn't necessarily the the biggest advocate of it i think what's clear though is that we've fundamentally moved into a different world and some of those preconceptions that we might have had might have been partly ill-judged so so so working through those things that the number one thing we know uh 91 of people say they want to continue working in some capacity when you look at the numbers of that people say broadly say they want to work at home three or four days a week so there's some firms saying we're going to let people work one day a week or two days a week at home people workers want to work more than that so there's going to be some degree of of balance and we're going to achieve an equilibrium so that's the demand side of it and in fact when you look at all age groups young or old there is a slight difference so younger workers have said that they were they're happy at home but they they it's close to how happy they were in the office and we can partly understand that a lot of young workers don't have home offices they don't have nice desks they're sitting on their bed or they're sitting on the table that sits at the end of their bed so they're working in slightly different scenarios but even they report they're more productive and happier than than that they were in a big open plan office so that's the first thing older workers are significantly happier if you've got a bit of space it seems to correlate with you feeling really happy so broadly all of the evidence suggests actually the experience of it has been at least unbalanced positive so then you look at the the other side and i guess it's firms and it's really growing evidence that firms are recognizing that something has fundamentally changed bloomberg did something interesting the business people they did an analysis of all the earnings calls so all these transcripts of like big bosses reporting to shareholders what they think is going to happen and bloomberg say that already about one in eight firms are talking about making their offices smaller the ft did something where they said about half of british firms are already talking about their offices being smaller so whether it's that demand side or whether it's that supply side almost certainly we're going into something that's going to look and feel a bit different to what we were used to before if you had to guess um i i completely resonate with that i think even for our organization we realized how much money i'll be honest how much money we could save by not having an office because it's not just the rent it's the the cleaning the electricity it's the food in the cupboards you know the maintenance of a what was a 20 000 square foot office in manchester uh and you you stripped back those costs and you know it was that you were forced to realize that it is possible for there to be another way and i think at first we were we were skeptical that our business could run in completely remotely then we realized it could and then we moved into phase three which was like okay but what have we lost now and it was it was it was definitely a phase three thing because in phase two we're like oh everything's fine in phase three we're like now we've got a problem because we've lost the uh the sense of community that our company was giving to our employees and for a company like ours community was a huge part of our our value-add you know we are the sterile stereotypical like millennial office with like the slides and the ballpark and the freedom and um and a real sense of strong community where pretty much everyone lives together and so in phase three of this sort of this sort of mental journey what we saw and i actually resigned just after in about september time what we saw was a bit of an exodus of our employees because now they're sad at home they're looking at their to-do lists and that they're now thinking the remuneration or the value i'm getting from this job is this amount of money and i'm doing these set of tasks so now i think i can get more money down the street at that place that has no working culture whilst i'm still going to be sad at home and it will be a similar set of tasks and it was it was astonishing it was astonishing how many people um are being completely honest because i have no reason not to be honest we almost never lost good people the month just before and after i left we we lost our the largest number of employees we've ever lost by a fault factor of 10. yeah and it's fascinating so let's look into that because you're exactly you spot on these the big themes that are emerging now firstly how can you make people feel like the part of something when the old way they felt part of something was the energy they had when they're around people right you know there is some buzz and and it's not an exaggeration i've chatted to some of the world's leading experts and they say good workplaces do have a buzz to them they have almost like this tangible energy um and i think that's one of the challenges we've got now if you've got a situation where people on video calls back to back and you know it might be not with the big boss it might be with clients they're dealing with or it might be with customers they've got to keep happy but if there aren't back-to-back meetings with those people then they can just feel well look that's going to be exactly the same wherever i go we're not going to have the same energy and there's far more evidence that when people feel part of something bigger than themselves it's transformational so i've been i'm writing something about resilience at the moment a book about resilience and what you discover is that actually what you hear about resilience is that people tell you all these myths about resilience that it's this individual strength or it's this it's this trait that we can do develop and what you discover about resilience is it's normally a collective thing it's because you feel part of a resilient community you feel like you've got the strength of others to draw upon you feel like you can tap into something one person in some of the research i was reading said you can't be a resilient on your own and there's so much truth in that now what does that mean for the way we're working right now well if you've got someone in a bed seat or a studio flat or a flat chair and they're sitting on their own all day and they feel lonely it's almost certain that those reserves of resilience are being tapped and you know there's one thing that psychologists talk about all the time it's this notion of of affect it's sort of it's a fancy way of saying mood it's a psychologist a way of saying mood and what you discover about affect is that the the mood we're in is really influential on a lot of the things on our experience of life and the uh creativity and our sense of collaboration so scientists talk about positive affect and negative affect and positive affect best way i can sort of frame uh positive affect it it suggests that like the mood we're in transforms some of the decisions we make and the best way i can frame that is that when you're a kid growing up whether your main carer is a grandparent or a parent or a a guardian but you knew from the age of four or five you knew that it was a good time to ask for something and a bad time to ask for something you knew based on the mood that your carer was in that there was a good time to ask for something a bad time but affect the mood we're in affects uh decisions well the situation we're all going through right now is not positive affect it's a negative affect loads of people are feeling burnt out average person during lockdown has been working about an extra 45 minutes a day that's on the back of the average working day has gone up by two hours in the last 10 years so people are finding themselves in this lonely unaffiliated disconnected sense of exhaustive burnout so it's no wonder people are quitting their jobs because they just don't feel like the good version of them that they used to feel like you know the contrast as well so this idea of contrast where you can remember how your job used to be and if your job used to be a 10 and now because it's because a central part of what made it a 10 say the community or the culture in the office or you know that sense of camaraderie or that sense that you know you were a group of people working together towards a goal now you're kind of sat in your bedside on your own on the end of your bed doing a to-do list um if your company was a 10 because of that culture and it's now dropped down to a six something in my mind makes me think that those companies will actually hurt more versus the companies that were like an eight before and an hour a six um and that's part of what i think with with our company social chain because culture was such a big thing that people must be thinking oh my god what the hell is this um being sat alone and we try i think you know i can't speak to the company now because i'm no longer there but i know there was ample efforts with all as with all companies to do these like zoom bingo things and that lasted a month before everyone got sick to death of that but you mentioned the word burn out there uh a very popular phrase a topic of much mystique as well i think um i saw your ted talk about the topic of burnout and i saw your your thoughts there i guess my my question is what causes burnout in your view yeah there was a really interesting there was a a really interesting book that just came out last year and it was based on a a successful article that had sort of blown up on buzzfeed by a woman called an helen peterson and she talked about she the premise of her article really good article worth searching for is the the millennials of the burnout generation you remember that one i think maybe you showed it right there's all these matchy matches and what she said is she said and she'd encountered it as a journalist she's thinking i'm feeling something i wonder if i could capture it and she was thinking is there such thing as errand paralysis so what she means by that is that she was getting to the end of like these productive working days and then she would get back to her flat and she would she would open a bill or she had she had something she needed to do and she just didn't have the energy this high performing really successful person didn't have the energy to get those things done and so she was thinking in her head is this some sort of weird um this sort of duality that you can be really accomplished at one set of things but you can't others she started looking into it and she realized it's not that you're avoiding one thing you're just exhausted and her lesson was that any time we teach we treat our energy as infinite that's when burn out comes and it we so often do it we we treat the idea that we can work all the time and the best examples i can give you are the ones where we actually check in on ourselves so i i used to find myself day job working at twitter worked on twitter for eight years i used to uh when i was especially guilty of this i used to have back-to-back meetings on monday what's the consequence of back-to-back meetings your inbox is is exploding it's it's absolutely overloaded and so i used to get home on a monday night get myself a cup of tea deal with all my domestic responsibilities and i would sit there and work and do emails for about four hours and just try and catch up with what i was doing and i quite often i would check myself and about nine o'clock i'd be spending as much time changing the music as i would doing emails or one long email that's like a two-pager who sends these emails these criminals sending long emails but i'd find myself reading this you know that feeling where you read it i'll just read that again and then read it again and what you discovered there's this science for this it's called ego depletion and the people who look into this say that our brains are sort of far more finite far more limited than we might imagine our brains are far closer if you want a metaphor for it our brains are far closer to the batteries on our phone than the infinite broadband that we we normally deal with so your brain's sort of got a certain amount of charge in it and when you use it and so the way you'll you'll witness this is maybe you walk into a situation and someone asks you a question at the end of a long day or whatever and you're like hang on can you just just give me a minute just give me a minute or someone asks you something really complicated just as you're about to oh okay hang on can we just give and effectively our brains are sort of far more finite once you recognize that you start thinking okay i wonder if that should influence the way i think about doing my job and and of course burnout is one of the things where we don't treat our energy as finite it is it is uh finite but we don't treat it like that and the end result is then we just feel like we're running on empty we're running on vapors and so when you look into it the world health organization uh recognize burnout as a real phenomenon and they say that burnout is is all about when our energy feels spent when we feel emotionally exhausted they talk about this other thing called depersonalization where when you're really burnt out you don't necessarily construe other people as full and empathetic individuals but sometimes you're a bit sort of dismissive of other people or you're a bit reductive of their motives or you start seeing people around you as an annoyance so in the old days if you ever found that the person you sat next to their chewing or their tapping was driving you crazy that can be a little bit of an exam example of deep personalization so it's a real phenomenon it's uh i think to my mind it makes you rethink the way you work so if you knew okay the most i can do every day is eight productive hours of work and you can you know there are evidence to suggest you can do more than that but if you started treating it like that and said maybe actually if i'm honest it's not a really high intensity productive hours but maybe it's five or six really good hours and then you know other stuff is dealing with email or dealing with with phone calls it i suspect it would change the way you made decisions and you see evidence of this barack obama used to have someone who followed him round who uh barack obama never chose his lunch in eight years because this person just made all his decisions for him and you see albert einstein said something similar einstein used to wear that same outfit every day and uh it was because he knew when he got to his lab when he got to the the place he was making uh decisions he knew that if he went there and he hadn't cluttered his brain with all these little micro decisions he was he just felt a bit more imaginative inventive creative so we see evidence of it in other people's behavior but normally when it comes to us we don't treat our brains like that we don't treat it like something we need to protect our energy to protect we we tend to treat our energy as infinite but that's why burnout comes just does the type of work you know you talk there about eight hours or five hours or whatever it might be does the type of work you're doing and the amount of intrinsic motivation you have or joy you get from it impact your likelihood of being burnt out yeah because like because that's what i that's what i suspected in my life because the people that i've seen that get burnt out and this is all anecdotal and there's no scientific evidence really to support these these assertions but people that i've seen get burnt out the most typically typically especially during the lockdown working alone often often freelance um often doing a repetitive task usually doing things that aren't that enjoyable and i had a friend actually come here and sit on the sofa which i've talked about i think in the last few podcasts and he basically told me that he was feeling a bit burnt out um and uh he was struggling to get out of bed and go and do the go and do his work in the morning he's a he's a freelance freelancer working on his own in his house he used to work within teams during pre pandemic and i i was saying to him like think about the things that make your work enjoyable and what other you know what are the things about work that are intrinsically and motivating to you all those things have gone right now so now you're just left with waking up alone sitting in front of a computer and maybe because your intrinsic motivations or the intrinsic joy of your work has been stripped maybe you're now um encountering burnout i think that resonates with me as well to some degree like if i've ever got close to feeling unmotivated or quote unquote burnt out it was when i was doing things alone pre-social chain on my own just for money well there's a couple of things there so two things so like this i think is all related to resilience so there's two things there the first thing is that the evidence we have is that when we feel an absence of control we do we generally feel more burnt out so let's think of examples and the research on this some of the best research on this is about nurses so very timely for the moment we're in right now when nurses choose to work extra hours or you might have known friends when you were doing jobs before your career where you know i used to work in fast food and some of those dudes used to work 14 hour shifts and you're like wow where did they get the energy but they were electing to do it and the evidence we have is that when people choose to do those things it often impacts them less they they feel like they've got control over it so you know i these guys who used to work with burger king king at me with me and they were doing 100 hour weeks but because they were choosing to do it because it was really important for them to afford a car to do things they were what you discover is that when you're electing to do it does seem to give you some degree of protection so control is a really important part the more control we feel over our lives so why might you now be feeling burnt out because imagine if your company has you on 40 hours of zoom calls a week or your inbox is always full or you've got a difficult person you have to deal with a client relationship who's phoning you all the time you might be feeling the absence of control or your your friend who's the the freelancer might be feeling like i'm just i'm not in control of things but there's a couple of other really important parts and they're about our identity and about the the sense of community and you get really good evidence of how when we feel part of something bigger than us and feeling that connection being around people is a really important part of that it tends to enrich us it tends to to protect us and you see really good evidence of this you see when people go to hospital if they have like a heart operation or they have something serious when they come out of hospital the people who reported that they were part of groups before their chance of survival their chance of avoiding depression is massively higher than those who live in isolation and look that's the experiment we're going through right now that you might have wonderful friends that are at the end of a zoom line or a messenger link or a whatsapp but if you're not around them and to some extent some of the energy we get from them is dissipating and i think that's the challenge that a lot of us are in right now it's just a very lonely existence we've got now all of the things that we found nourishing enriching life-affirming a lot of them have been taken away from us now the challenge go on i was just gonna say i was gonna say um actually there's a lady that sat in your in your chair yesterday anna hemmings and she's an 11 time or 11 time world gold medal world champion amazing olympian etc etc and she was speaking to the fact that at one point in her career when she's when she she was training in london to be a kayaker so she's like an eleven-time world champion kayaker right and then at one point in her career they decided that they wanted her to go to the olympics so she had to learn sprint kayaking right the coach was in florida so they took her away from her team in london and she had to basically train on her own via using an email that her her coach in florida was selling her and after doing that for a couple of months she got chronic fatigue syndrome wow so she was out for two years she said she couldn't lift her hands and shampoo her and the thing that brought her back was the realization that taking away her from her team as someone who was a bit of an extrovert and got her energy from people had um set off a bunch of alarm bells in her body so the the reason that she managed to recover and come back and win more world titles after two years of literally having this chronic fatigue syndrome was by realizing that and putting her back with her teams and changing her training which is wow what a metaphor for what we're going through right and it shows how the mind is so intrinsically connected to the body yeah people don't think that loneliness or removing you from your tribe can disable your body yeah or your energy but although there's remarkable amounts of evidence on that so there's a woman in the u.s called julianne holt lunchtime who's done like a colossal survey and she appropriates she says loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day and so you know it has this big impact on us and loneliness is as bigger than obesity in terms of the health impact it has on you and that's what we're going through right now and for all of these things that we've tried to sort of create these artificial intel alternatives zoom quizzes and all manner and things like that they just don't have the same connection of feeling surrounded with someone there's some evidence as soon as you start looking into these things it's extraordinary what an impact people have on each other so these one piece of evidence i went up to to oxford to meet the woman who did this research and she took groups of rowers similar to to the kayaker took groups of roads first and there are oxford university roads you've seen them the colossal the monsters and she she put the first group individually on rowing machines second group she said okay i want you to be on a a made-up boat you know you're going to sit on your rowing machines but you've got to be in stroke with each other and she wanted to see firstly what was the different experience what she noticed was that the firstly they did about the same exercise it wasn't like someone worked harder than others but she measured the endorphin levels you do that by uh you put these arm cuffs on people you sort of you subject them to pain and then you see how much pain they can take and the endorphin levels of the people who'd rode together was twice as high as the people who'd rode alone and you know you see this with choirs people who sing inquired you know you can grab strangers off the street get them to sing some abba songs together and you say to them at the end of it how do you feel they say i feel utterly elated now that's not because singing our songs on its own does it it's because when you feel some connection with other people even strangers it seems to be transformational it seems to sort of elevate our mood and all of that has been stripped from us so you know if you've got i guess you can try to do some approximations of it but all of that has been stripped from us and i think that's why it's it's inevitable that we are feeling flat energy-less we it doesn't feel the same right now how do we fix that though and this is i think it's going back to the start of the conversation why i hate it i hate the lack of connection i hate the lack of community i think are you an extrovert would you say oh god i really don't know i think on one hand i'm a massive introvert yeah i i i'm people know me i don't like to do i don't like small talk i like to sit alone for weeks on end i like i went off to the jungle for four weeks in september alone went off to the costa rican jungle alone so i like that although i have this kind of like you know public speaking and social media brand so i actually don't know although a lot of introverts like that ability to switch on the public speaking side and but i think actually the more you look into the introvert extrovert thing it's sort of a compartmentalization that doesn't necess the vast majority of people sit somewhere and sure exactly i'm the same as you um no but these uh i i think look the point you raise is there's no easy substitute but there is some evidence i saw an amazing piece of research and it looked at couples who lived distance relationships so you know in the uk distance relationship means you're half an hour an hour's drive from someone in the us it means you're like a three hour flight so they did a piece of research 40 000 couples living distant relationships and they wanted to know so these were unmarried so they wanted to know the ones who made it through a year what what was the thing that made it through a year and this was research was done three or four years ago so it's not from a different era of technology but the ones who stayed with each other for the long term phoned each other every day and you know when they they were asked what you talked about they said oh we just talked about trivial things so i think so many of us have got into this frame of mind of thinking well i liked her a photo and i sent a quick whatsapp saying what i sent a voice note horrific use of technology but they said but you know we think somehow we've serviced the relationship by doing these things and actually when you come down to it and maybe future generations will be different but it's it's often quite analog it's that sense of feeling seen and appreciated so i suspect face time might work the same way but so many of us are sort of are overwhelmed with these performative zoom calls right now where he's sitting there with like a celebrity squares a blanky blank uh array of faces in front of you i know and i wonder if it's that sense of being seen and being heard that probably connects and cuts through a bit more yeah i think so yeah i just think work is just so much more than the work right i think especially in the world in the world we live in at the moment where we're getting lonelier as a society i was looking at the stats when i was writing my book about you know the the when they ask americans for example how many people they can turn to at a time of crisis it used to be three people a couple of decades ago now they're like medium answer is zero yeah and um i think it was theresa may that appointed a head of loneliness where loneliness are for the uk and i've seen the stats so i think work is one of the few sort of i don't know institutions where it still binds us together um and we're not between four white walls tapping glass to order food and alone speaking to our nan through a piece of glass so it's a shame that that that community that part of community's gone but anyway moving on creativity something you've talked about at length and um for me i've i've always believed that i'm least creative in the office i've always thought i'm more creative in the gym and in the shower than i am when i'm when i'm sat in a boardroom with a bunch of people and i know this is something you've spoken about so i wanted to get your take on where we're most creative what kills and causes creativity yeah i mean look firstly i would all i ever feel in all of these situations is that i feel like i'm a a vessel that's passing on other people's knowledge so i've found myself being consumed with all these things and interested in their learning so look let me tell you um what i've i've discovered that neuroscience is really intriguing the most compelling thing about neuroscience is when you look into it uh neuroscientists used to work on experimenting on animals you know i'm not i'm not keen on that i was like i was you know in a protest group about animal experimentation when i was younger um and they used to look at brain injuries so that used to be the main way that neuroscience worked and it's only the last 20 years that brain scans have had any degree of sophistication but what they've discovered in like the time that they've had brain scanners is some of the things that they presumed about the way our brain works aren't necessarily right so let me give you one example but they used to put people in these brand new brain scanners and they would watch what their their brains did they give them a puzzle they give them a rubik's cube their brains would light up in these sort of different places and then they'd notice what happened when people stopped playing on the puzzle and their brains would light up in sort of loads of places as well and so it was it was baffling what's going on right now they'd say to these people they say oh right sorry i was a million miles away i was daydreaming so okay right that's interesting your brain's lightened up when you're when you're not thinking about something when you sort of switched off and so the way that neuroscientists categorize this broadly they say these three systems of cognition first one is like when you're doing that rubik's cube or when you're typing an email it's called the executive attention network so it's the main thing you're focusing on and then you'll know while your executive attention network is watching netflix or while you're writing an email you can also be aware of like the room you're in that's called the salience network and the third one the third so there's three of these systems the third one is that one when you're daydreaming the one where you're a million miles away the one when you're in the shower which is called the default network but what we discover is that people generally report having their best creative ideas not when they're frowning into their laptop screen but when they're in these default mode uh situations so you might have it in the old days if you're on a train somewhere or on a plane somewhere loads of people i've got a friend who says she has all her best ideas staring out the windows of planes yeah and so you know if that was you then this year has been an uncreative year but um my favorite example of it is a really famous screenwriter called aaron sawkin he's written the west wing he wrote there was a um there was a film he had on netflix just before christmas called the chicago seven he's written all these big things very famous for zingy dialogue so he wrote the social network film things like that sort of you know um really sort of really what's better than a million a billion like he's written all these zingy lines and he's realized that uh he has all his best ideas exactly like you in the shower he said he had he told hollywood reporter magazine he had a shower installed in the corner of his office and he has eight showers a day and he was asked by them he was asked by them hang on is this like some weird ocd thing he said not at all i find that when i you know so i'll be sitting there thinking of something trying to come up with an idea but it's only when i disengage my brain to something comes to me an idea comes to me and so what you described is exactly what a lot of these people whose job is to be creative have recognized and as soon as you know that you start thinking wow okay i need to think differently about being creative because creativity can then be when i'm sitting at my desk i'm sort of taking all this inspiration in stimulation ideas but then it's about disengaging going for a walk going for a cycle ride going to to do a workout might be the moment where the idea hits you and i don't think necessarily we think about that enough you know if you go back to this idea that your brain is a bit like your phone battery then some of those moments that effectively can recharge your battery can be the moments where creativity hits you and inspiration hits you so i think sort of rethinking the way that we treat a productive week of work of you know these blocks of work but then moments where you know it might be your personal is you go for a walk every lunch time that can be far more creative and productive than you might imagine well how do we make our work environments more conducive with creativity then is there a way or do we just resign to the fact that that's not going to be the best place for our creativity and if we're going to reach our creative potential it's probably going to be away from the office i think it's about recognizing there's a yin yang there's a balance of work and and imagination so i i always loved the example of um charles dickens charles dickens obviously um like incredibly productive i think he wrote 15 novels 200 short stories he edited a weekly magazine about a mile from here you know sort of incredibly productive we didn't work afternoons and so charles dickens would sit down at his desk at eight in the morning he'd write for about four or five hours and then he'd go and walk and he'd walk 10 10 miles every afternoon and that was like him lost in his thoughts you know striding through east london probably sort of imagination popping when he sat down the next day he had loads of ideas and i think some of us have eliminated that sort of the brain fermenting ideas we've eliminated that a bit so you know it might be that your way to do this yourself is just to make sure you just got some down time or you've just got some time where you know you put music on but you turn podcasts off or you just you try and get a bit more balance in how you're uh using your energy so let's conclude this point about work and creativity say that i today made you the ceo of a company that had 100 employees um and you could design from scratch the the working environment how often people worked and some of the sort of key sort of principles and foundations of that working environment what kind of things would be important to you based on all you know so let's look into what happened in lockdown the first part of lockdown most people reported that their engagement went up and why did their engagement went up their engagement went up because they were solving problems like we'd never worked like this before everyone was you know the first moment you're getting on a zoom call or a google hangout or you're getting on these things there's like you know even though you're in this crazy situation there's a degree of excitement fight or flight almost right and and so what do we know about that we know that people felt that they were involved in firstly a bit of team collaboration but secondly they were helping solve problems and so you know the whole organizations computer sales have gone through the roof whole organizations that had no laptop computers so they had to arm their teams with kit and so people felt really engaged by the fact that they back to what we talked about earlier had some control they had a a bit of influence so number one thing that we discover is the more that people feel that they can have an impact in their job and it might be something similar simple they're they're just responsible for a couple of things themselves the more that they feel that they've got some agency some control themselves they feel motivated in their jobs when do we feel unmotivated in our jobs when our boss tells us what to do but we don't get any input into it we don't necessarily think it's the best thing to do we're doing repetitive things that don't feel very rewarding so the best thing that any of us can do think well how can i make teams feel small and teams feel like they've got a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in what they're doing so that's what i would be saying what you discover is 100 is a really nice size actually any time a company goes over 100 what your discovery is you lose a bit of some of that camaraderie you better almost there's a few organizations that do this when you go over 100 split it into two teams because your that sort of cohesion you get works really well when we we've got a familiarity with each other and what happens is when you go over that you start losing it and you think we want we want it to feel like it used to feel it's never going to feel like that humans don't work like that so far better to say you know we've got two teams that love each other but we're we're working on separate goals so keeping things small is really critical and there's lots of evidence of the smaller you can keep things you almost get the economies of engagement compared to the economies of scale that when people feel they're part of something that they're having an input into their engagement is higher they they they work more effectively so i would say that would be the defining part making people feel like they've got things that they're responsible for and generally all of those things encourage active engagement what you find when you look into some of the stats they're terrifying so and when you globally there's an organization gallop to this workforce survey opinion poll company and they they do this workforce survey and they say that globally 13 of people are engaged in their jobs when they look into it what i mean by that is that these there's almost as many people there's about 22 of people who would actively disengage their jobs so by actively disengaged they kind of hate their organization and they want to bring the downfall of their organization so anytime you meet some someone on the tuber in the street they're almost twice as likely to want to destroy their company as make it succeed but then the vast majority of everyone else over 50 percent of people are just disengaged they're not actively disengaged they're just passively disengaged so work for most of us is something is something that sort of feels arduous we don't necessarily enjoy we don't necessarily value the decisions and you'll know as someone who's run a company where culture was the defining thing you'll know that when you get it right it can be this superpower where you know you're on high octane fuel compared to you know the energy can feel low otherwise and so just getting those things right generally is far more about people feeling a personal connection with the people that are around feeling like they're contributing something these things play a really big part we talked a lot about the joy of work obviously the i guess the antithesis of the joy of work is the misery of work and at some point when work feels miserable um people are faced with this quite um this quite confounding question which is how do i know when to quit and we talk that we know i think there's so much written about how to start and when to start and starting being the thing but obviously the thing that comes before starting usually is knowing the right moment to quit people don't quit sometimes and they spend many decades in a miserable job and you know then their fear of quitting almost becomes stronger because they're getting more comfortable and more entrenched so i wanted i've not seen you talk about anything about quitting before but i just wondered if you had a take on when the right moment to quit a job was or i know it's an incredibly personal nuanced thing but people i can i was thinking then i was thinking what are some of the things people really want to know right now one of them i'm sure is like i hate my job i don't have control my boss is an do i quit i'm gonna tell you a secret for the past five years while building social chain into a 700 person global social media powerhouse i've been using a service that i've never really mentioned some of you might know that service it's called fiverr f-i-v-e-r-r it's my little secret if i've ever had a project where i've needed affordable skilled freelancers to help me whether it's building a social media application that made my company three million pounds or just a video i needed editing or help making a logo or making a website i've used fiverr now that my secret's out the bag here's what i'm gonna do for you if there's a freelance service you need or a project you need help with a logo a website a voice over a video you need made anything at all go to fiverr.com ceo i'll put the link in the description that's fiverr.com ceo message me the service you want from the website and every single week i'll personally send you the credit to your fiverr account so that you can get that project done thank you to fiverr for the sponsorship and for supporting entrepreneurs and freelancers around the world i'm looking forward to all of your messages i've been working my way through these huel nutrition bars this week um as you know i love the ready to drink cure flavors but you will have also got these salted caramel bars and i'm a big salted caramel nut which i've been having and if you're if you're someone that does like to chew not just drink your food then i really highly recommend the salted caramel flavor there's also another flavor called the raspberry white chocolate flavor which i've been very addicted to over the last couple of weeks but again just like huel it's nutritionally complete you get all of your your proteins you get essential fats you get it's gluten-free as well and you get 26 vitamins and minerals from these bars tastes amazing and i'm a big salted caramel fan give it a go if you do send me a screenshot on instagram or twitter or linkedin and let me know what you think again as someone that skips meals this is an absolute lifesaver i was thinking what are some of the things people really want to know right now one of them i'm sure is like i hate my job i don't have control my boss is an do i quit yeah look you know big questions you probably could tell us more than that um yeah i think you know the uh the critical thing about that is is probably checking in with yourself and asking you know do i feel any sense of reward by my from my job obviously it's not a great time for anyone right now to be debating doing something that makes them economically precarious that so you don't necessarily want to risk something that is going to put you in a difficult situation but i think you know evaluating our jobs generally when you look into the research when you say to people have you had a good days a good day at work it generally comes down to whether people feel pride in their organization and whether they feel like they've made meaningful progress in something they've been working on so meaningful progress actually can be difficult right now if your job feels like you're the expert in emailing and video calls you sometimes feel like you've made no progress for weeks you haven't done anything for weeks and also if your organization is struggling this is a really interesting phenomenon because some organizations pre-covered were in uh were growing so naturally when you're an employee in those organizations you're dragged up with it you're giving promotions and pay rises and there's the cash to fund that now organizations are in decline or a lot of them are hanging on and so you're not getting a promotion your pay's been frozen you might have be on a pay cut you might be furloughed and it feels like suddenly you've gone into decline in your career because the organization you're in is in decline um and i think that also causes a lot of people to start to think well you know i might my whole life up until this point has been about progress and climbing the ladder why am i going down the ladder yeah i didn't do anything different or wrong you know it's a really interesting philosophical thing about that because the whole idea of the career at korea is the invention of the last 40 years you know uh ancestors uh grandparents our great-grandparents never had the idea of a career where i was going to be accomplishing something and developing and changing you know the job you were going to be doing next year was the job you were doing last year well done and the job that your kids were going to do was going to be the job that you did and the the this idea and it brings with it a degree of insecurity this idea that we will be on this developmental path is a construct look and it's a construct that suits the economic system we live in because it makes us all we strive to be accomplishing more than we did last year and to be earning more than we did last year but it's a construct for the last few years whether it's the origin of happiness i'm not 100 sure if i was going to put two things alongside some of the things that you've talked about that sense of feeling part of something feeling connected to other people i think is a more robust route to happiness than feeling like i'm on a career trajectory even though that can the the illusion of that can be incredibly powerful it's interesting because you know with there's this thing called like gold medal depression where like michael phelps he set these set these tarts one thing i kind of investigated in my book is the idea that we think stability we think chaos we think we live in chaos and and in search of stability but the moment we find stability i.e completed goals and um you know roof over our heads and everything's normal we actually descend into chaos so in fact we're meant to keep this is a philosophical idea i guess but we're meant to keep our lives in forward motion in that chaos because when you look at people that have achieved all their goals and they have nothing left to accomplish they so often fall into some kind of depression and lack of purpose and meaning i think jordan peterson talks about it i know benjamin said a lot about it that you know much of um i was looking at the stats around life expectancy in the uk and the us and over the last two years it's declined for the first time ever but and they say when they say why is that they say because the opioid crisis and say why is there an opioid crisis and they say well because there's a lack of meaning and so i i began to realize that in my own life i think i'm meant to keep myself my goals way out in front of me almost unattainable um and keep myself striving and i've even seen it in my person which i've talked abou