Podcast
Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture
Hosted by brucedaisley.com · EN
MAKE 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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
28episodes
Episodes
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People-watching in the workplace
Dec 100:42:32Tap to summarizeDr Karen Bridbord is the author of a new book, The Relationship-Driven Leader that invites us to bring a psychologist's lens to our job and the relationships with those around us.Her perspective is to use psychology to understand the person in front of you to interpret the world through their eyes. If you’ve got a controlling boss or someone who behaves in a way that impacts your life she helps you unpick what’s going in their head. The Relationship-Driven Leader: Strengthening Connections to Enhance Productivity and Wellness at Work 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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What Gen Z need from work
Nov 2500:38:38Tap to summarizeGen Z have been shaped by recessions, the pandemic, geopolitical instability, not to mention financial insecurity and world changing technology.That's the finding of the Edelman Gen Z Lab as told to me by the leader of the project Jackie Cooper. Most powerfully she explains that Gen Z's have a 'visceral need for safety' - that's financial, social, cultural and even physical.They respond to fear by asking questions and wanting to be heard, which older generations often misread as entitlement or disrespect for hierarchy.Politically, Gen Z is fragmented. Younger Gen Zs, especially boys/young men, are leaning more conservative and drawn to strong-man archetypes; older Gen Zs, shaped by Obama / BLM, are more idealistic about progressive politics. Algorithms and “TikTok-isation” amplify those splits.I was blown away to see Jackie Cooper from Edelman talk about the research that the company has done to understand the new generation of workers entering the workplace - I think you'll love this discussion. You can read the report hereFull transcript on the website.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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Is training really corporate sludge?
Nov 1100:42:21Tap to summarizeMost company training is a waste of time that turns firms into bureaucratic sludge holes. That’s roughly the conclusion of today’s episode which is a conversation with Andre Spicer and Mats AlvessonThey have a new book out The Art of Less. Andre has been a guest a few times before - way back in 2018. This podcast is old. In 2018 this podcast was ahead of Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO at the top of the podcast charts. (Andre talking about open plan offices)The idea that much of what companies do is related to their self identity, what the company aspires to be in the world - with the end result that it doesn’t achieve these things.Things we discuss:'The Death of the Corporate Job'how 'initiative-itis' is dragging down organisationshow training is corporate sludge that doesn't achieve its goalscorporate culture as an act of 'grandiosity'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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Strong team identity delivers success
Nov 200:45:24Tap to summarizeJeremy Holt is a psychologist and leadership coach who has spent more than 20 years helping teams get better. Read his research about better team results.This episode is the third part of a series about the power of identity in teams. Listen to the other Eat Sleep Work Repeat episodes about identity.Jeremy posting about identityWatch the Lebron documentary More Than a GameJeremy's book For the Love of the GameSign 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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To understand leadership, you need to understand identity
Oct 2700:51:51Tap to summarizeThis is the second part of an interview with Professor Alex Haslam, the world's leading voice on the study of social identity.You can hear the first part of this interview on the website.In this discussion we talk how social identity can help us understand leadership.Alex talks about the CARE model of leadership.C - Create the groupA - Advance the group (sometimes over themselves)R - Represent the groupE - Embed the group identity in everyday life for the groupIf you're interested in exploring Alex's recent contributions to discussions on leadership and culture these papers are a great place to start:Zombie LeadershipHuman Me-sources or Human We-sources - exploring leader narcissismAlex Haslam is Professor of Social and Organisational Psychology at the University of Queensland. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on group dynamics, leadership, and identity. Over the past three decades, Alex has helped reshape our understanding of how people think, feel, and behave as members of groups, and why social identity is central to motivation, resilience, and effective teamwork.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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Our personalities are changing, will it ruin work?
Sep 5Tap to summarizeLast month the FInancial Times published an article by John Burn Murdoch in the form of an analysis of personality data, specifically looking at what are styled the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.Typically these five factors are regarded as a statistically reliable way to measure personality. Unlike approaches like Myers Briggs these factors prove consistent over time and psychologists took a view that much of the variance of human personality can be understood using these factors. Interestingly these factors also prove predictive for other outcomes. Conscientiousness for example predicts academic success and job performance, neuroticism can predict mental health issues.To discuss it I'm joined by Nick McClelland, Nick is the CEO of Byrne DeanThe original article by John Burn Murdoch (archive version)Newsletter discussion on the dataDiscussion between John Burn Murdoch and Derek ThompsonChristopher Ferguson questions the effect sizeJay Van Bavel talks about the effect size of the dataAlex Haslam points out the questions that lead to the conscientiousness scoresSign 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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Did we do Big Ange dirty?
Aug 1100:42:06Tap to summarizeSign up for the newsletterA couple of years ago, I was surrounded with so many happy Spurs fans that I bought into the euphoric buzz they were giving off.Ange Postecoglou had brought the smile back to Tottenham supporters. I chatted to Charlie Eccleshare from The Athletic about the cultural reinvention that the Australian manager that enacted.Reader, the Big Ange story didn't end well as a result a lot of fans of other clubs regularly message me asking about the episode, or my opinion of Postecoglou's demise. It was while I was joking about this one time that today's guest got in touch.Dan Jackson is a former Aussie Rules footballer who now acts as General Manager at Adelaide Football Club. He got in touch suggesting that I might be unfair backtracking on the support of Ange, challenging me to reflect on 'how the world's premier football competition has such little respect for building genuine high-performance culture?'He said 'I'm sure you'd agree it takes time and a lot of focused effort to change and build a good culture - two things that don't appear to be given any focus in most EPL teams'.I loved the pushback and immediately got in touch to have a conversation with him. We talk both about Postecoglou (and whether we did him dirty) but also about how he is part of a team that tries to build strong long-term culture in his team. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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How Octopus Energy used culture to reach the top
Jul 30, 202500:35:46Tap to summarizeI’m often asked asked which company cultures I admire, especially as I tend to be critical of the culture inside tech firms. It’s easy to have good vibes in small firms but organisations who manage to deliver good culture at scale are the ones I’m most interested in. I often call out Nando’s or Octopus Energy.I was delighted to get the chance to talk to the CEO of Octopus Energy Group, Greg Jackson. I’ve often reflected that the best cultures seem to be codified and made explicit, but Octopus’s culture isn’t really defined by formal values, Jackson doesn’t pin it down to three or four words. Instead the culture has a vivid feeling but is loosely articulated, a tangible mix of trust, autonomy and a shared mission.Cultures are often defined by what they’re against as much as what they are for. Many companies give a laundry list of desirable attributes they strive for. There’s an organisation at the end of my street that has ‘excellence’ and ‘respect’ on its windows, but would any business claim to be built on mediocrity or disrespect? Aren’t they just given? Sometimes these things are called the Pillars of Character. Yes, we have integrity here, but how does that help you work here?For businesses these pillars are useless for creating differentiation. Jackson’s approach at Octopus stands apart from that, he takes issue with common norms elsewhere. Researching for the conversation I listened to one interview where Jackson talked about the absence of back-to-back meetings in his day. He said:First of one thing I do that I think is unusual is I don't pack my day with meetings. I'm religious about having lots of time outside meetings because in the one hour that someone wants to have a meeting, I can make 10 phone calls or I could drop by the desks of half a dozen team members and I can be available for people to deal with what's going on that day. So one thing for me is your time is far too precious to let it get soaked up on other people's meeting requests. It's quite funny when I got a new PA, she came from a very large software company and I said, ‘I've got a lot of meetings tomorrow’. And she said, well, where I used to work, my job was to pack from 8 AM to 5 PM every day, hour by hour by hour. And I was like, Whoa, how does that person get any thinking time? How does it get any, any time to reset? And how does it get to do anything proactive that changes the world?After the conversation, which was recorded live on stage near Guildford, someone came up to me. ‘My son works at Octopus,’ he said. Here we go, I thought. ‘Every single word he said up there is true. He says he wishes he’d joined there years ago’.Links:Greg on High Performance podcastTranscriptMake Work Better newsletterTake a listen, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Getting to grips with workplace AI
Jun 6, 202500:42:04Tap to summarizeThis is the second episode this month about AI and the implications for our jobs.Two weeks ago I went along to a huge event run by Workday down in North Greenwich. Workday, their partners and their customers took to the stage to talk about applications of AI that are coming to their platform. As part of the event I was able to run a discussion with a couple of voices from the company who are helping businesses navigate the challenges that AI presents to us. Sign up for the newsletterMore about Workday ElevateI was joined by Jerry Ting. Jerry is the founder of Evisort and now teaches at Harvard Law School and is a senior leader at Workday. And the other contributor was Angelique de Vries Schipperijn, she's the EMEA president for Workday. The conversation was fascinating for me in a few ways, firstly we can be so daunted about what AI represents in our jobs and this seemed simple and easy to understand, but secondly because as I mentioned last week the conversations I got from the audience suggested that there’s a lot of businesses who have barely started their own journeys.Look, here’s the challenge of the moment, I think the conversation at the event described a future that we have the agency to participate in. It seems real and like something we can connect with, but also everyone who came up to me afterwards anxiously told me that their organisations are doing nothing at all. That’s why I got so much value from this conversation. I think inverted commas “doing AI” feels scary and huge whereas incorporating it into some of the things we’re already going feels possible and easily achievable. I need to declare that this is a promoted episode in the sense that Workday is a client that I was working with at this event and have worked with before, but critically it was a conversation that I’m delighted to be sharing here. I want to give a shout out to Hollie Benneyworth at Workday who has worked so hard to make this happen.You can find a full transcript for this on the website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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What does it mean for culture when 'intelligence is on tap'?
May 26, 202500:34:22Tap to summarizeSign up to the newsletterFirst of two episodes going deep on how AI is going to impact work - and therefore workplace culture and dynamics.This week is with Alexia Cambon from Microsoft. Alexia is Head of Research on Copilot & Future of Work. Last month her team released the Work Trend Index Annual Report. It’s one of the most important pieces of insight into how our jobs will change. Their previous reports have been interesting going deep into how people are experimenting with AI but this year’s is different. It articulates a version of work that most of us aren’t yet ready for.P&G research: Having an AI assistant doubles a worker’s output, proving as effective as having a real teammateAlexia mentioned that the research was performed by Karim R. Lakhani. The paper itself.Conor GrennanJaime TeevanMore about marathoner Katherine Switzer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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