If you’re reading this, then like me you’re probably always looking for insight of how to make work better. If that’s you I can strongly recommend getting a copy of the The Happiness Dividend, the new report from Reward Gateway.

Opening with the context that half of all employees are unhappy at work right now, the report sets out the case for culture. Big stand out data points for me were:

• Happier employees are 10-12% more productive

• Happier employees are 30% less likely to leave their jobs in the next year

• Improvements in employee happiness are linked to 18% higher productivity

It’s a great crib sheet of research of the case for the defence - if you’re looking to win over your boss this is the attachment to send them.

• The Financial Times ran an analysis showing that higher paid workers were more likely to be using AI in their jobs

  

• You possibly saw the case this week of the Wall Street law firm who had to apologise because its legal filing was full of hallucinations. I find these things hard to understand, as it’s so easy to ask for citations and to check, but The Guardian reports that the ubiquity of AI work slop is actually making many jobs harder

• I know someone who in his first week at Meta was told ‘presume someone is watching everything you do, and listening to everything you say’. Now they are:

When Meta employees asked if there was a way they could opt out of a tracking system that could read their personal Gmail, health and banking details and private web usage they were told ‘No there is no opt out on your work provided laptop’. The company also told employees that they plan to implement 10% layoffs in the coming months and you can understand some degree of caution of not wanting to rock the boat in a choppy job market. (Worth saying that European laws will prevent a lot of this happening to EU and UK employees, where monitoring of laptops is allowed but can’t be excessive, but it speaks to the attitudes of Zuckerberg’s organisation).

• Couple of cracking reads from The Atlantic on the AI debate. ‘Am I coal, or am I a horse?’ Firstly it allows you to work out if your job is going to be wiped out by the machines.[Free archive version]. It mentions Jevons paradox that we’ve discussed before: when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of something lead to a rise in total consumption of that resource

• 75% of new code at Google is now written by AI

• Then some push back on the idea that young people are losing their jobs to AI [Free archive version]. ‘Since the release of ChatGPT, recent graduates in sectors with more AI usage have experienced slightly better employment outcomes than they did prior to its release,’ it suggests. The bad job market is cyclical, not down to tech

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There’s an old truism in work, backed up in the data, that we take a job for salary and we quit because of culture. Friendship plays a key part in this perspective.. Any leader wrestling with the conundrum of making their teams more engaged with their culture will find their attention drawn to the stat that the biggest predictor of workplace engagement is whether you have a best friend at work.

The data from the Gallup Global Workplace Report says that employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be fully engaged in their jobs. I’ve presented this to hundreds of executives and the response is always the same: ‘Best friend? What am I, six?’ I should add a detail here, it’s always men who say this. So I’m here to tell you that yes, even big boys have best friends.

Critically, for the friendless executives who scoff that friendship at work is merely an opportunity to slack off, Gallup’s data suggests that having a best friend is strongly linked to business outcomes - such as increasing profitability and higher employee retention. Workers reporting that they have a best friend at work are twice as likely to recommend their employer to others, to get more done in their jobs and to enjoy their work.

The complication of this data point is that the level of people reporting a best friend at work is at the lowest level ever. The decline is especially harsh amongst young people - the 21% of under-35s who report having a workplace best friend is the lowest number ever recorded.

Why are we not making friends as much? It’s possible that the mechanics of modern life are conspiring to make us fear that our colleagues just aren’t that into us. I’m going to let you know the problem: phubbing has killed your culture.

What the heck is phubbing? Phubbing is what psychologists have termed the phenomenon of ‘phone-based snubbing’. When we’re with someone and end up submitting to the magnetic lure of our devices. Conversation goes quiet. None of your colleagues had spent the weekend binging the same content as you. The little thing is sitting there plaintively pleading for a tiny crumb of attention.. ‘just have a little look - I got the good stuff for you. Just one little peek.’ We look at our phones and kill the vibe dead.

A meta-analysis covering nearly 20,000 participants found that when people were phubbed by their romantic partners it significantly diminished their relationship happiness. Partner phubbing caused increases in conflict and jealousy. This also held for work. In our jobs even the mere presence of a smartphone during face-to-face interactions starts reducing feelings of closeness. The worst of all is being phubbed by our bosses.

Studies found that boss phubbing eroded the foundations of workplace connection: wiping out employees’ sense of meaningfulness and safety at work. In other words, a manager’s wandering attention both feels rude and makes us feel like we don’t matter.

It’s maybe no surprise then that when our colleagues attention gets sucked into their phones we end up thinking they don’t like us much.

This belief that other people don’t like us to the same extent as we like them is sometimes called the ‘liking gap’. I’ve got some good news for you. It turns out not to be true - our colleagues like us more than we realise. Dr Gillian Sandstrom is a researcher whose work explores her fascination with our conversations with other people - whether colleagues, friends or strangers. She’s just published a fabulous new book ‘Once Upon A Stranger’.

Sandstrom says that conversations are often initially intimidating because they pose risks of social rejection and uncertainty. As we don’t know what our conversation partner is thinking we often fear the worst. Now imagine the self doubt when someone pulls out their Nokia. ‘The result is people chronically underestimate how much others like them and enjoy their company,’ Sandstrom says. ‘This liking gap exists not because people fail to signal they like each other - in fact, the signals are right there for all to see - but because people are too focused on their own self-critical thoughts to notice.’

When it comes to the workplace, the news actually gets worse. What’s striking is that this liking gap doesn’t close once we know people. One of Gillian Sandstrom’s collaborators, Erica Boothby, extended the research into workplaces and found the liking gap persisting inside teams. They found that colleagues who had worked alongside each other still systematically underestimated how much the others liked them - even after six months of collaboration. While the gap was widest in the earliest interactions, it didn’t simply dissolve with familiarity. And the consequences were specific: people who doubted how their colleagues saw them were less likely to ask for help and less willing to speak openly.

Sandstrom gives a bit of advice that feels like an important rule to live by, ‘Conversations are a great source of happiness in our lives, but even more than we realise it seems, as others like us more than we know.’

What does it mean for us at work? Well it’s an important reminder that there’s a bit more love in the Zoom than we might guess. It’s highly possible that the person sitting opposite you thinks more of you than you realise. Even if they occasionally distractedly check their Instagram. The liking gap persists because we’re all awkward souls trying to find a way to connection, and those darn phones are promising a quick hit of delight.

The fix isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t easy. Talk about it with your teams. Put the phone away. Stay in the conversation a little longer than feels comfortable. The friendship data doesn’t ask you to invent closeness it just asks you to stop actively undermining it.

There’s an important lesson for us all. The best friend at work that drives all that engagement, retention and meaning started as a colleague who you bothered to talk to.

• I was really taken with this post by Neil Perkin, which suggests that ‘the further you are from the actual work, the simpler it looks’ to replace it with AI, those who are close to jobs know it’s not remotely close

• For all Anthropic’s talk that software coding is ‘going away first, then all of software engineering’ they currently have 454 open coding roles live on their website

• Gallup released the latest sweep of their State of the Global Workplace report. TL;DR - UK engagement is static at 10%, US is down at 30%. (Generally countries with universal healthcare, rather than employer provided, have significantly lower engagement which does pose questions about the data)

• One interesting take is that Gallup say managers have happier lives but worse days, reporting that they have the highest levels of stress, unhappiness, sadness and loneliness in the workplace

• The Wall Street Journal asked why work has become so joyless and concludes we’ve got rid of all the fun of our jobs [free version]

• Some coverage this week of Duolingo sending a taxi for candidates’ final interviews (and then asking the cab driver what they were like) [free version]. This isn’t fully new, Netflix Chief Talent Officer said she’d ask the receptionist which candidates were d1ckheads. It feels a little creepy but I guess it only catches people who aren’t genuinely kind. ‘The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good,’ as George Orwell told us

• Relatable: Artemis astronauts reported having ‘two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working

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Two podcasts today because… of reasons, and the first rule of adult life is that no one cares about reasons.

Firstly a wonderchat with Gillian Sandstrom about the joy of chatting to strangers. I love her work. Her new book is one of those titles that has genuinely inspired me to change my behaviour. Talking to strangers is a muscle that anyone can work everyday.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

Next up Pippa Grange is one of the world’s leading performance psychologists, having become renowned by working with Gareth Southgate’s mens football team.

I was really struck by the honesty in her new book that she’d suffered a major episode of burnout. An episode that left her ‘on the sofa’ unable to move.

When someone that attuned to their body and mind can fall victim of this, what does it mean for the rest of us?

I talked to her about her new book and how we should all think about burnout, performance and our priorities in life.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

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First let’s go deep on psychological safety…

Last week’s post about psychological safety prompted reader Tom Geraghty to get in touch. Tom is something of an psychological safety enthusiast, running a company called Psychological Safety and a newsletter of the same name. The guy is crazy for the stuff.

Tom is such a Psych Safe nut that when he offered a fascinating potted history of the phenomenon I asked him if I could share it with a wider audience:

“What’s really interesting is that through the 1970s and 80s, the world of aviation was grappling with the causes of disasters, and found that practically all of them could have been prevented had someone felt safer to speak up and question or challenge the decisions of the captain. This was termed “attenuated speech” or “safety silence”, and the primary cause of this lack of voice was the steep “power gradient” in the cockpit (also called authority gradient or cockpit gradient).

“This finding catalysed the creation of CRM (Cockpit, then Crew, Resource Management), which has at its core creating the conditions in which people can speak up to someone with greater authority or status. One way of helping to do this is by introducing ourselves by what we’re doing, not our rank or grade, which has since been adopted by many healthcare teams and others (i.e. “Hi, I’m Jane, and I’m looking after the patient’s anaesthesia today” rather than “I’m Dr Smith and I’m the chief anaesthetic consultant”).

“One useful way to think about psychological safety is as increasing “interpersonal predictability” - the better we can predict how people in a group will respond to us, the more likely we are to take that risk. Hence, group size is a key factor, because predicting how people might respond to you becomes naturally more difficult as the size increases.

By going deep on this stuff, I found myself thinking again about Nathan Fielder’s remarkable second season of The Rehearsal.

Fielder, whose monotonal awkwardness is at the heart of his comedy, spent a whole series of his show exploring his own obsession with aviation safety. While Fielder repeatedly bemoans that his show is constrained by the contractual limitation that HBO paid him to make a comedy, it is both very funny and hugely instructive on how psychological safety is really formed.

While reviewing transcripts of Bangla Airlines flight 211 (which crashed in Kathmandu in 2018) he was alarmed to see that despite taking place two decades after the mandated psychological safety system used in global aviation (the CRM mentioned by Tom above) the log of the flight shows terrible conflict in the cockpit.

The captain Abid Sultan, 52, smokes throughout the ill-fated flight and uses abusive language towards co-pilot, Prithula Rashid, 25, the airline’s first female pilot, calling her an idiot as they first prepare to land.

Fielder spends time following aviation professional and is alarmed with the realities of the job. He observes that for all the aviation industry talk of safety standards the realities of cockpit safety protocols are half-hearted checkbox exercises. Most pilots he meets rarely fly with the same crew and he notes that ‘currently the only FAA required training for assertiveness in the cockpit is a short PowerPoint presentation’. The pilots he tracks rarely speak to each other before they take control of planes meaning they’re totally unprepared to challenge each other if something goes wrong.

‘Throughout my time talking with hundreds of pilots,’ Fielder says, ‘I’d become convinced that this cockpit communication issue isn’t just an occasional occurrence. I believe its happening in some form on every single airline flight.’

‘Wherever I travel now, I can’t help but notice pilots everywhere, not talking to each other,’ he says. ‘Standing in complete silence, just moments before flying hundreds of people through the sky.’

John Goglia, a former aviation industry leader, told CNN, ‘what Nathan has uncovered was a little sliver that has fallen through the cracks, a communications disconnect between pilots. When he first came to me and mentioned that to me, it immediately caught fire with me because I've seen it. I've flown in many, many, many cockpits… I plan on taking that show to my students to show them’.

You can watch the show on Sky or Now TV.

Here’s when I first discussed the programme

Why do so many mission driven organisations have stinking cultures?

On the subject of psychological safety, this week there was wide coverage of a toxic culture at the top of UK retailer The Co-op saying that there was a climate of fear where ‘you learn to look at your shoes'. One senior leader told the BBC, ‘Nobody can speak their mind in this business’.

It’s interesting this, I’ve worked with so many purpose-led organisations that have toxic cultures. I worked with one mission driven consultancy that had one of the lowest levels of engagement scores I’ve ever seen. It was hiring some of the most talented recruits out of elite universities but was seeing them quit in months. Accounts on the job review site Glassdoor referred to a culture beset with bullying and aggression. In my own work with the organisation’s leadership team there were discussions acknowledging a track record of leaders shouting in the workplace.

Another business was a mission driven investment fund, focussing on green investments. In a finding that was surprising to no one an employee survey reported that there was low psychological safety. Background discussions revealed that this lack of trust was down to the behaviour of leaders. Those working with them experienced they were aggressive, domineering and unaccommodating of other colleagues’ views.

So why does this keep happening? Two things seem to be at work.

The first is what psychologists call moral licensing. When people believe they are doing good, they feel entitled to overlook moments of their own bad behaviour. They give themselves the pass on the rudeness, the snappiness. They don’t ever think they are the problem, they genuinely believe that the importance of their cause earns them latitude to be authentically themselves. They were ‘working to make the world a better place’ - and other people needed to acknowledge that wasn’t easy. It’s also a powerful excuse to silence their own conscience.

The second is that mission erodes the normal checks on bad behaviour. In a commercial business, a toxic culture eventually shows up somewhere measurable, employee quit rates, or revenue. Leaders are held to account because the evidence is hard to ignore. In a mission-driven organisation, the cause itself becomes the alibi. Leaders can always point to the work as proof that they are succeeding, regardless of how they treat the people doing it. Behaviour that would be career-ending elsewhere is quietly tolerated, because nobody wants to be seen as the person who got in the way of something important.

The bitter irony is that this makes the mission harder to achieve, not easier. Psychological safety allows the candid dialogue that lets bad ideas get challenged, if nobody can speak their mind, the cause suffers. As the Co-op’s boss was fired yesterday morning, this is something the new CEO might want to consider

• WE KNEW IT! Workers who ‘fall for corporate bullsh!t are worse at their jobs’

• I always like saying that when it come to AI, it’s still not too late to be early. Nicely shown by Marks & Spencer press releasing their big announcement yesterday: that they’ve given Co-pilot to their store managers(!!!)

• Nick Bloom says mentions of AI in jobs are doubling year-on-year

• JP Morgan introduced a new tool to measure how long workers are working in the office. It’s been presented as a wellbeing tool from the firm, they previously capped working hours at 80 per week

• With so much Skills chat into HR circles, I decided to track down how Mastercard are getting on with their internal Talent Marketplace. The organisation announced a couple of years ago that they’d enrolled three-quarters of their workforce on the system. These ideas had their origin the work of Intel back in 2013 to allowing internal mobility on short-term projects (to give new challenges for tenured workers, and to allow leaders to bring in the right skills at short notice). Mastercard now say 93% of their employees are registered on their exchange, ‘and an average of 42% engage with the platform on a monthly basis’ Interestingly a third of those who engage changed role

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Earlier this year I was really taken with a LinkedIn post by Rob Briner, saying that for as much as we talk about psychological safety 'we don't know much about how to increase it' and 'we don't know much about the causes and effects of it'. Rob is a professor of organisational psychology at Queen Mary University of London, specialising in evidence-led interventions. He plays the role of a weary umpire when he hears people casually pronouncing on the cure for burnout, or other workplace related issues.

There was a great debate in the comments of his post, where Alex Haslam suggested that in fact there was plenty of evidence that group identity (a sense of We-ness) was the foundation for psychological safety. When we feel part of something meaningful, it unlocks that trust and ability to communicate without fear.

Alex cited research by Katrien Fransen, professor at which found evidence of identity leadership building psychological safety (or causing burnout in its absence). Thinking back to candid teams I’ve been part of this notion certainly passed the sniff test and reading Katrien's papers delivered a real penny drop moment for me.

The vital part of the insight is that is delivers a path to building better team dynamics that is clear to reproduce. I called her up to talk about her research:

Listen: website / Spotify / Apple

Papers:

• The impact of identity leadership on team functioning and well-being in team sport: Is psychological safety the missing link?

• Unlocking the Power of ‘Us’: Longitudinal Evidence that Identity Leadership Predicts Team 5 Functioning and Athlete Well-Being

Last month the Welsh Government published the first report into their experiment with minimum basic incomes. MBI is an idea that we’ll hear a lot about in the next few years as governments wrestle with the second order effects of AI led automation.

When your Uber driver (or lawyer) is displaced by a bot, governments might need to provide a livelihood to people to enable them to survive. There’s a line of thinking that suggests that in the abundance created by automation, this should be more than subsistence (both for moral and economic reasons).

In the Welsh trial participants were ‘care leavers’ aged 18 or over. These care leavers were individuals who had spent time in local authority care between the age of 14 and 16. The payments were roughly inline with the Real Living Wage given £1800 (£1290/$1862 after tax) each month for two years. Life outcomes have typically been difficult for these individuals so it was felt that they were worthy place to start.

Participants initially hadn’t anticipated working but quickly realised their livelihoods would be enhanced by topping up their income. Themes emerge that the payment helped individuals build a life with fewer concerns - young people described reduced anxiety, greater confidence, and a sense of being able to participate in ordinary life on equal terms with their peers. One participant put it plainly: ‘Before the money, I felt very restricted in what I could do. During the money, I was able to do what I wanted and live my life the way I wanted. It definitely opened my eyes to the fact that I was a lot more competent than I thought I was.’

The housing findings deserve particular attention. The money helped. During the pilot, young people could afford better accommodation, move away from unsafe situations, and achieve a degree of stability most hadn't previously experienced. When the payments stopped, some ended up in emergency accommodation. The report is honest about this: the pilot delayed housing problems for many people rather than resolving them. This is probably more a reflection of systemic failures in housing. While the 2 years of payments have now ended the study will continue until 2027.

Worth checking out

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A week that brings Scott Seiss back is a good week:

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• The headline that ‘workplace attendance’ is at record post-Covid levels might prick your ears up, but it’s only just gone over 40% - this isn’t a 5-day office story

Apologies, I’m as weary of the AI & jobs articles as anyone but several items follow:

• ‘Work, out of reach’ - the next lecture on work and AI by economist Daniel Susskind is great watch. He reflects on the talk of skills mismatches and the short and long-term impact of this

• The New York Times asks a similar question, just how bad is the AI jobs apocalypse going to be? (‘The risk is real. Given the upheaval we may soon be facing, it would be nice if we had a president capable of leading a thoughtful national conversation about where A.I. is taking us.’) [GIFT LINK]

• The Washington Post produces an infographic that considers which roles are at risk, but are also adaptable [GIFT LINK]

• HBR says right now AI job layoffs are about the potential of the technology, not what it’s actually delivering

• I don’t really understand football but I did like this story about David Luiz

One of the themes we’ve explored over the last few months is the idea that most messages inside organisations are received by weary, perhaps cynical audiences.

This is a topic that I returned to this week with a conversation with Professor Benjamin Laker from Henley Business School. I love Benjamin’s work, his article on Meeting Free Days is probably the piece of research I've shared the most in the last 5 years and it’s no surprise that the esteem of his work has led to him working with huge organisations and governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last autumn Laker and colleagues published an article in Harvard Business Review reflecting on the failures of culture change efforts inside organisations. (I first wrote about it here). The article featured research finding that 72% of formal culture change initiatives inside organisations showed ‘no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention’.

My conversation with Professor Laker went further into this. ‘Culture isn’t a campaign,’ he explained to me, ‘the more you talk about culture, the less people believe you’.

In many firms he explained, ‘You are already quite up against it because of previous initiatives’. The workforce collectively says, ‘Here we go again. A town hall meeting. The slogan is changing. We’ve done this before. Nothing changes as a result.’

This is especially true because frequently employees observe contradictions between the words management are saying and the actions of the leaders. In Laker’s research he found that ‘59% [of employees] told us that senior leadership actions contradict stated values at least weekly’. That might be announcing cost savings but flying business class themselves, declaring high bars for behaviour that no one at the top actually meets, the list goes on.

So what’s the answer? Not less communication, but a different sequence. Hold back on treating things like campaigns. Nail the delivery first, then offer explanation.

The reflection that we live in a sceptical world is a vital lens of any of us right now. Knowing that more trust will be gained by doing things rather than talking about them is vital. There’s an important paradox at the heart of what Laker unveils is that communication alone isn’t enough. Flashy new values and a slogan won’t change behaviour. But that isn’t to undermine the importance of communication. Leaders need to be the explainers in chief.

The clearest example of this I've seen recently is in New York. Mamdani inherited the assumption that most people don't believe politicians or trust that things can change. When Manhattan was hit with 20 inches of snow this week, his team told him they didn't have the people to clear it. His response? We’re a city of 8 million people, people isn’t the problem here, a system to organise them is. The snow was cleared in two days by paying $17 to $30 per hour to a citizens’ army of willing workers.

The communication followed the action, not the other way around.

Delivery first, then explanation.

Laker’s research reflects exactly this logic: when senior leaders altered their behaviour - changing how they ran meetings, responded to challenges or made decisions, trust scores increased by 26%. Not from a new values framework. From doing things differently.

There’s been a lot of discussion that in the era of Mamdani, Farage and, maybe, Trump the role of a politician is to think like an influencer, to communicate memorably and frequently. The best politicians have always been create communicators, it’s just today that looks like someone who captures your attention on Reels or TikTok rather than giving a one hour speech.

To my mind, leaders need to think about what they can learn from this when it comes to their own role as Explainer in Chief. The more important lesson for leaders isn't about format, it's about sequence. Act first, show that change is happening, then explain what you did and why. That's what makes people believe you and buy into you.

Listen to the interview:

Website / Spotify / Apple

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Requesting Boast Mode: Tell Me About Your Special Culture

Do you work in a fantastic workplace culture? Is there something that you’ve done (or benefitted from) that has helped energise your team dynamic? Or has it turned around a bad experience? I’d love to hear from you

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• The US is drifting further and further away from the norms of the rest of the world. Paid maternity Leave in the US already sits at the bottom of the league table. Here Professor Scott Galloway (who positions himself as progressive) tells new fathers not to take paternity leave from their firms

• The Times reports that the government is considering making it a legal right to do some work from home

• I’m deliberately trying to avoid talking too much about AI and work because its so extensively covered elsewhere. Of course you might laugh when you see that tech boss declare ‘all office work will be automated in 18 months’ and then realise the guy saying it works at the company that makes Teams and Outlook

• But least once a week someone tells me they’ve been dazzled with what an AI tool has just done for them. It largely suggests that most people aren’t throwing challenging tasks in the direction of the premium AI products. For those people I say: try something big this week. Ethan Mollick’s guide of which AI tool to use is here. (For me I’d suggest either Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude are the best two to play around with - Gemini for speed of response and extent of research, Claude has the best written language that don’t seem as Slop-afflicted as Chat GPT)

• I was moved by this TikTok about someone’s friend finally recognising the exhaustion of work. (Worth watching rather than reading). The poster’s friend tells here: ‘I’m so sorry I gave you such a hard time for being unavailable for so long… There’s something about freedom of thought here, I feel like I felt my brain change walking into the building… like a comatose feelings’

Have we reduced the independence of children so much that they struggle to cope with a transition to the world of work?

In the UK economic inactivity is strongly on the rise in those under the age of 25. Recent data from the Learning and Work Institute and the Office of National Statistics reports that almost a fifth (19.2%) of 18-to-24-year-olds are not in employment or full-time education. The ONS credits much of the rise to ‘people who were inactive because of long-term sickness’ - citing big increases in mental health challenges.

So much of contemporary discussion about young people veers into a debate about the rights or wrongs of mobile phones and social media, research is a little less certain that phones are wholly to blame.

An eye-opening post from Dani Payne, Head of Education at the Social Market Foundation might be grounds for reappraisal. In her TikTok Payne suggest that Gen Z anxiety might, at least in part, be down to the way that we withhold personal autonomy from young people.*

Dani’s original post is essential viewing:

@danihpayneChildhood has changed - it lasts for longer, but it’s smaller, more insular, less free. Children can’t play alone outside, roam far from home or walk back from school like they used to. Some really interesting data from @Teacher Tapp (if you’re a teacher, do download their app and get involved in the polling!) that sparked some further research and thoughts from me on what this means for youth mental health and the opportunities we give young people to take risks, manage responsibility, exercise agency and control and ultimately mature. But what do you think? Is this reduced freedom a good thing, or perhaps a necessary thing in modern day society? And what age were you allowed to walk home from school alone? #ukpolitics #mentalhealth #education #teachersoftiktok #parentsontiktok

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Teacher Tapp is an app used by over 10,000 teachers. It asks a daily question at the end of the school day and uses the data to report back to participants, and to inform policy makers. As Payne reports Teacher Tapp asked teachers what age children are able to talk home from their school without an adult (or older sibling):

(Reminder: Year 3: 7-8 year olds, Year 4: 8-9, Year 5: 9-10, Year 6: 10-11)

Payne says ‘Over the last few decades we’ve reduced how much independence we give to children in a major and systemic way’. Only one in 10 schools allows Year 4 pupils to walk home from school.

Teachers were then asked at what age they were allowed to walk home school. Looking at the data allows us to see the big shift that took place in the 1990s and beyond. Teachers in their 20s reported being allowed to walk home from Year 6, whereas teachers in their 50s reported being allowed to walk home from Year 3. The charts shows a clear upward climb in the age that independence was allowed.

Payne points out that the rise of child anxiety pre-dates the advent of mobile phones and social media, ascribing the limitations to independent play as a clear example of the impact of creating a low ‘locus of control’.

The ‘locus of control’ is a sense that our actions impact what happens to us. Independent play enables us to explore this understanding allowing us to explore risk-taking, decision making and being an individual.

Payne cites a study from the Wellcome Collection that mapped how children had seen a steady decline in how they are permitted to play: grandparents were free to roam across a whole town, the next generation could roam neighbourhoods, where today’s children are rarely allowed to play outside of their street. ‘We’ve removed independence, often in the name of safety, without grabbling with the psychological cost,’ she says.

I saw something along the same lines this week describing the transition of skateboarding from a practice of unbounded adventure, into now only found contained in adult-approved parks. (‘An activity which used to expose one at a young age to harsh realities of the world - class stratification, power dynamics, treatment of “the other”, definitions of space - and helped one define themselves in relation to these things, has become a more passive activity, woven into mainstream culture’.)

There’s two consequences for work. Firstly, clearly there’s a whole cohort of young people who might struggle to reach the workforce at all. Secondly we should recognise that a whole generation of young people have been denied the opportunity to practice independence. As Jackie Cooper recently said on the podcast, we should understand that ‘Gen Z have a visceral need for safety’. If we want to develop initiative, risk-taking and dealing with ambiguity we need to think about training these things from scratch.

There’s a truism about connection: that inconvenience is the price of community. We should recognise the benefit of friction in other areas of our lives. It might be too late to change the restrictions we placed on previous generations of children, but taking account of their needs as they arrive in the workplace might be the best next action.

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*This whole post owes all credit to Dani Payne, I contacted Dani about her TikTok and as she had no plan to post it elsewhere she gave me go ahead to use the data and the argument. All credit to her, check our her TikToks, the sort of genius insight that is so much more readily found on the clock app than on LinkedIn. Says a lot about how LinkedIn is a self-promotion shop rather than a genuine space for business discussion. Thanks also to Grainne Hallahan and Laura McInerney at Teacher Tapp for the data.

Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code returns with reflections on forming cultures post Covid. He’s moved his attention to an examination of what contributes to us getting a fulfilling experience from work - and life.

We talk attention, community and the way that great teams demonstrate ‘group flow’. We also delve into some research by Nick Epley that I’ve covered on the newsletter, that suggests we’re terrible at predicting how interactions with other people will make us feel.

If you like this check out the previous episodes with Daniel:

• Dan Coyle can fix your broken culture

• The Culture Code

Listen on the website / Spotify

What makes for a great place to work? This week I got the chance to pick the brains of Daniel Zhao, Chief Economist of Glassdoor, as they published their new rankings of Best Places to Work report for 2026.

Gone is the era of tech firms being the best places to work, this year the chart was full of a wide range of organisations and sectors. The top three US firms included a car wash chain and a burger restaurant.

So what made for the firms who did well?

Culture explains a lot of it. We tend to join a job for salary, and quit because of the culture. Good culture makes us stick around and feel loyal. We’re 7 times more likely to quit a job for culture than for money.

But there's more than that. The best jobs give us career progression, they gift us a sense of autonomy, critically (listen up tech firms) flexibility is a big part of what we're looking for.

I was really impressed when reading the reviews of firms who performed well is that they weren’t perfect. There were plenty of relatable criticisms of organisations along the way.

Listen to the discussion below or on the website

Glassdoor: Top US places to work, Top UK places to work

Do corporate values do more harm than good?

On the subject of good companies, this week management icon Margaret Heffernan wrote a long and satisfying post railing against corporate purpose. She pulled apart the idea of purpose statements. Using the scandal ridden history of Johnson & Johnson as her jumping off point she reflects on the distraction of purpose/mission/values. It’s savage stuff:

Purpose has become a smokescreen, a disguise. Pretending to, or encouraging a belief in, a higher value system beyond profit is a feint. Deceptive and mind-numbing at worst, decorative and distracting at best, it is a displacement activity which looks like conscience but cannot induce it. We will get nowhere until business can forswear abstract nouns and learn to use language that is practical and tangible. We also have to call out the suspects that keep making repeat appearances at every crime scene: Scale, Competition, Speed and, yes, Purpose: the over-zealous belief in an organisation so devout that it blinds followers.

Last year Professor Benjamin Laker at Henley Business School and colleagues published research exploring the impact of values on culture. (Alternative archive version: these links don’t always work outside UK). They wanted to understand how leaders express and define culture, and how these communications were interpreted by their employees.

They found that culture was often seen as a communication strategy - expressed through an internal comms campaigns rolling out new values or articulating corporate purpose. But Laker and colleagues found that culture fails when it is treated like branding instead of behaviour.

If new values or training modules are rolled out employees look to see if these new symbollic gestures are matched by a shift in leadership behaviour. In fact 72% of formal culture change initiatives that they examined showed ‘no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention’, being perceived as cosmetic by employees. The opposite was also true, when senior leaders altered their behaviour - changing how they ran meetings, gave feedback, responded to challenges or made decisions trust scores increased by 26%, irrespective of whether there was a new culture campaign or not. They noted that one effective leader told them, “We didn’t announce a culture shift. We just started acting like it mattered.” Laker and colleagues observed that this meant that ‘before culture can be articulated, it needs to be embodied’.

This is especially true because employees are highly attuned to the actions that senior leaders are tolerating that contradict professed values. Their research found that 59% of employees felt that senior leadership actions were contradicted stated values at least weekly. When leadership are tolerating or conducting counter-cultural actions it undermines faith in the overtly communicated culture. Employees notice.

The research found that 69% of employees withheld concerns or feedback from senior leaders. Some said they’d spoken up in the past and it had done no good, others mirrored the concerns of Amy Edmondson, they were worried that speaking up would lead to them being considered disloyal or difficult.

Laker suggests that leaders need to demonstrate that leaders were fine with feeling questioned or challenged. He suggests that a company meeting should involve a frontline employee making an uncomfortable observation about culture, chosen in advance by their peers. He says leaders need to take it in without defending it. ‘Just listen, acknowledge, and take one visible step forward. The point isn’t the question - it’s what you prove by how you answer.’

Read the full research

How different would your ‘problem person’ be if you centred your attention on them?

Last year my biggest podcast was a conversation with Zach Mercurio, Ph.D. about Mattering, the feeling that we are significant to others.

@ttrofficialTwo minutes for ten days: behaviour transformed? Andy thinks so! What do you think? Catch up with Tim Smale and guest Andy Baker here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiElPsdJYGU #behaviour #schools #classroom #teaching #teachertok #teachersoftiktok

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This clip from Teachers Talk Radio shows the impact of this mattering in schools.

Teachers were asked to take their most challenging child in their class and to give them 2 minutes’ attention every day for 10 days. For ten days the teacher was asked to engage with that child for 2 minutes. This was engagement aside from working in class (to avoid the child being anxious about their work).

2 minutes pure engagement.

By the end of ten days the children’s behaviour had already changed. The kids when asked observed that the teachers ‘seemed to give a s**t’ about them.

The research into this goes back to the 1980s but has seen a resurgence since 2014.

An education blogger, Angela Watson, styled it as the ‘2x10 Strategy’, a ‘miraculous solution’ saying it was a practical, low cost intervention for teachers. Watson said it was the first time she’d seen something she could call ‘miraculous’ in its impact.

Pure and simple this is what Zach was describing when he talked about mattering. Showing people that they are significant to us. In work it’s why teams think that leaders have favourites, because they seem to show a sense of mattering to some, but not all of us.

My challenge for you is, what would this look like with your problem person at work? Maybe the issue isn’t that they are bad, maybe the issue is they feel like they don’t matter to you. Read her original post

Read the research

‘Assume positive intent’ - I worked in one culture where we were implored to assume good intentions behind the acts of other teams. It came from an interview with the one time CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, who said it was the sage advice of her father. ‘From my father, I learned to always assume positive intent,’ Nooyi said. ‘Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You’ll be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different.’

The adage urges us to avoid the curse of Attribution Error: where we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions (or worse, by their mistakes). If our colleague comes into a meeting late they’re a lazy loser, if we’re late it’s because the buses in this country are an actual disgrace. However, this article cautions us that assuming positive intent can give deniability to leaders who make others feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. (Star Tribune version) The broad truth is that extending the interpretation of positive intent to colleagues is helpful, but leaders should be held to a higher standard.

Leaders shouldn’t fall into the trap of reaching for the excuse ‘sorry you took it that way, I didn’t mean that’. Amy Edmondson suggested that psychological safety exists when team members can raise concerns without fear of consequence. But if junior staff know their concerns will be met with ‘I meant well,’ they quickly learn that raising issues is futile, the opposite of psychological safety. If positive intent is gifted to spiky management communication it can create bias-filled or passive aggressive cultures where junior employees are fearful of raising concern with management. For leaders they need to consider their impact over their intent. Sharing their intention can help contextualise the outcome, but shouldn’t give us a pass from considering the impact we have over others. Good read

• Nice post by Professor Rob Briner about ‘growth mindset’ - if you’re a big fan of growth mindset and use it in coaching your team I won’t spoil this for you, run immediately to the link

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Last year I managed to sit at the back of a huge company’s internal conference. While viewing a venue I was allowed to sit in on a software organisation’s annual gathering to rally the troops, reward success and get the team on track.

These things generally follow a standard format: some vast screens, a big audience of excitable employees and some impressively slick presentations. Big pop music hooks welcome speakers to the stage.

What stood out was the presentation by one of the senior leadership team. It was certainly being discussed in quiet corners of the bar afterwards. He started a story about his childhood and some of the rough bumps in the road that he’d experienced. Soon he was bridging into the challenges of his life today and how stress had taken a toll on his mental health. He steered clear of ticking the ‘ok not to be ok’ box on the bingo cards but only just. His lip went at one point. It was quite the show.

The whole thing was straight out of the Brene Brown playbook. Brown encourages leaders to ‘rumble with vulnerability’ when telling their stories. To put it all out there showing who they really are. I'll be totally transparent on the issue with this - Americans are different to people from anywhere else in the world. (I mean this with love btw, my partner is Lebanese American). I’m not sure the vulnerability thing works perfectly out of the box.

This is no slight to Brene Brown. Her first TED Talk on vulnerability (15 years ago!) was a masterclass. I’ve witnessed firsthand how such testimonies can connect with US audiences. They can be seen as brave, inspirationally breaking down hierarchical barriers. With my own eyes I’ve seen how an earnest, deeply personal, even occasionally tearful talk can charm an audience. But these things don’t land the same way everywhere else.

For the UK conference audience that day the whole thing was just an exercise in cringe. I can’t even begin to imagine what the Dutch would have made of it. It just struck me the same rules are not international, the euphoric appreciation of American audiences, outside the US is replaced by a sea of people wishing they were anywhere else. Praying that they get an emergency call that a distant relative has died so they can go home early.

As far as the coffee bar chat that afternoon went they’d have given anything to not have to be there. I want to suggest that this isn’t a passing bout of cynicism, but that there’s reason to think things are getting worse.

This week Edelman published their annual Trust Barometer. Edelman’s commentary suggests that we’ve entered an era of isolarity, ‘where people are unwilling to be with people whose views (or sources of information) differ to our own’. Accompanying it a huge disappearance of optimism (only 15% of people think their families will be better off in the future).

Edelman see this cynicism is being expressed as a rejection of AI, a rejection of multinational brands and hostility towards workplace colleagues who disagree with us.

In the face of this cynicism is no longer seen as being a tool of critical thinking (scepticism), now it’s felt to be a defence mechanism against a world that feels increasingly performative.

Cynicism makes us view these gestures as an act. This performative vulnerability can feel invasive. At best like a parlour trick where a manager who has read a book is trying some schtick out on the workforce, at worst it’s manipulative.

Why, we ask ourselves, is this guy suddenly telling us about his mental health challenges? Our default setting is to disbelieve what we’re being told, and to question why we’re being told it.

Societally we see evidence that this goes way beyond the workplace. The last five British Prime Ministers have each been successively the least popular Prime Minister of all time. (No one cares about reasons, the data says people don’t trust what we’re being told. Also, no idea how David Cameron escaped scot-free from that one).

The crisis of trust should concern all of us. The cynicism documented in the Edelman report isn’t irrational. There’s a widespread sense that people feel let down by people in power and the institutions they represent. Talking about the Beckham feud this week Marina Hyde highlighted the fact that ‘authentic’ communication is now a content category, manufactured on demand. Like the emotional keynote, we should recognise that the power of what we think we’re achieving might not escape the cringe of the people receiving it.

• I’ve commented before how tribal I find the AI debate. Personally, I can definitely see both sides of where we are right now. But to enable you to pick your lane, here’s fan service for both sides:

• Anti-AI take of the week: “Recently, senior executives at Salesforce have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and long-tail customer problems. They even say that it has caused a marked decline in service quality and far more complaints”. This post suggests that over claims on AI’s capabilities are starting to cause an embarrassing reverse ferret

• Pro-AI take of the week: the positive buzz around Claude Code and Claude Cowork are ongoing. Some examples below and they are hard to argue with:

Telegraph article (archive version), website. Elsewhere Google’s Learn Your Way brings Notebook LLM to revision - students using it scored 78% (vs 67%) on retention tests. This interactive map tells you the cheapest Lime bike journey to avoid paying money for standing at traffic lights - it’s entirely built in Claude Code. I asked my friend (a very senior developer, who was quite sceptical on AI until Christmas) his take:

• On 14th May I’m giving a new talk ‘How Boring Ruined Work’ at the Watch Me Think conference, I’ve not written it yet but I’ve got high hopes

• A post from Reddit about someone being performance managed for not working out of hours. (Warning: most Reddit content needs a least one chinny-reckon stroke of the chin)

'Every day our employees are faced with 25 moments of truth that shape what customers think of our service.

That's 125 moments a week.

That's 500 moments of truth a month.

We've got 14,000 frontline staff.

That's 80 million moments of truth every year'.

I loved this discussion with Kevin Green from First Bus about building customer happiness on a foundation of better workplace culture.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

There’s an old truism in work, backed up in the data, that we take a job for salary and we quit because of culture.

Friendship plays a key part in this culture. The Gallup Workforce Report says that employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be fully engaged in their jobs. Critically, for those who might scoff that friendship at work is merely an opportunity to slack off, Gallup’s data suggests that having a best friend is strongly linked to business outcomes - increasing profitability, and driving employee retention.

To explore the impact of friendships at work, for the last two years KPMG has run Workplace Friendship research. The latest round found that:

• Workplace friendships are valued at 20% salary premium

• 57% of people would take a job with salary 10% below market value if it offered close work friendships (vs a role with 10% over market salary but no friendships)

• Workplace loneliness has doubled since 2024. 45% of workers say they feel ‘isolated and alone’ at least some time at work

• Three quarters of workers say that financial constraints prevent them from socialising with colleagues outside of work

• Work-life balance is the strongest driver of job preference. The combination of strong work-life balance and frequent learning opportunities boosts an employer’s preference to 71%

• 87% say friendship-enabling cultures are crucial for retention

One of the considerations we might speculate on is whether remote or hybrid working changes the importance of friendship. In fact the numbers are almost identical for every work setting. We value friendship because it makes us feel more motivated, gives us guidance and builds our confidence. Having a friend at work makes our jobs feel more enjoyable.

84% of employees believe having a close work friendship is important for their mental health. This is especially true for remote workers.

What is especially interesting is that the need for human interactions is seen to have increased in the era of AI chatbots. 86% of professionals say that AI agents have increased the need for human collaboration. You might recall the research I shared at the end of last year that said because we are increasingly throwing questions to the GPT, group chats are going quiet. This is one to watch especially as half of professionals say that technology has replaced deep connection with superficial interaction.

The fact that half of the workforce are feeling that our workplace interactions are becoming more superficial invites us to speculate how friendships are actually made.

When researchers have explored this they’ve concluded that the quality of friendships is dependent on time spent together, consistent with Robin Dunbar’s suggestion that we have circles of friendship. Both of these considerations should be to the advantage of workplace connections. If we find someone who is on our wavelength then a good workplace friend could sit in our top tier of relationships.

As trivial as we might tell ourselves that this is, having strong social connections and support has been found to be more important for our health than our diet, our exercise regime and our consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. Friendships keep us thriving.

One of the mistakes we frequently make with friendships is using nostalgia and loyalty to mentally hold ‘best friend’ spots for people we spent a lot of time with when we were at school or college. Data suggests that this is especially common in men. When asked to name our best friends, we can find ourselves naming someone we used to sit on the bus to school with, but we haven’t seen in person in over a year.

The secret of tapping into the life benefits of friendship is finding friends wherever you find yourself. Can you put percentages on happiness? Maybe not but data can give us a sense of what way the wind is blowing. In research people who are friends with their next door neighbours are 34% happier. Having a best friend who lives within a mile of you makes you 25% happier. Evidence suggests that frequent, unplanned encounters with people you like is the secret to optimal happiness, this is called propinquity. Work can deliver on all of these things.

So how do we make friends where we find ourselves?

Before Christmas I was revelling in the TikToks of Jess Dawson (also on Insta). Dawson had immersed herself in the endeavour of making a new friend every day. Some of her content was utterly joyful, going climbing with someone she got chatting to on the train, laughing with a man in the post office queue, hanging at a Christmas market with a new friend. It was touching to witness Dawson’s gentle efforts yield such rich returns. There were potential friends everywhere.

There were a couple of issues with the approach. By gamifying the idea into making a friend a day some of the content felt a little like Love Bombing. These were fast friendships yes, but the recipients often seemed to be longing for something more than a quick hit for the Tok. Secondly, and more significantly, Dawson caused herself to burnout by chasing such a volume of connection (and content creation) in such a constrained timespan.

What Dawson’s experiment can show us is something important: we’re surrounded by potential friends. This is undoubtedly true for work. Workplace friendships benefit from slow burn, repeated interactions, shared exposure to BS and corporate nonsense, the build-up of trust and understanding. The basics are there but many of us worry that technology is getting in the way.

I spent some time with a hotel company this week who broke into groups to reflect on when their culture was at its best. Every group spoke fondly of taking time to laugh, to have fun, and of how laughter was an important ingredient of many of the things they did. It was clear I was in a room full of friends.

All of this reminds us that leaders often miss one of the most important pillars of culture - that they should set the tone for their team. So often leaders miss the importance of friendship. They fixate on things they can measure: meeting count, productivity, sales figures. They dial up the stress in meetings, intent on creating an accountable, high performance organisation.

The best leaders in the best teams recognise that success often starts from a different place: setting the tone for connection, for laughter and for friendship.

Interested in the impact of culture on our jobs?

• Catherine Price on the power of fun

• Listen to a podcast on toxic culture

• After mentioning the transformational buzz around Claude Code last week I spent the weekend chatting to a veteran developer. He told me that he was so dazzled with what Claude Code had done for him (when dropped it into a complex 10 year old code base at his organisation) that he’d changed his perspective on what AI will be able to achieve in the future. This week Anthropic released Claude Cowork - a tool which allows you to organise your work. Suggested uses including dropping a folder into the tool and asking it to index the contents, or reviewing the transcript of your meetings to provide coaching. Anthropic say that Cowork was entirely built by Claude Code in one week. It’s hard to see how people will actually use the Cowork product but it’s an illustration of how quickly these things are evolving.

• Fascinating piece from the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch saying that in the current jobs market soft skills are paying off better than strong numeracy

• Last week I shared the satirical post below from Peter Girmus (click through to read it in full, it’s fabulous). This week Amazon mimmicked this in real life, giving managers a dashboard of metrics about who is coming into the office. It’s their right to do it but shouldn’t they focus on how people are performing? The data highlights time spent in the office (to avoid ‘coffee badgers’ who come in to be marked present, have a cup of something and leave)

  

• Football heads might be interested in the saga of how the culture at Celtic FC went bad overnight. A new coach, Wilfried Nancy, was fired within 33 days of his appointment. This article says that he lost the players in his first 10 minutes. A lesson of how we want to perceive competence in our managers before any sense of team cohesion and a plan

• I know the research suggests that unconscious bias courses don’t really work but based on The Traitors seriously someone needs to stage an intervention with the UK population: (this happens every single series btw):

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Thanks to Alastair Gill for the FT link.

Welcome to Q2 of the twenty-first century.

Thank you for joining us, we’ll jump right in.

I started the week stranded in Puerto Rico. All flights cancelled due to some local skirmish in Venezuela. You won’t have heard about it. What was interesting was that for the first 48 hours airlines just left the desk staff to deal with the chaos. My flight home was moved back a week, and no additional planes were added to deal with it. In the end some extra flights arrived and some well-timed tears by a member of my travel party secured the goodies.

While I’ve not delved into predictions for the year ahead as I’ve been going through the big stories from the last few weeks there are two themes that really stand out:

• a reflection on the grimness of the job market

• a change of tone on AI

Horrors of the job market

Many people start the new year with a resolve to find a new job. The old truism of jobs is that we join for money, leave because of culture. It’s often the glimpse of our lives without daily contact with our boss over Christmas that reminds us that life actually could be happy. ‘I’ll pull that CV together and get out there’. According to LinkedIn research released this week 53% of Brits say they’re looking for a new role in 2026.

To those people I’m sorry to report that the job market is utterly gruesome for candidates right now. Either candidates are finding it hard to get human eyes on their applications or when the hiring process starts it seems to go on forever.

LinkedIn’s research says that three-quarter of Brits feel unprepared for the realities of job hunting in 2026. There’s reason to be fearful, AI slop has hit the application process. Since the start of 2022 the number of applicants per open role has more than doubled in the UK. The vast majority (79%) of recruiters say it’s become harder over the last year to find qualified talent. This Business Insider piece articulates a job market where candidates apply for hundreds of jobs, each with a single click. (Archive version includes slightly more of it). Those hopeful applicants are promptly rejected by a black box algorithm somewhere on the internet. The article mentions candidates who have unsuccessfully applied for a thousand jobs.

The worst part of this scenario is that employers aren’t enjoying it at all. The surge in applicants means that they feel ‘swamped’ with candidates. The challenge is similar to the dystopian mess of the online dating scene, where users are very keen to date the hottest people on apps but hesitate to consider someone from the mid-market looks range. One jobs website, Greenhouse, has responded by adopting some of the features of dating apps, allowing candidates to highlight one opportunity a month as their ‘Dream Job’ as a way of standing out.

If online dating is a sign of the direction of travel, strap in because things are about to get a lot, lot worse.

A year of reckoning on AI

A lot of organisations have reached the stage of AI implementation where they’re wondering when a benefit is going to hit the bottom line. It’s worth clicking to expand this workplace parable from Peter Girnus (full version on X here) about organisations dashing to equip their teams with off the shelf AI tools under the guise of a vacuous ‘digital transformation’ program: (He also did one about RTO, very funny)

There’s a stark bifurcation in the AI chat at the moment and whatever lane you’ve taken you’ll find plenty of voices that will back up your views.

Amongst the AI boosters there’s a sense that the latest models are reaching a dazzling level of capability. There’s even talk of AGI being in sight.

On the other hand Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, gave a fabulously indiscrete interview with the FT where he describes large language models as ‘a dead end when it comes to superintelligence’ and that he won’t change his mind ‘because some dude thinks I’m wrong’. I’ve certainly heard similar from senior people at Google Deep Mind and having spent all day replying to AI generated emails from a company I have a contract with the singularity feels a long way off right now.

A good bit of sober system thinking perspective came in the form of an interview with economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Brynjolfsson is a legendary voice in the field of workplace productivity and he was certainly confident about the imminent uplift that AI was going to deliver to workplace efficiency.

He took a surprising strong stance on the mistakes that firms are making, saying that using AI to replace workers is destined to fail.

He said the current mistake of AI is that organisations are using it as a tool to automate and replace workers rather than augment employees. ‘Augmentation is the norm,’ he says, ‘I think a lot of people have this intuition that you need to replace workers in order for productivity to grow. Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he says. There’s good news in his predictions, he thinks productivity is going to start trending strongly upwards over the next five years

(On a personal level I am a (self paid) premium subscriber to three AI services and get fantastic value from them on a daily basis, I’m into it).

• 74% of single people find themselves working on Sundays to stay busy

• The CEO of South West Airlines takes a stand declaring that ‘meetings aren’t work’. He blocks his calendar every afternoon from Wednesday to Friday to interact with employees

• The Guardian did a brilliant analysis of UK businesses rolling back their commitments to LGBT rights, observing that social media posts by big firms have dropped by 92% since 2023. The only company bucking the trend was Apple, their public posts actually went up. Poses the question, what’s the value of a fair-weather ally? I posted this on X and there was something of a co-ordinated pile on from anti-trans voices. I’m fortunate social media criticism is harmless to me (King Knobhead himself set a legion of them on me last year, he was replying to a Guardian article that I wrote about him but I cleared all of my tweets since). But others aren’t so fortunate. Count me as very vocally supportive of the trans community. I find the idea that we can’t allow people to live their lives with dignity as inhuman. I love organisations defending our right to live a free and happy life. If you can’t allow others to choose how they to live their own lives then it says more about you than about them. There’s no LGB without the T

• Good luck in performance review season

• FYI I still have calendar availability for the Fred Again dates at Alexandra Palace. It’s a whole thing. I registered and never got a code. Looks incredible

• Going back to work - the video game:

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• Maybe you missed it? The idea that Gen Z workers are entitled is one of the biggest misconceptions of work, they’re merely keen to understand why they are being asked to do things. Edelman’s Jackie Cooper says this is ‘down to their visceral need for safety’. Listen to the discussion

By this stage of the year most of us are exhausted.

Ready for a break, for pings to finally calm down. So let’s use this time for something different. Here’s five lessons about workplace creativity that pop music can teach us.

Am I obsessed with pop music? Yes. Do I ever bother this newsletter about it? No. Except today as a festive treat. Let’s explore some lessons that exciting, exhilarating pop music teaches us about our dull jobs. You might also get a couple of new tracks to listen to.

(Annoyingly YouTube embeds don’t consistently go to the right moment so click the link before the clip to see the exact quote)

1. Creative work is about putting the hours in

By far the biggest songwriter of the last 2 or 3 years has been the dazzlingly brilliant Amy Allen (recent writing credits include: Rosé/Bruno ‘APT’, Sabrina Carpenter ‘Espresso’, Tate McRae ‘Greedy’, Harry Styles ‘Adore you’ and Sabrina Carpenter ‘Taste’).

This year she’s certainly gone from industry secret to heavyweight status. What I love is how Allen articulates how creative work isn’t just glamour, it’s about turning up. When the NYT interviewed her she said she’d written a song a day, 7 days a week for 7 years (normally in a writing room with co-writers or artists).

Over those 7 years that meant she’d penned 2500 songs. ‘And talking about big songs I’ve had — that’s like, what, six? The batting average ain’t strong. But that’s enough to have a career.’

Six hits from 2500 songs.*

This has applications for our own jobs. In the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast episode about creativity Stanford’s Jeremy Utley explains that the best way to stimulate innovation at work is recognising that great ideas aren’t miracle births. To come up with a great idea, we need to accept that we need to create lots and lots of ideas. In Amy Allen’s case she became the hottest songwriter in LA by writing one hit a year. Do you really think your first idea is going to be your best?

* It’s worth accepting since she won Songwriter of the Year this year she’s had more hits as she’s been added to bigger rooms.

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2. Julia Michaels says a different sort of creativity happens face-to-face

If Amy Allen is the hottest songwriter of the moment then she follows in the footsteps of Julia Michaels, who for a long-time was at the top of credits on the biggest songs in the world. (‘Issues’, Justin Bieber - ‘Sorry’, Selena - ‘Hands to Myself’, Hailee Steinfeld - ‘Love Myself’).

In 2020 Michaels endured a couple of years break in her song writing because she refused to write songs on virtual sessions. She felt the quiet vulnerability that made songwriting successful was lost on video calls:

“And then Covid happened. I wasn’t doing Zoom sessions. That for me was like, ‘no, I need to be in the room… I think the best thing about songwriting is that we’re all so insecure that most of the time we won’t say anything but you’ll hear someone mumble something and you’re like, ‘what was that?’ You know, like someone has a little idea but they’re afraid to say it. That could be really great. Zoom takes all of that out.”

See this moment

In the back catalogue of Eat Sleep Work Repeat I spoke to psychologist Anita Williams Woolley who described this as ‘social perceptiveness – the ability to pick up on subtle non-verbal cues and draw inferences about what others are thinking or feeling.’ She says when we are attuned to this it serves to create better ‘collective intelligence’ of a group.

3. Creativity is chaos - don’t glamorise past ideas

Fred Again tells a story here that Brian Eno had related to him about creativity. Eno is a super-producer, maybe the original super-producer, who went from being a member of Roxy Music to running the desk for the likes of David Bowie and Coldplay. Eno, who was very familiar with helping artists overcome a creative impasse, had a story from the Berlin sessions for U2’s Achtung Baby.

‘Brian was working with U2, they were following up the Joshua Tree and they were in this place where he says they were expecting every song to just come. ‘Remember that afternoon where we just wrote Where The Streets Have No Name and it was all just great and we had a beer’.

They were in the studio expecting it to come and not embracing the chaos and struggle that often has to be part of making a song.

[Eno] took them to this three star Michelin restaurant. Everything was this absolute epitome of calm and perfection. They’re in this restaurant with a waiter per person and it’s so quiet with soft music. It’s really peaceful.

Then he took them back to the kitchen where obviously it’s just absolute chaos in a three star Michelin restaurant. You know if you leave a plate here for more than 30 seconds it can’t be served and everyone’s running around like crazy. He was like this is where you make your music stop trying to make your music in the restaurant you make it in the kitchen. Embrace the chaos.’

Watch this quote in the clip

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4. Creativity comes from being relaxed

If you’ve not revelled in Rosalia’s Lux then treat yourself in a quiet moment this week. I’m envious of you.

For an album so rich in emotion you might be intrigued what the creative process looks like. Here she explains to my two favourite music critics, Jon Caramonica and Joe Cascerelli, that she makes her best work with people she loves laughing with.

Talking about producers Noah Goldstein, Sir Dylan and Caroline Shaw (who have between them produced Kanye, Tyler, Bieber, SZA) she describes the room:

”They are the people I have most fun in the studio with, they are the people that I love hanging out with, we spend time together and we are always laughing. We actually need to tell ourselves ‘OK. Let’s focus and let’s make music.”

Watch Rosalia explain it:

5. Creativity loves outside inspiration

Two examples here. Firstly Billie Eilish tells a wonderful story about writing ‘What Was I Made For?’, the soundtrack song for Barbie.

Billie allowed herself to write in character as the doll, producing an utterly beautiful elegy about struggling to find our place in the world. ‘I don’t know how to feel, but I want to try,’ she whispers.

Writing the song words flowed from her as she situated herself in character. ‘It wasn’t until two days later that I realised this is about me, and my life’. It occurred to her that she was actually singing about her own sense of identity and insecurities.

She’d been able to speak more freely by pretending this was about someone else, ‘an excuse to be a little braver’.

Man, I could watch Finneas and Billie talk all day about their work. You need to skip forwards to 13 minutes

Also, by the way, what a song.

Secondly Rick Rubin describes how System of a Down had an almost finished track but didn’t know how to fill the bridge.

They were getting nowhere and Rubin suggested they grab a book from a shelf and use whatever they found. As Rubin explains, ‘the first phrase he sees, that’s what’s in the song and it’s the high point of the song… it’s incredible’. (Trigger warning: he does use the word ‘rad’ to describe it):

Extra. Sometimes genius is just genius

Yeh. I’m not sure what the rest of us can learn here. It’s just genius of a different level but joyous to watch. Waiting for John Lennon to show up for that day’s session, Paul McCartney hacks Get Back out of the fresh morning air.

I’ve watched this clip 10 times, there’s no point where the thirty seconds you’re in doesn’t make sense from what came before. But by the end one of the most famous songs in the world exists and at the beginning it didn’t. Skipping between the last 10 seconds and the first 10 is stunning.

Paul allowed the passage of time to take him to a different place:

Thanks for spending time with me this year. More workplace culture chat in 2026. Love you.

About a month ago I found myself on a panel alongside Jackie Cooper, the founder of Edelman’s Gen Z Lab. Edelman, a communication agency, found themselves creating the special department after hearing that clients were confounded on how to deal with the group, both as customers and as employees.

The Lab’s findings are worth checking out because both chime with what you might have thought but also challenge it. Empathising with context is a good foundation. Members of Gen Z have been shaped by recessions, the pandemic, geopolitical instability, not to mention financial insecurity and world changing technology.

Such constant change has led to them having what Jackie describes as a ‘visceral need for safety’ - that’s financial, social, cultural and even physical safety.

They respond to fear by asking questions and wanting to be heard, certainly something older generations often misread as entitlement or disrespect for hierarchy.

Politically, Gen Z is fragmented. Younger Gen Zs, especially boys/young men in the US, are leaning more conservative and are drawn to strong-man archetypes; older Gen Zs, shaped by Obama / BLM, are more idealistic about progressive politics. (The polarisation doesn’t feel as pronounced in the UK where the Greens are actually polling ahead with under 50s)

Understanding this generation is key to success for all of us in the next few years - I think you’ll love this discussion which you can listen to as a podcast below. You can also read the report here

Listen: website / Spotify / Apple

Thanks to Deliveroo for Work for sponsoring this week’s Make Work Better. (If you want to reach 145,000 workplace culture obsessives across Substack and LinkedIn get in touch)

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• Meetings consume three days of work per week: workers spend an average of 25 hours a week preparing for, participating in or following up on meetings according to new data from Zoom and Deloitte

• 70% of Brits say the rhythm of the week has changed in the last 3 years. Not just the end of ‘Friday pints’ but that the 9 to 5 has become the 5 to 9 as we’ve started living life earlier. Some good insight in this new report from The Guardian (thanks to David Wilding for pointing this one out)

  • Friday is the day when most people are able to carve out ‘me time’

  • More than 55% clock off early on Friday (home internet usage plummets between 3-5pm that day)

  • ‘5 to 9’ has replaced the ‘9 to 5’ with 63% of the UK now saying they wake before 7am, 61% of Londoners are up earlier than three years ago

• A different source (this time in the US), but similar findings: workers are clocking off 90 minutes earlier on Fridays than they used to in 2019

• At the other end of the weekend, Adobe looked into the causes of the ‘Sunday Scaries’ with 82% of workers saying they experience some degree of angst about the workweek ahead. With remote workers its caused by lack of fulfilment

• Haunting article from Slate of a handful of firms who are proactively pushing workers to engage with workplace wellness activities like yoga. Includes the line: ‘My workplace just decided to do a casual, team-wide weight loss competition’

• The Guardian also reports that AI is set to replace 3 million jobs in the next ten years, while 2.3m new jobs will be created. Worst affected professions will be management consultancy and software development jobs

• If you’re paying attention to friends who are looking for work it will be no surprise that ‘the job market is hell’ with AI written applications being rejected by AI powered algorithms

• Employees are the most adept at AI are twice as likely to quit, so says research from Upwork. Workers are proving to be 40% more productive with AI tools, but there is a ‘productivity paradox’ where workers are getting more done but feel more disconnected from their colleagues. Workers report trusting AI more than their colleagues (similar to this research about student group chats last month)

• I’ve been losing more and more faith in the New York Times but this discussion entitled ‘Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?’ was utterly execrable. The piece uses two female conservative voices to say that giving voice to women has ruined work, citing issues like MeToo. I share it partly because I loved the person who made merch to call out the BS of it all:

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Anytime I’m asked which books I’d recommend on workplace culture, top of the list are the books by Zeynep Ton.

In The Case for Good Jobs she leads in to a story of one employer she was working with:

‘Low pay also undermines motivation and engagement. As organisational psychologists have shown us, what really engages and motivates employees is a sense of belonging, achievement, recognition, meaningfulness, and personal growth. When companies pay little and operate with high turnover, they end up making many interrelated decisions that hurt their ability to meet those needs. Management, seeing itself as saddled with a low-ability, easy-come-easy-go workforce, uses more and more top-down control to make up for employees’ individual skill, judgment, and dedication. That, of course, doesn’t develop belonging and achievement—it erodes them. Managers who are constantly fighting fires have no time or resources to provide feedback. That doesn’t develop career opportunities. As a worker, when you constantly worry about making ends meet, can’t focus on your job, fail in front of the customer every day, or feel that your time or abilities are not respected, it is hard to find meaning in your work—regardless of what the company’s purpose is or the social good it may actually do. I once met with leaders of a company that spent a lot of time and consulting resources to develop their mission. They wanted to feed the human spirit. During one of our calls when they kept talking about this mission, I asked how much their frontline employees were making. It was about $9 an hour.’

This week is Living Wage Week. In the UK there are 4.5 million jobs - or 1 in 6 jobs (16%) that are paid below the real Living Wage. Almost 6 in 10 (59%) workers paid below the real Living Wage reported skipping meals, turning off the heating, falling behind on bills or taking out a pay-day loan to cover essentials. Over 2 in 5 have used a food bank in the past year.

There are plenty of employers who willing to take a stand to say they will pay their workers enough money to live on. There are more than 16,000 accredited employers who are signed up to the Living Wage pledge. The pledge commits to paying £13.45 per hour (or £14.80 in London). The legal minimum wage is £10 for under-21 year olds and £12.21 for over 21s. In contrast the Living Wage is the pay level that independent experts have determined is the real cost of living in the UK.

The real Living Wage is worth over £2,400 more a year than the current minimum wage. This is equivalent to 7 months’ worth of food for a household or 4 months of housing and energy costs.   

In 2024 the Living Wage Foundation reported that ‘The sector with the highest number of jobs paid below real Living Wage is the wholesale and retail sector, with more than a million low paid jobs’.

I spoke at a Retail Trust event last week and brought up the issue. There are many great employers in the space, Living Wage employers include Cook, IKEA, Uniqlo and LUSH but many of your favourite high street brands haven’t signed up to pay their employees a living wage.

I chatted to someone at the Foundation, they explained to me that many non-signatory employers do peg their pay grades to the Living Wage, but don’t sign up because they would be required to pay the same to their contracted suppliers like security guards and cleaners. These jobs are sometimes called ‘invisible jobs’ because those doing them have no chance of progressing, no career opportunities and don’t really figure in many people’s considerations. There’s not a lot of mattering for security guards or cleaners.

The Office for National Statistics observed a cluster of organisations paying around the real Living Wage (but not signing up) and attribute this to the success of the Living Wage campaign​.

Last time I presented to the Retail Trust, one veteran of the industry put his hand up and told me that I needed to understand that one of the biggest issues in the space was that in-store employees were fed up with their office colleagues working from home a couple of times a week.

I expressed surprise at this, but I’ll always defer to the sector knowledge of an expert.

Afterwards a very experienced leader came over and told me that this was far from the truth. She said: ‘Workers in store are much less interested in whether their head office colleagues are doing work from home. They want to know what hours they’ve got next month, if they can plan their lives around them.’

I should have known it. A big bossman peddling horseshit to get the team back to the office.

I’m not sure the audience of the Retail Trust enjoyed me calling this out on my return last week.

Yes, by all means two or three days in the office is demonstrably effective for team cohesion but demanding four or five days in the office has the direct impact of making working mothers’ lives harder. (Sorry, it is gendered and it is inarguable in the data, no matter how inconvenient it is for leaders who want the band back together all the time).

You can either want diversity, or you can want your office minions surrounding you four or five days a week but you can’t have both).

This desire to have predictable hours is why the Living Wage Foundation have added a new part to their campaign, the Living Hours Pledge. A commitment that aims to balance flexibility with dependability. The simple offer of a minimum 16 hours a week to those who want them, and 4 week visibility of shifts. This isn’t fantasy employment terms in the world of retail, in fact it forms the basis of how the world’s biggest commercial employer Walmart have set to re-invent their workplace over the last few years (with the addition of a proper app that allows easy swapping of shifts with other employees, a hugely important need in the space).

Other things to know:

• Workers paid the Living Wage are 1.7 times more likely to say their job has a positive impact on their physical health and 1.6 times more likely to say it positively affects their mental health, compared to low-paid workers

• Three quarters (75%) of workers paid the Living Wage are satisfied with their current job, dropping to 61% for low-paid workers

• 75% of employers paying the Living Wage reported ‘increased motivation & retention’ of employees, 58% reported ‘improved relations between managers & staff

I’m utterly inspired by the work of the Living Wage Foundation, in the twenty years they’ve been operating they’ve put £4.2bn back into the pockets of frontline workers. Please do check out their work

Here are my slides from the presentation - click to view. There’s some commentary, but drop me a line if any of the slides need explaining

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Most company training doesn’t change behaviour. It signals virtue, adds admin, and clogs the pipes.

That’s the show-stopping take of Andre Spicer and Mats Alvesson, who have written a new book The Art of Less about cutting out the dark matter that makes work miserable. They told me about how bureaucracy and admin has served to make work exhaustingly slow. With creeping initiative-itis slowly us dragging down.

The one thing that stayed with me was the discussion of culture as a gesture of grandiosity. That firms don’t just want a functioning operation, they want to create an aura of superiority or uniqueness to their culture.

Listen: Website / Apple / Spotify

• Related to this week’s podcast, I was impressed with this new research by Perk, who tapped Forrester data to show that most workers are losing 7 hours a week to soul sapping admin. 45% of us believe this is contributing to feeling burned out

• A YouTuber highlights the reality of slavery in Dubai, please check this out

• Rob Mayhew gives an emotional call for us to value culture

• I don’t tend to do other podcasts but I was happy to join a couple of friendly faces, Rachel Forde and Marco Bertozzi on their Mentor show:

Listen: Apple / Spotify

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What went wrong with England’s Golden Generation? A cohort of supremely talented footballers who didn’t perform at their highest level when playing for their country. In a recent interview Stephen Gerrard explained that when he turned up for his first England camp in 2000 he was expecting Manchester United players to ambush him. There was such entrenched oppositional identity that the players never lunched together or gelled as a group. He said that players used to sit and eat with their club teammates. They saw themselves as Liverpool or Man United players first and foremost.

When Gareth Southgate became England manager he set out to define what it meant to be an England player. He said:

“There’s something I tell our players before every England game, and the reason that I repeat it is because I really believe it with all my heart. I tell them that when you go out there, in this shirt, you have the opportunity to produce moments that people will remember forever.”

He worked with the likes of Owen Eastwood who asks players to think of themselves as short-term custodians of the England shirt, responsible for passing it to the next generation in a better place. He was obsessed with building a group identity for the players. Some of this involved the players celebrating their pride in their ethnic heritage and its relationship with being a modern England player. Southgate said, ‘everyone has a different idea of what it actually means to be English. What pride means. For me, personally, my sense of identity and values is closely tied to my family and particularly my granddad.’ He left the job as the most successful manager in the last fifty years.

This week’s podcast is a further exploration of identity, this time in the form of an interview with psychologist and leadership coach Jeremy Holt.

Holt has found that whether in Olympic teams or amateur teams, from football to volleyball, having a strong group identity is transformational. His work found that team identity was responsible for a substantial increase in team performance. His headline was that strong identities lead to teams being 53% more successful than teams with weak identities: the difference between promotion and relegation.

Jeremy has written a book, For The Love of the Game, that takes a practical, hands-on approach to building team identity. The book is explicitly about sport teams but I am certain that all of the exercises are relevant to all teams. Jeremy works with lots of non-sport organisations and uses the same approach with them.

The book is filled with lots of conversations to have with your team, in meetings, over meals, on the bus. For example:

• If someone new joined tomorrow, what personal story would you share that would tell them what this team is all about?

• Think back to a moment that showed what makes us different? What happened? How did it feel to be part of that moment?

• What impact do you want this team to have beyond hitting our targets?

• What’s the most meaningful thing that has happened to you in this team?

• What strength do we have in this team that we haven’t unlocked yet?

The most important thing with learnings from the last three podcast is turning the insight into practice. Getting it out of theory and into things that you test out with your team. Jeremy’s approach is a great way to challenge yourself to do that.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

PS. Of course identity alone isn’t responsible for the transformation of the England football team under Southgate. You might say that there’s also a story about preparing for penalty shootouts. (Or ensuring stronger psychological safety after them - I’ve covered some fascinating analysis of this here). The one thing that working in social media taught me is ‘beware simple answers to complicated problems’.

In the last podcast with Alex Haslam, he said that the mechanism by which social identity works is ‘depersonalisation’. I’ve reflected a lot on this, it very much reminds me of this post last month from the genius that is Frankie McNamara where he opines ‘when community collapsed we all went to counselling’ maybe ‘it isn’t a you problem, it’s a we problem’:

(Is there a better analyser of contemporary life, right now? His post on the evolution of Irish identity is actually breathtakingly good).

Listen:

• Owen Eastwood talks about his approach with teams (and a second interview with Owen)

• Former England culture coach Pippa Grange explains her work with the team

• Professor Damian Hughes explains how FC Barcelona defined their culture

• Listen to a playlist of identity episodes

• More on identity in last week’s newsletter

Thanks to Deliveroo for Work for sponsoring this week’s Make Work Better

I love the smell of collaboration in the morning:

Someone described it as a ‘Quiet Quitting Assembly line’.

• You might have seen this ‘meaning matrix’ by Ben James. He said meaning in life is formed when we find ourselves creating together with others. I think this is why work can be the source of immense fulfillment for us. If we can create strong group identities and then feel like we’re achieving excellence together it can be hugely fulfilling for us.

• Despite all of the reports that AI projects are failing an extensive investigation out of Wharton suggests that most firms are happy with their AI projects seeing return already. 46% of businesses leaders are use AI themselves everyday

• Economist Daniel Susskind gave a fascinating lecture this week about how improvement in technology typically leads to more skilled jobs to operate it:

He says ‘Since the industrial revolution, workers who worried that would be replaced by machines have largely been proven wrong’

• I’m obsessed with the ‘property theory of everything’ - here someone explains how Zohran Mamdani won in New York: NYC hourly wages have gone from 35% more than US average to 20% more (while rents are 2x the US average). (He also won because politicians need to talk about hope of a better tomorrow, of course)

• On the subject of that, is there anything more depressing than the lack of imagination shown by the Labour Government? Bureaucratic career politicians with no ideas. Now they’re trying to crack down on 4-day week experiments - all the reasons giving in this article are PR dismissal points, in fact the county council were using 4-day weeks to make relatively low paid jobs appealing to more candidates

• Here’s a TikTok of someone explaining his employer has installed a ‘timetracker’ app on him. The app takes a screenshot of someone’s computer desktop every 10 minutes and tracks what they do on their computer. Here’s someone else detailing how it works). Then someone on Reddit says that their firm started doing this, so employees decided to stop communicating with management. All of it is utterly dystopian

• One consequence of fewer managers is that bosses don’t have time to talk to their team members any more

• Smart pricing model

Tapping into the power of us

At the end of the nineteenth century Illinois born psychologist Norman Triplett performed a series of social experiments that seemed to confirm the effect that we have on each others’ work.

Triplett arranged for 40 children to play a game that involved turning a fishing reel as quickly as possible. He observed that those who did the game in pairs were quicker than those who turned alone. Working alongside others made us work harder.

Triplett then studied cyclists comparing the race times of those who raced against other riders, those who had pace setters and those where the cyclist rode alone. He found that those who competed against each other were 23% faster than those who cycled alone.

He kept experimenting with different ways of pitting participants against each other, concluding that the presence of a competitor ‘served to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available’. Competition is good.

A few years late French engineer Maximillen Ringelmann observed what became known as the ‘Ringelmann Effect’. He observed that asking group members to pull on a rope produced less total effort than the sum of their individual attempts. This is idea is known as ‘social loafing’, the idea that we don’t fully apply ourselves when the outcome of our endeavours is hidden in the collective. The idea of social loafing is that our motivation dips when part of a group.

These two ideas have served to form the basis of general attitudes towards work. People work harder when in competition with each other, but they slack off if their work is buried in the output of a group.

But in fact despite enduring in contemporary business wisdom, both philosophies have been challenged by subsequent exploration.

A definitive meta-analysis in 1993 found that ‘social loafing was eliminated when participants worked with close friends or teammates’.

In the original Ringelmann experiment participants had found themselves pulling a rope with strangers. In fact when people performed activities alongside friends they worked harder, demonstrating not social loafing but what was styled ‘social labouring'. We work harder when care about the group we’re working with.

Ok, but what about when this isn’t a group of friends, what would it take to shift a group from a disconnected assembly of strangers to feeling like they were a group? One experiment in Norway recruited a group of teenagers. One group of participants were put into teams. As part of their team ethos they were asked to develop a team slogan, group song or philosophy over the course of a brief 30 minute team building exercise.

Just 30 minutes identity building started some simple magic. The experimenters observed that the groups who had competed without a team exercise had shown signs of underperforming expectations, confirming that 'social loafing had occurred’. But the cyclists who had created the loosest form of group identity demonstrated social labouring, outperforming forecasts.

The researchers concluded that when individual effort couldn’t be perceived then ‘social loafing is likely to occur’ but when a small exercise of building group identity had been achieved it led to teams outperforming their individual talents.

In other words, yes we might slack off if we feel our effort is lost in the group, but when we feel that our group matters we unlock extra effort beyond the norm. There this is transformational ‘power of us’. The study of this ‘social identity theory’ is one of the fastest growing areas of social science.

Today there’s the first of three podcasts about what social identity offers to us, in life and in work. It’s the first half of a discussion with Professor Alex Haslam, one of the most important figures in the study and understanding of social identity.

The second episode next week takes us into the implications of social identity for leadership and for organisations.

The following week I’ve got a fantastic interview with Jeremy Holt, who has applied social identity to sports teams.

Holt has found that whether in Olympic teams or amateur teams, from football to volleyball, having a strong group identity is transformational for motivation. His work found that team identity was responsible for a substantial increase in team performance. His headline was that strong identities lead to teams being 53% more successful than teams with weak identities: the difference between promotion and relegation.

The genius of Jeremy’s approach is that he lays out dozens of conversations you can have with your team to gradually strengthen group identity.

Here’s the first episode with Alex.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

If you’re interested in understanding the compelling evidence supporting social identity theory the best training you can send yourself on is watching Alex’s brilliant presentation to the British Psychological Society:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on LinkedIn. Give it a share

• Interesting exploration of how attitudes towards work are shaping the expectations of workers. ‘The Dutch are quietly shifting towards a four-day work week’

• Building famous cultures is an important criteria for all great organisations. This exploration of the declining student culture of Harvard has resonance for all of us. Students turn up to lectures but have their heads down in their devices and rarely speak up. Students are chatting to each other less than ever before, sometimes even skipping lectures all together. The truth is that to change this you need to create norms (no devices, recorded attendance) that some people might consider to be illiberal. Good cultures aren’t just the easiest route, they represent our disagreement with easy

• The job market is tough right now: ‘I had to do a personal statement for Greggs that was about 1000 words long’

• ‘I just don’t trust her’: if you’re watching The Traitors there are stronger lessons of unconscious bias in this show than in that DEI training that your firm made you do: example 1, example 2. It’s devastating to watch

• Three quarters of millennial dads say they want to share the parenting load with their partners but their jobs don’t see things in the same way. One in five say when they’ve asked to take time off for family reasons they’ve been asked why their partner isn’t doing it

• Higher pay is the top reason we seek a new job, but JLL’s 2025 Workforce Preference Barometer says flexible working is a higher priority for workers than salary if we’re staying at our company. (Also, 57% of those considering quitting blame burnout for their decision)

  

• Someone sent me this lovely guide to making friends: ‘go where hands do things’, ‘make a specific, stupid plan’, ‘let the phone be a bridge, not a house’

• When it comes to time we spend in the office, the biggest predictor is our manager’s behaviour

• John Wiltshire wrote a visual account of how much office space we need to feel like we’ve got room to do our work

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What others are saying about the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast?

“Am sitting here reading ‘The Power of Mattering’ that you recommended a while back. I bought it as I’m having a tricky time at work and actually some stuff in the early chapters made me cry. Realised this was exactly the problem… feeling like I don’t matter and have too few work friends. Anyway its made me realise a few things I can work on with my own team. Thank you.”

Listen to the episode on the Power of Mattering. If you like it, leave a review where you listen. (You’re meant to say these things to feed some horrible, toxic algorithm. I normally can’t be bothered humouring the beast)

Last week I did a deep dive on the new research from Leesman about creating offices that make work better. There was one detail that I wanted to return to - the office as the showroom for our organisation.

Our offices aren’t just places for us to do work - they’re also a place to show the best side of our brand to potential customers.

But we’ve stopped using our offices for hosting customers since the Pandemic. It’s the invisible decline in influence that no one is talking about.

This week I attended the presentation of Leesman‘s latest research about office space. Hidden in the details was the stat about using the office as a showroom.

When we’re asked how important the office is for ‘hosting visitors, clients or customers’ pre-Pandemic the score was 31%. Today the number has dropped to 20%. A huge, huge drop that we’re not seeing in the other uses of the office.

We’re getting fewer face-to-face interaction with customers and collaborators in our offices.

At the event Kyle de Bruin said this was likely a reflection that our customers aren’t travelling into town as much themselves, so more meetings are becoming virtual.

This to me is a much bigger issue than trying to get employees to increase an extra day in the office. With customers, in-person meetings build relationships and trust, not to mention securing their full attention.

If we believe that a sales proposal delivered remotely has anywhere near as much attention as a pitch done on Teams we’re kidding ourselves.

I chatted to someone in sales recently and asked how his team had increased the theatre for remote selling (more video? shorter meetings?), he told me they’d not changed a thing since before the Pandemic.

When I posted the data on LinkedIn Isabelle Dauchez, who describes herself a ‘workplace whisperer’, described how a recent brief for a law firm was ‘to be famous for their client experience’, and ‘become the IP employer of choice’. I’m sure that these two things are related, when we get the chance to show our offices off they are a statement of who we are. She says:

‘The result on the ‘public’ side of the office was a very flexible and adjustable environment that could be transformed for all sorts of events: conferences, cinema nights, family days, parties, wine tasting…but also smaller gatherings organised last minute.’

’They have used their office throughout the years as a showcase for their identity, hospitality, care and attention to detail. They are now famous for it.’

‘Theirs is a great way to create genuine social connections with people they would otherwise only have a working relationship with. In today’s sometimes brutal world of work it makes a huge difference.’

I’d love to hear other people’s perspectives on how they’ve tried to keep using their office space to project what their organisation represented to the world.

Thanks to Deliveroo for Work for sponsoring this week’s Make Work Better

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We need to tackle workplace loneliness

This week’s first podcast is a conversation with Simon Gilbody, a researcher from the University of York who specialises in understanding loneliness. We discuss the impact of loneliness in the workplace and how we might seek to solve it.

On the website there are lots of links to articles about workplace loneliness - and why it’s getting worse.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

In the comments on LinkedIn Di Gates mentioned how she runs sessions that teach the neuroscience of connection. She elaborated to me that this means teaching leaders how to ‘embed human connection into the daily employee experience’ reminding them of what interactions we value with each other. Superficially we might wince from teaching basics like this but it’s pretty clear that a lot of the basics are AWOL at the moment. Interesting what organisations do to reconnect their teams.

• Are you self-employed? Take part in the Leapers research about the experience of working alone. They’ve promised to share the results with me when they’re published

• The podcast above was about loneliness, this week a group called the Economics of Mutuality Alliance Partners published a fantastic piece of research about loneliness

  • despite what we might presume young people are significantly lonelier than old people

  • 14% of people say they have nowhere to go when they feel lonely

  • people who don’t belong to any groups are 1.6x more likely to report being lonely

  • Dissatisfaction with income doubles the likelihood of loneliness (let this guy be your focus group for this point)

• 54% of undervalued employees say they want to leave their jobs in 2026 (and almost half of all UK employees feel undervalued right now)

• ‘My manager asked me to take minutes’. Funny TikTok from the frontline of navigating work

• ‘Culture builders - you are the future!’ My talk to the Business Culture Awards event is now live online. I keep the camera man busy running around like a tit. Check out the Business Culture Awards - a fabulous organisation that celebrates great companies. (As ever this presentation was to a brief, happy to devise something for your own culture brief)

A second podcast to call out today, this one a promoted episode with Deliveroo for Work. I’m talking to Spencer Walker, global director of Deliveroo for Work.

The podcast has returned several times to the idea of food as a cultural trigger, something that catalyses connection and allows cohesion. We explore that idea further this week with Spencer, who runs Deliveroo For Work the workplace service provided by the delivery firm.

You can also checkout The Deliveroo Feeding Employee Engagement Report.

More about food, rituals and culture

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify / LinkedIn

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I’ve always found the research published by Leesman to be some of the most valuable insight to help us to decode the evolving workplace. (Here’s some of my comments on their work in the past: here, here and here). Leesman say their mission is simple: ‘to help create better places to work’.

They started by discussing the commute. The idea of evaluating the benefit of the commute would have seemed heretical five years ago. It wasn’t up for debate whether you saw getting into town as worthwhile, today some of us have a choice whether to head in. As someone reminded me last week, the return train from Croydon to London is now £15.30. Is sitting alone on Teams calls worth £15 plus a sandwich?

The unspoken issue is that commute lengths have increased across the board. Leesman say 27% of workers have a one way commute of 30 mins or less. An additional 48% have between 30 minutes and an hour’s journey to get to work. But for the remaining 25% have over an hour (with 4% having over 2 hours each way).

Unsurprisingly the longer the journey, the more we prefer to work at home. Just 35% of those who travel over 2 hours are satisfied with what the office offers them.

(51% of Brits and Americans report being satisfied with their commute, compared to 71% for Europe and 66% for Asia). Interestingly satisfaction with commuting is highest for those who cycle (89%), run or walk (88%) to work.

Leesman’s conclusion is that the commute ‘sets the tone for the day’ and should be seen as part of the workplace experience. Employers should think about improving the commute - maybe by incentivising cycling or allowing staggered start times. Anything that makes the commute better makes the job seem better.

When it comes to presence younger workers do indeed report being in the office more. ‘Nearly half (47%) of employees under 25 are in the office more than three days a week’, a stark contrast to the 28% of over 55s - an issue that raises questions about mentoring and passing on knowledge. Leesman report that the higher the office attendance rate, the higher the satisfaction with the office. (Multiple interpretations of this, of course).

While workers with their own dedicated workstation are happier (happiness index of 74.3) than those who have to pre-book a desk (69.3) or who wander the halls looking for a space (69.1), in fact a bigger contributor to happiness is whether there’s a range of working environments when we get to the office. (This was a big theme of Leesman’s last research)

It was the rhythms of working that was the most interesting. The most important perceived role of the office remains the same - to get individual focused work completed. (89% said this) followed by planned meetings (74%) and collaboration on focus work (58%). Despite some organisations declaring the office is now a place for experiences, for most of us it isn’t just a place of coming together, we also want to do our day jobs while we’re there.

So what’s the ‘so what’ on all of this?

• We can’t ignore the commute, it’s part of the office experience and we need to make it better (I’d love to hear from any firms who pay for workers’ commute)

• Offices don’t need to be louder, they need to be elite for focus work (alone and with others)

• Young workers are showing they’re willing to come into the office, we need to deliver mentoring and learning for them to reward their faith

If you want to hear more Leesman are running a webinar version of their insight next month - sign up to attend or to receive their research deck.

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Thanks to Deliveroo for Work for sponsoring this week’s Make Work Better

• Ignore the zone full of AI slop: Steve Bannon’s infamous strategy for beating off press criticism is to ‘flood the zone with shit’. People switch off when too many stories are hitting them from too many angles, they feel overwhelmed and dial down their news consumption. Anyway, staying interested in AI is becoming like that. But here’s two things that you should be aware of. Firstly Ethan Mollick covers the breakthrough evaluation of AI agents released last week which found that AI is now equal to human experts on complex tasks:

  • Industry experts were asked to do blind assessments of work projects completed by either AI or humans. The projects took the form of common tasks in different sectors (‘from finance to law to retail’). The tasks would take humans between 4 and 7 hours to complete, the AI of course completed them in seconds. (It’s worth taking a look at the tasks here). The experts were asked to assess who did a better job, not knowing which assignments had been completed by humans or AI agents. The humans won the competition, but by a whisker. The conclusion has been that we’re close to AI being able to do expert level work on specific projects. With guidance of course, but hours of work in minutes, if guided by a human

• Secondly Derek Thompson weighs in on whether this will lead to AI stealing our jobs - he concludes that Jevon’s Paradox says it won’t. Jevon’s Paradox is the observed phenomenon where increased efficiency leads to more consumption rather than less. Make sure you drop an off-hand reference to Jevon’s Paradox in your catch up with your boss this week

• Generation Numb: almost half of all employees feel ‘numb, indifferent or nothing’ towards their company culture according to a new report from training group, Sponge. The report suggests that this numbness is a barrier to performance and recommends taking the approach of building individual connection inside organisations to repersonalise the experience of work

• Good LinkedIn post about how many start-ups are baking workplace agility into their model - starting with co-working and dialling it up or down based on usage. I gave my perspective here, what do you think?

• One of my favourite reads of this year was Brian Eno’s book on art. He says children learn through play and adults play through art. He’s been talking about these themes for a decade and they get better every year as he evolves them. I loved the book but Eno talking about it is even more compelling. Do yourself a favour and check this out while you make a meal one night this week

• The Zach Mercurio podcast about mattering has been the biggest episode of the year, he’s doing a free webinar with HBR

• The idea that tech billionaires are going to gift us a minimum basic income in the future is hilarious. Here’s LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman saying that wanting work-life balance is a red flag that you’re ‘not committed to winning’

RTO mandates are caused by middle aged men not getting the respect they want from their families

A mention of the last podcast, a discussion with the brilliant Nick Shackleton-Jones.

Anyone who uses TikTok may have come across the witty rants of Nick (I included my favourite one in last week’s newsletter) dismantling the futility of bureaucracy, giving coping strategies for neurodiversity and venturing into philosophy. I chatted to him to hear more. Nick posts brilliantly witty rants on TikTok that are just the best things I hear about work and the futility of bureaucracy.

TikTok is a fame machine and if creators drop a banger they can end up reaching a vast audience. Nick has posted some content about work, neurodiversity and philosophy that has had millions of views.

Great listen. If you don’t use TikTok then I’ve given a selection of his best posts below:

Nick on LinkedIn / Shackleton Consulting

The pick of Nick’s posts to check out:

• Middle aged men don’t get on with their wives

• The original on middle aged men

• What I miss about corporate

• More of what he misses about corporate (on company values)

• Adaptive processes for neutrodivergent people

• Pedestrian bell

• Chase difference

Listen to my interview with him: website / Apple / Spotify

RTO mandates lead to us questioning leaders

This week an article in the Wall Street Journal shared new data about the failure of Return to Office mandates. Over the course of the last three years we’ve heard repeated headlines of big organisations demanding workers return to the office.

Bosses explained that supplies of culture were being kept in the office and no one was accessing them. The article uses Flex Index data to suggest that despite all the hot air workers just aren’t going in any more than before.

But the impact of this is bigger, it undermines leaders on everything they say.

When workers are asked to come into the office more, they run a prediction through in their heads, ‘will I chat to colleagues?’, ‘will something worthwhile happen?’, ‘will the extra domestic stress justify the expense and time lost?’

Workers tell us in research that when they go in to the office they hold those decisions up to scrutiny. Nothing kills RTO mandates more than going in to the office and sitting on Teams calls all day. Or not seeing colleagues because of the lack of hot desks.

Suddenly we’re all placed in a moral conundrum: if I don’t go in on that extra day will anyone say anything?

Now, our boss, who doesn’t really agree with the 4 day mandate is tasked with ‘having a word with us’. But they don’t bother because they don’t want to have an awkward conversation. They tell HR they’ve had a chat with the team.

Now we’re reached a new equilibrium where team members aren’t coming into the office any more but are comfortable believing that senior leaders make bad decisions. That’s never a good place for a successful culture to start.

Will Clankers hollow out your group chat?

There’s new research suggesting that AI chat is replacing human interaction in work settings, leaving people describing themselves as isolated and alone.

A paper styled ‘How Generative AI is Eroding Social Interactions and Student Learning Communities’ was published earlier this summer, and it documents how college students are turning to ChatGPT rather than seeking help from fellow college students. The researchers noted that the arrival of the AI tools had served to reduce social interactions with peers, teachers and the wider community and had also served to leave ‘students feeling isolated, demotivated, and shameful’. One student told the researchers that a class group chat had gone quiet:

‘We used to [have a class Discord channel]. It used to be a lot of people just asking questions about maybe, a lab or a homework... I guess everyone’s just [using] ChatGPT now.‘

Across the 17 students questioned there was a unanimous recognition that there had been a reduction in peer interactions. We’re aware that when asking fellow humans for help we need to use empathy to understand their mood before asking them, in contrast ChatGPT didn’t require us to practice those human skills, ‘There’s a lot you have to take into account: you have to read their tone, do they look like they’re in a rush...versus with ChatGPT, you don’t have to be polite.’ It might make the AI superficially more appealing, but exposure to fellow students also serves to improve our people skills.

11 out of 17 students reported that the changes to the method of learning had served to make them feel more isolated. The conclusion of the study gives a powerful warning of what might be coming for workplace relationships:

‘Despite some benefits, AI may be inadvertently destroying the very social fabric that supports meaningful learning. Going forward, it is necessary to balance the integration of AI with the irreplaceable value of human interaction.’

Read more: How Generative AI is Eroding Social Interactions and Student Learning Communities

(HT to Pronita Mehrotra for alerting me to the research)

Producing this newsletter, Make Work Better (and the podcast, Eat Sleep Work Repeat) is a labour of love taking me two or three full days every week. While I treat it like a full time job, it generates close to zero money (by choice). If you see value in me continuing this work please share it on a chat channel or with a like-minded colleague.

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• ‘Moments that matter’ - I’ve been hearing this phrase a lot in HR communities. The idea that we need to use our together time to foster meaningful moments of connection. The phrase came up in a brilliant interview with Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s Global Head of People Analytics. She talks about Microsoft using a metric of thriving (instead of engagement) to see how employees were getting on. They describe thriving as being ‘energised and engaged to do meaningful work’.

  One of the outputs of measuring thriving is that ‘we would see that there was more and more of a correlation between people coming into the office… than the folks that were working remotely’. They looked clearly at this and decided that this was ‘'a causal relationship’ - it was the coming into the office that was making the difference. It formed the reason behind the change I mentioned last week of MS going from a 2.5 day RTO mandate to 3 days in office

• On a slightly more negative note this article on The Verge is a stark contrast on the state of the firm, suggesting that morale at Microsoft ‘is at an all-time low’ as the firm is riddled with ‘a culture of fear’

• Nick Shackleton-Jones' TikTok content about 'working in corporate' is consistently funny. (He doesn't post it on LinkedIn or Reels sadly). His post last week about CEO's desire to drive a RTO being about their status and identity is so spot on that it deserves a much wider audience.

  Nick says that at home middle aged CEOs don't get the fawning respect they think they deserve from their wives and kids. Being respected is an important part of why people aspire to become leaders. They like feeling like people will listen to them. People get in touch to pick their brains or ask to be mentored by them.
  Along comes the pandemic 'and you're now just another person in a t-shirt on a Zoom call'. They get criticised if they don't empty the dishwasher. No one keeps quiet while they're on their calls.
  They're desperate to get back to wearing their crown in the office. With the collapse of the office their identity fell apart. Everything they'd aspired to was being thrown away.
  Can't we just go back to the office where people laugh at their jokes, where they felt important. The bosses want their status back! (If you’re not on TikTok check it out on LinkedIn)

@shackletonjonesWhy you are being asked to go back to the office #work #career #business #wfh

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• The Guardian found that a third of UK firms are using spyware to track workers’ activity

• Across companies that launched formal culture initiatives 72% showed no meaningful increase in employee trust, engagement or retention. This HBR article about culture eventually becomes a good read: ‘many leaders treat culture as a communication strategy. They believe it lives in messaging—in the articulation of purpose, the rollout of values, the tone of internal campaign’. The challenge is when the experience of work doesn’t match a changed narrative. The article is filled with practical suggestions: ‘At your next town hall, ask a frontline employee to open with one uncomfortable observation about culture, chosen in advance by their peers. Don’t explain. Don’t defend. Just listen, acknowledge, and take one visible step forward. The point isn’t the question—it’s what you prove by how you answer.’

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What gives a team ‘the collective edge’

If we shifted our focus from the individual to the collective how different would our results at work be?

On the new podcast I'm joined by Colin Fisher who explains that great teams are the most important contributors to great outcomes at work. The problem is that for many of our teams they are less than the sum of the parts. Groups get bigger and bigger and stop being effective. Managers avoid having discussions about trimming teams down - and it leads to failure.

Colin's new book The Collective Edge breaks down the ingredients of forming good teams. Colin Fisher is a professor at UCL School of Management

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

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There was a ripple of interest this week when Microsoft announced a RTO push. The Washington Post declared that ‘another wave of return-to-office crackdowns is coming’ and lots of news outlets covered the announcement without looking at the details.

Those details bear reading, the update was that the firm was moving policy from 2.5 days onsite to 3 days. This was additionally only for workers who lived within 50 miles of an office. Oh and also, it wasn’t a mandate, managers were told they could create their own rules based on their own team dynamics. Not so much the final push for the office, but a tidying up around the edges of a policy that seemed pretty well set.

It follows a pattern that is broadly observable across the UK: big corporate organisations asking for 3 days in the workplace, smaller firms expecting something slightly less. You might conclude that more office time is the payoff for being in a bigger bureaucracy with more relationship connections that need to be serviced. The numbers of people working at home have barely changed in 3 years, there’s nothing really to see here.

The disruptions to this gentle equilibrium come when senior leaders want to have their cake and eat it, reducing office space, introducing company wide hotdesks and having no anchor points for employees. Without allocated desks or designated areas for teams it’s routine to hear stories of people venturing into the office to not to see colleagues for the majority of the day.

I worked with one organisation who had saved on city centre space to such an extent that they now found themselves dealing with employee backlash. Colleagues’ orders to be in the office for three days resulted in them having an experience like squeezing onto an overbooked train on Christmas Eve. Workers were routinely taking Teams calls while sitting on the floor of busy corridors. There was nowhere to hang coats on a rainy day.

The solution? They were now being told to ‘flatten the curve’ by coming in to the office on Mondays and Fridays to avoid the rush. Hmmmm, if you come into the office on a Monday and meet zero coworkers, did that elusive magic of culture ever really happen? What are we trying to achieve here? Have we maybe saved a little too much money?

Pre-Covid, finance directors used to look at office occupancy rates of 50 to 60% and speculate how much money they could save if they tried hotdesking or increased desk density. Now with most offices being empty on Mondays and Fridays a lot of leaders have made the call to downsize. The truth is that the greater the financial saving, the less effective the office is becoming. If you don’t encounter colleagues accidentally, if you aren’t able to have face-to-face time then there is very little point of spending time and money on a commute.

I was interested in an additional complication that I saw this week. New data suggested that mortgage backed office stock had reached a record ‘delinquency rate’ meaning that 11.7% of office mortgages that had been placed into securities weren’t keeping up with their payments. Old office towers are sitting empty and it’s rumbling to be a bigger issue than the 2008 financial crisis. In today’s podcast, Mike Wiseman from British Land assured me that this was largely a US issue, where lots of poor office stock hadn’t been maintained for years and was slipping into disuse.

Overall, beware of headlines saying that there’s another RTO push on the horizon. The issue is largely settled, the data isn’t moving.

Where there is a discussion is how to use the time we have together. For senior leaders the sad truth of that is that it’s increasingly a choice of useful vs cheap.

How behavioural psychology is shaping next generation workspace

In the context of the above discussion about the office I felt it had been a while since I had a conversation about how our physical workspaces are evolving. Post Covid disruption has made the property business hugely raise their games. With 20-25% of Gen Z workers self reporting having issues of neurodivergency the office is trying to prove that it's still the centre of great workplace cultures.

I chatted to Susan Carruth, a partner a 3XN, an architecture firm who is pioneering thinking about the needs of occupants and Mike Wiseman Head of Campuses at British land.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

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• RTO leads to brain drain: a research paper that looked at 3 million tech and finance workers found that RTO mandates led to big surges in employee turnover, concentrated in women, senior leaders and skilled employees

• I’ve posted before about series 2, episode 7 of The Bear (you’ll remember it, it was just before it became the most boring show on TV) - check the posts out here and here. That episode directly paid homage to the restaurants of Will Guidara and his book Unreasonable Hospitality. Guidara’s eateries set out to be the highest regarded in the world, not only by delivering elite food but by offering the greatest hospitality of any venues on the planet. Overhearing a guest remarking that they’d eaten everything in Manhattan other than a New York hothog, the team went out, bought a hotdog and served it in haute cuisine style: ‘It was only then I realised I wasn't actually in the business of serving people dinner, I was in the business of serving them memories’. In the spirit of that I loved seeing what the behind the scenes team at Diary of a CEO did for their guest Jimmy Fallon. Actually dazzling

• The New York Times published a lovely article about how small talk can be made more rewarding (secret: it’s when we skip into ‘pretend play’ and you can get better at this)

• A TikTok about astronauts being hired for emotional intelligence (those who mirror their laugh are better able to connect with each other) - it’s actually drawn from the work of Charles Duhigg, here’s my podcast with him

• I saw something this week that said your politics aren’t just your opinions on things they are an articulation of your values. Based on leaning into your values, shout out to the inspirational flotilla going to deliver food to Gaza right now. (Btw their use of Instagram is absolutely outstanding documenting their multiple attacks by drones this week - unsurprisingly the BBC didn’t cover these episodes). If you can both sides children dying of hunger it says more about you than it does about the situation

What a dizzying time to be living through. When a 23 year old this week told me that the world seems to be mad right now I felt able to accept that it wasn’t just my weary self that was feeling overwhelm. Thank goodness for pop music and tennis, eh? Is that just me? The Jade Thirlwall album is the best pop record of the year and I’m still reeling from how thrilling the conclusion to the US Open was. (Even if Ben Rothenberg is right in saying the first six round of the Men’s could have been an email)

Recent newsletters that you might like:

• Will changing human personalities ruin workplace culture?

• How Octopus Energy used culture to reach the top

• Have we forgotten how to team?

• RTO mandates leave to a top talent brain drain

• Inside the culture at OpenAI

The summer’s over, baby. Look out the window. Summer’s gone. I know you weren’t really paying attention to work chat while the weather was good, so let’s recap on what you missed.

Last 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.

The paper pulled no punches with the headline, observing that conscientiousness was ‘in freefall’. I wanted to go deeper with this insight because it has the potential to transform how we build workplace cultures.

The research is fascinating because it surveys a consistent panel of 7000 adults each year. The drops in the traits described are in the same people over time: we’re becoming less extroverted, less conscientious and less agreeable.

Typically these five factors are regarded as a statistically reliable way to measure personality. Unlike methodologies like Myers Briggs these factors prove consistent over time and psychologists take a view that much of the variance of human personality can be understood using these factors. Interestingly these traits also prove predictive for other outcomes. Conscientiousness for example predicts academic success and job performance, neuroticism can predict mental health issues.

This matters in the context of work because teamwork is entirely predicated on the idea of us being agreeable and conscientious and to some extent leaning into whatever extroversion we feel. If teamwork has been upended then it has implications for how we build cultures. If you have a culture that is based on attentive service and building connection with customers then it’s possible that those things no longer come as standard.

If these traits are really in freefall it will be hugely consequential for work - both how we perform it and how we team with colleagues.

The vast majority of the coverage of Burn Murdoch’s analysis was positive, but there were a couple of critical posts that people dropped in the comments when I first shared it. The gist of the criticism was that the effect size of the changes was far smaller than the graph suggested.

‘The youngest age group, 39 and younger, which was the focus of all the fuss, shows mean conscientiousness score of 35.51 out of a range of 9-45 in their 2015–2017 data, the first data point available. That's actually pretty high. By the latest data point, 2023–present, it had dropped to 33.26…actually still pretty high. That's a drop of a mere 2.28 points.’

Psychologist Jay Van Bavel challenges this pushback suggesting that while that change might seem numerically small, it is substantial:

‘The Flynn effect is perhaps the most famous personality change. IQ grew a full standard deviation (14 points) in 66 years. Yet the change in conscientiousness is happening even faster. The blog [challenging the effect size] notes that it dropped .4 SD in a mere 7-8 years. The author claims this is a very small effect. Yet, If this trend continues, it will easily be larger than the Flynn effect--it's changing 3 to 4 times faster than IQ did. We need to put effect sizes in a broader context to understand them. These personality changes are actually very sizable by historical standards.’

I especially enjoyed the contribution of Professor Alex Haslam. Haslam looked at the questions in the Big Five survey that generate the conscientiousness score:

• "I work hard to accomplish my goals"

• "I am dependable and can be relied upon"

• "I am willing to put in the effort to complete a task, even if it's difficult"

• "I am able to resist temptations that would derail my progress"

• "I believe that rules should be followed whenever possible"

His conclusion was that it was as likely that the changes reflected ‘widespread disenchantment with such things as rampant managerialism’. Work has just become so dull and bureaucratic that we struggle to be conscientious.

Overall I err on the side of feeling that John Burn Murdoch has revealed something that is of huge significance, and will have a major impact on how we build teams.

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I took this conversation to the podcast, talking to Nick McClelland, the CEO of Byrne Dean, an agency that specialises in dealing with cultural issues inside organisations. One person describes Byrne Dean as the ‘best kept secret in the City’.

We talk about the research and what it means for work.

Listen: website / Apple / Spotify

• Another sign that consultancy firms are standing on a cliff edge: a $400k Deloitte report for the Australian government was caught having unchecked AI content - including half a dozen references that didn’t exist, and an invented quote of a court judgment

• I liked this, in a round-up on Manchester United’s defeat to Grimsby Town, veteran sport journalist Henry Winter observes that ‘team-first, individual-second’ cultures are becoming less common. As Winter says, ‘What’s happening at United is not a story of bad players but bad culture and poor leadership’

• ‘Does forcing people into the office really improve a company’s culture?’ asks The Economist, writing about the impact of hybrid working on workplace mojo. It reports a study that found that ‘firms which insisted on workers returning to the office after the pandemic saw job satisfaction fall and staff turnover rise’. The piece delves into data plundered from Glassdoor reviews finding that employers that ordered a full RTO were rated by employees as having more agility, but were seen as being less supportive, and more toxic. Leadership was also perceived as being worse. (Some good comments on LinkedIn to this)

• On similar lines, Flex Index published results of some BCG research into the performance of US organisations and then matched it to their working policies. Organisations that were more flexible tended to grow faster than firms who were fully onsite:

  

• Lots of comments on the last newsletter post about AI coaches. One especially brutal one came from Lee: ‘For me BetterUp’s app is just what work offers to staff when they’re feeling down about not being developed. Manager not showing any interest in you? We’ve got you a BetterUp subscription. It’s the new Headspace sub, now get back to your 996.’

• Is your boss a dickhead? It’s not a sackable offence to let him know according to a UK employment tribunal

• An MIT report found that 95% of company AI pilots were failing to produce any benefits. The report suggests that every day use of ChatGPT benefits from its flexibility, but workplace implementations stall because ‘they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows’

• While I’m posting that anonymous post I’ll give another toot on this post about Subject Access Requests (which are law in the UK and the EU). More than a handful of people have contacted me saying this post got them a much improved settlement when their work was performance managing them out of the business