Has hybrid working been a disaster? Should we stop pretending and get back to the office? That is the claim of a new book by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington.

The authors of In-Person tell us that: remote work is qualitatively worse:

‘Mentorship falters, learning slows, and the quality of our work suffers. Innovation stalls, and we drift further from one another and from the mission that once animated us.’

They claim that ‘we have sleepwalked into a new normal that will make us less creative, more isolated, and ultimately less fulfilled.’ They tell us that remote work makes us lonelier, it ‘degrades mental health’ and it is an existential risk for the economy.

This is a huge topic for readers of this newsletter. Frequently readers tell me how keen they are to get their team back to the office. In this exploration I think it is important to follow the data. It’s clear that some degree of in-person work is helpful for teams, but let’s honestly calculate how much.

Not only did I hate the book - in pursuing its hypothesis the argument is partial and at times borders on disingenuous - but I’m also a little suspicious of it. I can’t escape the fact that the authors were funded to write the book by the neo-conservative Smith Richardson Foundation. The Foundation makes it clear that it gives book grants ‘to create an economic climate hospitable to entrepreneurship and growth’. Nothing reasserts the power of capital over labour more than demanding submission about how the work gets done.

Maybe I’m misguided, but I can’t help but feel that a book that was even-handed about the data wouldn’t have got the think tank funding. (I’m not suggesting that this was the program they were on but its grant to write a book seems to be a similar funding model).

But I wanted to examine the book’s arguments in good faith - so below you’ll find some of their key data points. If you prefer to listen here’s my interview with Natalia Emanuel where I raise many of these topics (as well as the Smith Richardson Foundation funding):

Listen: website / Spotify / Apple.

Point 1: Remote work produces high quantity work but lowers quality

The authors evaluate analysts producing earnings forecasts, saying that those produced in person were 15% more accurate. (It’s worth saying that the same research said that remote work saw a 46% increase in timeliness - remote reports were produced much quicker). This was the author’s own work and hasn’t yet been peer reviewed.

Point 2: Creativity drops with remote work

One study that looked at brainstorming over video found that it produced 14% fewer ideas - and the ideas were rated less creative. Eye-tracking suggested that staring at the screen narrows thinking. Microsoft found that when staff went remote, communication networks shrank and became more siloed. Indian firm HCL Technologies found that remote workers submitted as many submissions to an ideas portal, but they weren’t rated as highly.

Point 3: Remote work is bad for mental health

The authors claims that after 2020, people in jobs that can be done remotely became 9–12% more likely to report depressive symptoms.

Professor Nick Bloom has commented extensively on this research - saying that it is a ‘a gross misunderstanding of the data’, suggesting that people with mental health issues might retreat to WFH as a coping mechanism - rather than it causing their problems. Indeed Bloom thinks remote working has been a huge benefit to most people’s mental health challenges.

Point 4: Mentoring fails at a distance

This is an interesting data point, albeit based on a single study of one firm. In one firm engineers whose team sat together in one building got 22% more code-review comments than teams split across two buildings. When offices closed for Covid, the drop in feedback was steepest for the teams that had sat together. Over time, engineers who got less feedback wrote buggier code.

Point 5: The book discounts the lived experience of workers

One worker with a two-hour commute and a young family is pushed aside because his experience isn’t typical. Meanwhile the authors pick stories that suit their narrative. We’re told that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had a wonderful relationship in person but fell out when they were apart. In truth Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, documents that their fall out was largely based on resentment over credit and recognition - not their WFH disagreements.

Point 6: ‘No iconic inventions were made on Zoom’

The authors claim that nothing good was ever invented remotely, ignoring their own story of Concorde’s black-box code being programmed by home-workers.

Conclusion

What is interesting is that I feel hybrid work addresses a lot of these things. Getting the best value out of in-office time requires co-ordination and collaboration. The authors report a Turkish call centre that found that bringing fully remote teams together once a month raised productivity and lowered quit rates. In another study sales reps given paid-for in-person lunches with colleagues sold 15% more. (Their firm got $1.3m in extra revenue for under $15,000 outlay).

If you’re interested the podcast is great place to explore your own thinking. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Listen: website / Spotify / Apple.

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• Intriguing post suggesting that Amazon’s unique meeting culture (where colleagues bring along a proposals in the shape of long-form documents that are read in silence) has been damaged by the arrival of AI-slop. ‘Two minutes in… it was blindly obvious that he was reading it for the first time… Because the presenter was the most senior person there, nobody was brave enough to speak up.’

• Meanwhile Microsoft leaders are worried about a ‘doom loop’ of low quality internal documents being created. 90% of executives say that they’ve yet to see productivity gains at their organisation; while a third of leaders say there has been an AI incident that led to an issue like ‘data loss, financial damage or operational disruption’.

• Getting team members involved in defining the culture of a team helped to embed it: participants ‘reported stronger team cohesion… and described the intervention as contributing to greater accountability, buy-in and team unity’.

• Zoom’s announcement that it was going to capture out-of-meeting hallway conversations and make their contents searchable made me wince. It sounds like it’s an integration with DTEN hardware devices. Let’s hope these things remain optional.

• Important HR training video

• Icebreaker gone wild: BUPA’s Australian head of HR admitted to sneaking items through the self-check out without paying. She didn’t last the week.

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‘Most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so’ - Sam Altman.

I’ve forced myself to re-read that quotation by Altman several times.

Do I disagree with it because I disrespect him?

Has he hit a fundamental truth about workplace culture, that merely sounds bad from the mouth of the oligarch who might destroy us?

I returned to it on the news that a safety leader had left the firm saying: ‘I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken.’ David Robinson’s own estimation is that there’s a fifty-fifty chance of artificial intelligence killing the human race and he felt Altman wasn’t interested in doing the right thing, if it was at the expense of his organisation.

There’s definitely some element of truth in what Altman says. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras tried to decipher the approach of the companies that had outperformed their rivals over the long-term.

The authors talked about ‘Cult-Like Cultures’ saying the very best firms did have a sense of indoctrination and strong ideologies.

Ultimately it comes down to what cultures do with doubters.

A cult tends to throw them out, but the most effective organisations welcome debate and disagreement. Cultures need their sceptics, they need those willing to challenge the leaders’ voice. The best cultures are the ones where the noisy troublemakers are used both to keep the culture honest, and also constructively suggest a different way forwards.

Clearly at the cutting edge of AI how you deal with doubters is of existential importance.

Robinson isn’t the first safety researcher to leave OpenAI saying these things. It’s worrying if Altman is putting his desire to build a religion ahead of the safety of the rest of us.

Read more: The Atlantic / The Guardian / Altman’s original post

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• Man, did I hate ‘In Person’ the new book by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington? It reads like the latest title in Darth Vader’s Reading Group, offering a very biased take on why remote work sucks. (And as far as my detective work could find out it was funded by a neo-conservative think tank). I ended up sharing my reservations with Natalia in a brilliant podcast discussion that’s out next week. In the meantime the authors share some of their case in this Atlantic article.

• Best leader? Worst leader? I really like this survey about good leaders and bad leaders. It’s something of a socratic questionaire, taking you closer to understanding what the real secrets of leadership are.

• From the same field of research, for World Mental Health Day a reminder of the Social Cure.

• ‘An oxymoron is the opposite of polarisation. An oxymoron is a concept that has as its constituent parts seemingly mutually exclusive... contradictory elements.' I could listen to architect Bjarke Ingels all day. (Archive Eat Sleep Work Repeat with him)

• Last week I mentioned the AI job scam that targeted me. Journalist Victoria Turk describes exactly the same approach that came for her. The job seemed perfect, in fact maybe ‘too perfect – as if someone had put my CV into ChatGPT and asked it to create a job description based directly on my experience.’ Take care out there!

• ‘You are being watched… every word that you say and every time you utter something. It just feels really dystopian’. The Co-op has been subjecting call centre workers to an AI assessment of their work.

• Andre Spicer, the Dean of Bayes Business School, shared a valuable post about a cultural change discussion at the school. What works when it comes to changing culture? Changing practices, cultivating internal influencers, building a movement… and lots more.

• ‘Bye for now, take care’ - someone sent an AI agent to his AI job interview.

• I interviewed Professor Laura Empson about the culture inside professional services firms.

Where Creativity Lives - new video

What can Justin Bieber and The Beatles teach us about good ideas?

Last month the APG asked me to give a talk entitled ‘Where Creativity Lives’. It was pretty obvious that they wanted me to talk about pop music for half an hour but were scared to ask.

Armed with lessons from pop stars like Rosalía, Sabrina Carpenter and songwriters like Amy Allen I talked through what we can learn from the biggest marketplace for creative ideas in the world: the music charts.

I explain how:

• Creativity is killed by stress

• What we can learn from the Grammys songwriter of the year, who wrote 7 songs a week every week for 7 years, and ended up with just 7 hits

• The lesson we can learn from George Harrison feeling disrespected in The Beatles

• How being bored might be your secret doorway to creativity

• How contemporary creativity is more about collaboration than being a lone wolf

The talk is here:

The slides (with links for further reading) are here.

APG is a wonderful membership organisation that promotes smarter thinking - especially in the marketing and communications fields.

Our jobs have turned into the place where we’re told what to do: show up and follow orders. That was the finding of the latest Skills and Employment Survey (SES) the long-running study of working life in Britain.

When asked, only a third of UK workers say have discretion over how they do their jobs, a number that has dropped from two-thirds three decades ago.

When we hear this it’s hard not to think of the two other issues of contemporary work that have come to define the era: low engagement and low productivity. The latest Gallup survey reports that workplace engagement lingers at 10%. It’s always a difficult stat to quote, most organisations subscribe to a pulse tool that will tell them that they’re own engagement is something closer to 70 or 80%. ‘Low engagement is for other companies, it’s not our problem,’ they conclude. Meanwhile their workforce sits on back-to-back Teams calls, with glazed eyes and deadened souls.

Professor Alan Felstead, one of the leads of the research, was clear when I asked him to explain the disappearance of workplace agency. He’s pretty clear that we’ve created a version of work where people feel like they know how to do their job best, but they’re not permitted to. The end result is an experience of work that is disempowered and disengaged.

The SES survey is a gold standard piece of work, that has been running for decades. It involves face-to-face interviews across the country. Through his involvement Felstead has become clear that the productivity crisis is directly related to a lack of workplace agency. As he says, ‘The more task discretion people have, the more productive they are at work.’ We’ve created a version of work where we don’t allow the worker on the frontline to choose how to get their job done. ‘People make the difference,’ he tells me, ‘and they should be allowed to make that difference, because it’s good for productivity and it’s good for their mental health and wellbeing.’

It has an adjacency with comments from the UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, this week suggesting that the secret to growth is devolving decisions down to ‘allow growth in every postcode’. Felstead says ‘the small-ticket items matter most’ - things that feel specific to each person doing their job has the greatest uplift on their sense of autonomy.

What strikes Felstead is the fact that workers are highly forthcoming when it comes to saying how they could improve their roles. ‘When people are asked [how to improve their job], they’re more than happy to input and often they input a lot.’

The challenge for many organisations is that they don’t necessarily want to hear the inputs from frontline workers, maybe they believe that a new system is too bureaucratic or new computer software is unsuited to the job. Head office is determined to implement a plan which feels inappropriate for those doing the job. It’s why these workers often don’t believe the company culture belongs to them.

The idea that workplace autonomy might be the driver of results isn’t a new idea. One of the most important psychologists of the last fifty years, Martin Seligman, published a new book on the topic last week. Agency sees Seligman laying out his conviction that human agency is the propulsive force of advancement. As he says in the book,

‘Agency drives action. This psychological state is a driver of human progress over history. When it is present, progress occurs. When it is absent, stagnation occurs’

It’s worth thinking about a recent Teams call and reflecting on how much agency you witnessed from the quiet corners of the call. One organisation who has recognised that there is a value in empowerment is Octopus Energy. When I spoke to their CEO, Greg Jackson last summer he told me that the firm didn’t really have their culture codified, other than they set out to give everyone autonomy in their roles. His job was to let his workers do what they believed was the best version of their job. (Listen here: podcast on Octopus Energy

Felstead has advice for any manager. He says despite what we might hear, most of us don’t think our jobs are ‘bullshit jobs’, ‘they’re an important part of our lives’ but ‘the main message is: give employees greater voice. Listen to them more’.

Listen to my discussion with Alan Felstead: website, Apple, Spotify

Check out Alan’s workplace quiz: How Good Is My Job

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Like this? I gave a talk on similar themes in the summer:

• I had a remarkable experience this week of a recruiter approaching me for a very well-paid advisory position (at an unnamed firm). I sent over my credentials and details. There was definitely a spring in my step, it’s always nice to open the inbox to good news. The recruiter came back with a 7-point savaging of my submission, and insisted that I should use their partner company to urgently get my application into a more refined state.

  This would of course be a worthwhile investment, to land such a lucrative role.

  The only issue was that their email was glaringly AI-generated. (Backed up when Pangram, which I tend to trust, rated it as 100% artificial).

  I pushed back, suggesting their email felt very sloppy when they were offering to refine my content, rather than turn it into something more generic. They immediately went quiet.

  I’m pretty sure that there was no job. It was just a racket to get money out of eager candidates.

  The Washington Post reports that job scams like this are getting more and more sophisticated. Their simple advice: beware anything that seems too good to be true.

• Jarring Wired article about AI co-workers starting to join some organisations’ Slack channels

• Barclays softened its RTO plan after vocal employee backlash.

• Review of a talk I gave to the APG last week. Hoping to upload a video of it in the next few days.

• Former podcast guest Tom Kegode, who played a hands-on role in Lloyds Bank’s cultural transformation, has started publishing a book week-by-week. Worth getting in early.

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We’ve known for a long-time how important workplace friendships are for employee retention, customer satisfaction and workforce happiness. But a new report from KPMG is a powerful indicator that workplace bonds dial up the emotions on all aspects of work - including the stress.

‘As AI increasingly handles more complex tasks, the cognitive and emotional demands of people in the workplace are only increasing,’ says Sandy Torchia from KPMG commenting on the firm’s latest research into workplace friendships. The report found that workers with strong connections at work were the most engaged employees, with 49% saying they were ‘always engaged’. But they also reported the biggest emotional swings. A workplace with strong employee connections is going to find job cuts significantly more emotional that those where workers don’t fraternise together.

The benefits of having close personal friends at work went beyond the feelgood factor that saw strong friendships being perceived to be worth a 20% salary premium. People with close friendships at work were far more likely to say they were focussed on skill development (87% vs 52% of those who don’t socialise at work). They were also more likely to trust their company and also partipate in using AI tools.

Those with workplace connections were way more more likely to say their work mattered to them (84%), compared to non-socialisers (62%). This is about group identity in action, when we feel part of something and see colleagues as mattering to us, we become more committed to the job in hand.

But the cautionary note is worth considering. Recent history has seen many organisations having to cut jobs, and that context saw employee connection serving to turn the dial up on all workplace emotions. Those with friends had the highest happiness scores (82%), highest excitement scores (65%) but also high stress figures (63%) and elevated sadness (47%).

67% of workers said that a culture that allowed them to have close friendships was an important reason to choose to stay with their current employer. These employees were twice as likely to say they were very happy with their jobs.

The research is worth considering alongside the study below in Top Reads that suggests detachment at work is the cause of burnout. We need to feel connected at work, but employers should be aware that we can’t pick and choose when the emotional intensity counts.

Workplace connection is an antidote to burnout and an engine of AI adoption, but it comes as part of a package. We can’t take the productivity gains, the increased loyalty and effort, but then be frustrated when connection amplifies the stress of job cuts and stress. Team cohesion, group identity, is a powerful driver of workplace productivity but it comes at the expense that organisations need to be seen to be doing the right thing for the tribe.

Read more: KPMG - Friends at Work 2026

• Quiet quitting is about detachment not burnout, that’s the finding of a new piece of research out of the US. The study looked at explanations for the phenomenon and found it reflected a shift in workers’ attitudes, going slow because they felt work was an unfulfilling part of their lives.

  The quiet quitters weren’t those with low status jobs, in fact those who were allowed hybrid working were more likely to check out than those on site all week.

  Worryingly for leaders seeking a fix, the researchers suggest that managers won’t find easy answers to quiet quitting, the trend reflects a broader disaffection with work and society.

  This has echoes with Edelman’s Trust Barometer, organisations seeking to find a way forward probably have to think about gradually building trust and differentiating themselves versus the outside world. No quick fixes here.

• ‘Business should be a multiplayer game’, says Rory Sutherland, but technology has made it a single player game. The Telegraph reports that 17% of Brits go through the day without talking to anyone and 40% of us feel lonely at work. (Alternate link).

• AI-caused Disconnection: coming soon to a workplace near you. MIT published an assessment of what AI is doing to students. Study groups are vanishing, written assignments no longer discriminate between students, the use of chatbots over conversation is killing confidence and connection. While this is education there is plenty of evidence that this is being mirrored inside workplaces.

• CEO of United Airlines says he allows himself no more than 4 hours a day of meetings. I’m interested if organisations can manage to systemise this as their collective behaviour. It proves a lot harder to deliver it than to talk about it.

• Reading fiction helps us understand other people more effectively - children who read more have greater empathy.

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‘To begin with, AGI would require us to shift the focus of education away from building workplace competence towards cultivating personal character; from what people know in their heads to who they are as a person’. So says Daniel Susskind, economist and professor of business at Gresham College, in his new book.

Bruce talks to him about how AI is changing work, education, and the meaning of our jobs. Daniel’s new book is explicit on AI and how we should prepare for the future.

Predictions of the future have shown it is too uncertain to second guess, so what can any of us do to ready ourselves? Susskind says that we should prepare by learning the basics while training on the very latest AI models. Above all else he believes we need to teach the essentials of character.

It’s an important, timely discussion. The website has a full transcript and links to Daniel’s recent lectures.

Listen: website, Apple, Spotify

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I was at an event recently where a speaker was asked her advice for beating burnout. ‘Get up and go for a walk’, she said. I could feel hundred eyes twitching as the audience tried to hold its composure.

Six years of experience of self medicating with a few thousand steps has taught us that walking alone isn’t enough to solve the problem of endemic workplace stress. Walking is glorious, yes for sure, but if your company runs on adrenaline a stroll around the block isn’t going to magic all of your problems away. Those Teams pings don’t answer themselves.

The issue is that we’re all looking for push-button solutions to systemic problems. When it comes to fixing work we’re seeking answers that are easy, immediate and individual. (With the obvious inference that the real solutions are complex, gradual and - yes - collective).

With that major caveat loaded upfront I was really taken by some research this week from Manoush Zomorodi. Zomorodi is a writer and podcaster who has previously written about the importance of boredom to the creativity process. She’s clear on the size of the challenge of contemporary work, ‘in 1950, 25% of the workday was sedentary. By 2019 it was over 80%'.’

Zomorodi first explored the impact of being at a desk on our energy and wellbeing. She took a five-minute walk every hour (at 2 miles per hour it was a very slow pace). Her blood sugar levels improved by 42%, there was a five point drop in her blood pressure and her mood and energy ‘dramatically improved’. Having seen big personal gains, she signed up twenty thousand participants in a scaled exploration of these actions. Participants reported fatigue dropping 25%, productivity also showed marked improvements.

Zomorodi has framed some of the issue as ‘screen apnea’ saying that sitting and staring at a screen causes shallow breathing. In this styling she stands on the shoulder of tech exec Linda Stone who coined the term ‘email apnea’ to interpret her own breathing pattern when answering messages.

I guess it brings us back to the speaker. I think she was half right. While I don’t think getting up and walking is going to fix burnout, we do need to address the current sedentary state of work. The evidence for getting up from our desk is real and has effect sizes far beyond what we might guess. If you’re making back-to-school resolutions getting up and walking around does seem to be one worth prioritising.

Hear Manoush Zomorodi talk about her research on Vox’s Gray Area.

Read about her research.

Something of catch-up mode this week, as I’m calling out some of the best things I’ve seen over the summer.

• If your organisation has contemplated AI-enabled job cuts, this longread about Meta/Facebook is a cautionary datapoint. The article paints a detailed picture of how Mark Zuckerberg’s firm became enchanted a vision of going ‘fully AI native’. This would having AI agents using AI tools, creating a rebooted Meta with far fewer employees. The unashamed objective was to replace some of the business’s old guard employees with bots - reducing some teams by 60%. (Rather than short-staffed, the inside jargon for this is ‘talent dense’.) Understandably as gossip about a first wave of job cuts broke out in the company employee sentiment dropped from 74% to 55% favourable. But then the problems began. There were reports that AI agents were taking ‘large-scale, disruptive actions that humans [were] unlikely to execute’. Major technical and security problems, like service disruptions or possible data leaks, surged by 40% year on year. Time firefighting issues rose 70%. Like a comic parody of the Sims, surging employee unhappiness led to Zuckerberg ordering an improvement in the quality of snacks provided to employees. Overall a cautionary note about the current capability of AI systems.

• On the same topic, rather than destroy employment The Economist estimates that AI has created about one million new jobs in the US, (Archive link). One noteworthy data point is that customer-service roles have dropped by 10% in 3 years.

• I was chatting to someone in the US over the summer who was doing two full-time jobs - both remote, both the same hours. In his first job ‘Craig’ finds himself in a deeply political environment where’s he’s been sidelined and overruled on key decisions. He took a new job with a startup which had courted him, begged him to join them, and told him he can be a big part of what they’re building. So he’s started work with them… he just didn’t quit the first one. This isn’t unique, the two job hustle is the topic of Reddit’s r/overemployed, a forum where people share tips on how to do double shifts. When I spoke to Craig last week, he was heading out to a meeting with the startup. He told me his last action is always the same: a simple heuristic: keys, phone, mouse jiggler. I can understand his caution, recent research suggests that 70% of US firms track their employees’ actions. (Probably, in truth, to catch people like him out!) I started investigating the concept of over-employment and found that the PAYE tax system makes it practically impossible in the UK. There are repeated episodes of employees being asked if they have another job because HMRC has informed on them. Do you do two full-time jobs? Get in touch, I’d love to talk to you on a podcast (anonymously of course).

• Interesting article about how New York is accelerating office conversions to deal with its housing crisis. They’ve created over 10,000 new homes this year with conversion permits.

• Goldman Sachs fired an executive for not responding quickly enough to a work email while he was on paternity leave. He sued the bank, and a tribunal awarded him £1.5m.

• I presume it’s not real but it’s a fair reflection of how AI interviews feel

• Looking to cause some chaos at work, this TikTok has a suggestion for you

Using culture to deliver famous customer hospitality - an icon talks

Danny Meyer is one of the most respected restaurateurs in the world. Beyond the success of the likes of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack he’s also become famous for writing a book, Setting the Table, that has become an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. The book is used as training manual beyond the hospitality trade by businesses who want to be famous for providing strong customer service.

Danny talks about service being a monologue, whereas hospitality is a dialogue. In his new book, What Could Possibly Go Right?, he updates his story. His first book documented many slips on the way to running a series of beloved restaurants; he was proud that he’d never closed an eaterie, for example. The new book catalogues closures, missteps, Covid and an even an intervention by his leadership team when the culture of the business was on the wrong tracks.

Danny tells Bruce that restaurants are the perfect space to watch culture on fast forward, and how anyone can learn lessons from his businesses as they strive to be the most beloved venues in New York. Cracking listen.

Listen: website, Spotify, Apple and YouTube below:

Also clips on LinkedIn

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This week I had an enjoyable ding-dong of a discussion with Professor Rob Briner. (You can listen to it as a podcast below).

At one stage Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen.

To be fair I’d already acknowledged that I agreed on what he was saying that behaviours are more important than culture. Also I’m more than a culture fan, I promise.

But it’s a sign that it’s an outstanding discussion. Rob’s key point was that the idea of culture is vague and subjective.

Rob says that culture is ‘a description. So if you want to change something, you don’t change the description of it, you change the cause of it.’ He says we should be specific about what we’re trying to do and why.

‘It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting,’ was the way that one management thinker, John Shook, expressed this in a famous study of the NUMMI car plant in Fremont, California in the 1980s. The notion that behaviours are hard to change and require much more deliberate action that changing slogans is easy to accept.

Rob Briner takes this further and explains how any of us should be thinking about bringing evidence to our work with teams. For me a key takeaway was a recognition that discussion about culture often seeks to be a short-cut to do behaviour changing work at scale across an organisation. A leader diagnoses that some employees aren’t behaving in an enterprising way, and they announce that henceforth the culture will be more entrepreneurial. In this regard the demand for a scaled solution gets in the way of us staging an effective intervention.

In truth the most effective organisations need to think about how they allow local decision making - unlocking local autonomy in their teams.

A wonderful discussion. Check it out on:

• the website (with transcript)

• Apple

• Spotify

• YouTube

Rob asked me to share the following bio:

Rob Briner is Professor of Organisational Psychology (Queen Mary University of London) and a Research Director at Corporate Research Forum (rob@crforum.co.uk). He has been promoting Evidence-Based Practice in Management, HRM and Work Psychology for almost three decades. His recent research with Corporate Research Forum includes reports on Evidence-Based HR and how HR can more effectively drive organisational performance.

He also leads CRF’s Work Psychology Network which has produced reports summarising the best available and most practical work psychology theory and evidence around a range of topics including motivation and performance, assessing potential and behaviour change in organisations.

He has also produced a series of short posts on LinkedIn where he explores various popular ideas about behaviour at work (e.g., learning styles, psychological safety, growth mindset, happy-productive worker) and asks about each: Is that really a thing? That question is answered through a combination of critical thinking and using reviews of scientific evidence.

There are some good comments on the LinkedIn posts about the episode: here and here. (Feel free to connect there btw).

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• The end of the World Cup always brings articles about the culture inside the different camps. While the going was good for England this video felt highly salient - a manager obsessed that team cohesion was the most essential ingredient for success. And it certainly looked to be lived out for a while, backed up videos suggesting the culture in Tuchel’s squad was great. But this longread in The Athletic (alternate link) highlights the challenges that were actually going on behind the scenes. Cath Bishop talks about the importance of team connection (in a very much before the Argentina game take).

• Want to help with some research? A researcher at the University of Salford is trying to examine coercive control in the workplace. If you’ve experienced workplace abuse (or know someone who has) please complete this anonymous survey.

• The importance of delivering Mattering to high performers as well as underachievers. High performers (who can be up to 400% more productive than their colleagues) often disengage if they feel invisible or micro-managed. (Alternate link). More about Mattering on the podcast.

• US productivity stats are on the rise, flexible work and greater use of digital technology are being credited.

• Helping the NEETS (young people not in education, employment or training)

  I had a brilliant discussion this week with Shane McCracken director of “I’m a... Programme”. Shane runs brilliant discussions between school kids and scientists. Exposing them to jobs that might otherwise be invisible to them.

  This exposure has a meaningful impact, Shane explained to me that pupils who have had 4 or more meaningful career discussions are 86% less likely to become NEET. In one chat a teacher pulled Shane aside and told him that a child who was selectively mute in class was happily typing away asking questions of a scientist.

  I’m so inspired by the work of Shane and others helping reduce the challenges of the NEET generation. If your organisation is looking to fund social projects I’m sure he’d be keen to hear from you.

• Zuckerberg used AI to target workers with medical conditions with redundancy.

• Former podcast guest Jeremy Holt encodes the new Prime Minister’s speech to work out how much he uses the language of identity.

• The UK CEO paygap has expanded again, bosses are now getting 130 times a worker’s average pay. We’ve covered extensively that followership is enhanced when employees see that the boss is ‘one of us’ - and that CEO pay gaps typically reduce this.

• Research into chimps suggest that group bonds and mental health come from touch. Indeed, friendly touch prevents conflict. (I’ve had a podcast on this in the past).

• Me chatting about the Living Wage campaign driving pride - even amongst the employees who aren’t the beneficiaries of it.

• This TikTok account never fails to make me happy (also on IG).

This week, on Tuesday 7th July, I was honoured to host the Living Wage Awards in Westminster. The Living Wage Foundation invited me to play a part after I posted about their campaign in 2025.

Last year, in preparation for a talk to the top 100 leaders in the retail sector at the Retail Trust I had spent a couple of hours talking to members of the Foundation to understand why the retail are one of the slowest adopters of the Living Wage.

There were lessons from the awards night that sectors like retail could learn from. One message that came across from the winners was the idea of the Living Wage as a business strategy - firms who signed up saw lower quit rates, higher employee loyalty and happier customers.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves opened the night after a short film celebrating the origin of the Living Wage Foundation. In 2003 low paid workers came together to send campaigners to HSBC’s annual general meeting. The campaign gained momentum when cleaner, Abdul Durrant, took the floor at the AGM and addressed the bank’s CEO:

‘We work in the same office but live in different worlds. Let me tell you what it’s like to work on £4.50 an hour and bring up 6 children.’

The intervention was widely covered in the media, and within eighteen months the bank - as well as and neighbouring financial institutions - had raised the pay of their cleaners.

It was a springboard to the movement that has now signed up more than 16,000 accredited employers and has put more than £4.2 billion in the pockets of low paid workers. This stuff really matters, MIT Professor Zeynep Ton says that an extra couple of pounds per hour impacts mental and physical health in the workers who receive it: ‘It’s the difference between being able to sleep and not being able to sleep’. When I was a child my mom (we say mom, not mum in Birmingham) worked three jobs to keep the household going, I know first hand the impact that a decent hourly rate has on living standards.

The most inspiring part of the evening was that alongside people who have dedicated their lives to campaigning for fair pay, several workers took to the stage. Workers who had spoken up to their employers, cleaners had written notes to big bosses. Gentle people who had used their voices, risked everything for a better life.

Big winners were Barnet Council, Uniqlo (yes - a retail business taking a step forwards!), Department of Business and Trade, Linklaters, Just Helpers, Ealing Council, Upward Frog, the Manchester Action Group, Compass Wellbeing, Siemens, Cleanology and the campaign for Making London a Living Wage City. Well done to the winners - I’m inspired by all of them.

More about the Living Wage Foundation.

Shared identity amidst diversity

How do you build a shared identity amongst the people of the most diverse city in the world? Zohran Mamdani's Knicks victory speech was an elite use of identity leadership. With the New York Knicks down 20 points in the last quarter of game 4 of the NBA playoffs, the odds makers 'gave the Knicks a 99.6% chance of losing the game'.

'There is one thing that the pundits don't get about this team, that they just don't get about this city.'

'It is in that 0.4% that we go to work. It is in that 0.4 percent that we find a way, we win'.

In the full speech he articulates what you might call the New York state of mind. 'What is New York if not your back against the wall. A dream that feels just out of reach? What is not New York but 99.6% of the world stacked against you. And who are New Yorkers if not people who hear those odds and smile.'

There are lots of lessons from sport around us in the summer time. The wonderful thing about - say - the World Cup is that you're reminded that the people of every nation on earth when asked say that they are the best country on earth. In turn Mamdani here is reminding New Yorkers that they are citizens of the greatest city. Why? Because they never give up. This is something every team leader can learn from.

A masterclass of communication.

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• This interview with Pixar founder Ed Catmull unearths a lot of new content about the studio’s approach to creativity. (For example Steve Jobs fired two board directors who only agreed with him, because there was no point of having them there. And also the Pixar Brains Trust used to stop senior people speaking for the first ten minutes to allow other people to speak without trying to please bosses.)

• If you like combining your World Cup viewing with some couch psychology then this interview with penalty expert Geir Jordet (I’ve mentioned him before) is a great exploration of how to embed psychological safety. Damian Hughes (former podcast guest) also explains how the England team developed their buddy system for penalty takers.

• For people interested in culture or enjoying their lives, go to work in a private-equity owned business is just about the biggest red flag of misery ahead. Run for the hills. The Guardian did a nice explainer for the people who aren’t sure what the PE business model normally looks like (and why it often leaves culture in tatters).

• Former Health Secretary Wes Streeting wrote an interesting piece about the culture in the NHS, calling out the fact that at the recent review of Nottingham maternity services (where 520 mothers and babies suffered potentially avoidable injuries or loss of life) many senior leaders refused to co-operate with the inquiry. While he suggests that a forthcoming ‘Hillborough Law’ will mandate candour in public office (with a two year jail sentence as the threat) it begs questions about how such cultures could be changed without a stick.

• We’re far more accepting of CEO pay-gaps when we still feel that we share the same identity with the boss says new research.

• I must be a weirdo but I loved this article about how happy rat-catchers are in their jobs. (Why? Massive amounts of agency, constant thinking about different challenges and lots of problem solving). The rat part would be an issue for me.

• Germany’s leader has ordered a crackdown on their ‘sicknote culture’. The country has an average of 15 sick days per year and he says they won’t accept phoning it in any more.

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Last year I shared a TikTok (and later a podcast discussion) with the brilliant Nick Shackleton-Jones where where he ascribed bosses' desire to have workers back in the office full-time to an urge to feel significant. (Make sure you check out his original post). This week new research has been published which goes some way to confirming his hunch was right.

Adam Grant is one of three researchers who found that being in the office together was less about the professed desire for collaboration or higher productivity, it was designed to make a boss feel more important.

In a piece for the New York Times about his research Grant says that:

‘As a general rule… it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.’

Grant (and his co-researchers) specifically take aim at the organisations who have insisted on a full RTO, suggesting that that trend accounts for about a third of US employers. Their conclusion suggests that the bosses who are insistent on getting the team back every day are telling us something powerful about themselves:

‘The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism - the tendency to be self-centred and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status - and the more they favoured return-to-office mandates.’

For Grant the demand to have employees around is all about ‘command and control’. RTO-obsessed bosses want to be able to ‘intimidate by hovering’ by people’s desks or ‘by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table’.

I found that the research was best consumed side-by-side with another piece highlighted by the New York Times last week. That research was clear that some in-office time seemed to have a benefit to our wellbeing and team cohesion.

The second research study found that remote workers who lived alone became increasingly isolated, including spending less time with friends. ‘To maintain… connection, workers need doses of in-person time with one another,’ the NYT concluded.

Some commentators have pushed back on the second article suggesting that the relationship might be coming the other way round (that people feeling withdrawn choose to WFH and that the withdrawal came first.)

To my mind it’s an illustration of what most of us have recognised that this isn’t an either/or, it’s an and. Teams need to have some face-to-face time to sustain a healthy sense of connection.

It reminds me again of the new book by Professor Nick Epley that I mentioned last time. Most tellingly Epley found that when people were told to behave more extravertedly than they felt they ended up feeling happier and more energised. Epley’s conclusion was that extroversion was adaptive and that we should seek to encourage it in organisations. (There’s a great interview with him here).

From an organisational perspective the implications seem to be holding firm on a balanced approach to work. Yes, we can gift the agency to our team to let them work some of the time at home. And also we want everyone to commit to spending some of the week together, behaving like part of a team.

(In fact after writing this I saw that Nick Shackleton-Jones posted his own response to the research:

@shackletonjonesThe real reason you are being asked to return to the office (and thanks to Eoin Cannon) #work #career #rto #worklife #office

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• ‘The best person I’ve ever come across in football’. I loved this so much. A clear example that great culture often needs humour as a lubricant. England footballers saying how important Jordan Henderson is for the team’s culture because he manages to balance being socially amusing, while being able to tackle knotty relationship issues. ‘The best guy I’ve ever come across in football’. ‘He’s so funny’, ‘he’s the funniest guy at this camp’. ‘If we did a blind ranking of who people want in the camp, he’d be in everyone’s top 5’, ‘If there’s a problem staff will go to him to sort out the issue’. Beautiful to see a support character getting such recognition. It’s a reminder that you don’t need to lead from the front and that leaders are found throughout teams.

• ‘Core engineering folks feel treated like trash"‘: really interesting article about the (destruction of the) engineering culture at Facebook (Meta). For the first 20 years of the company the ‘move fast’ culture was seen as the secret weapon to getting rapid progress made. At some point in a stage Post-Covid reflection Zuckerberg decided that the organisation had become entitled, slow and ineffective, and he went to war with his own employee culture. Engineers who for a long time were told they had the autonomy to choose what they worked on were now ordered to work on the mundane chore of ‘data labelling’. There’s been so many bad stories on this one, the main takeaway is that you can’t treat people (and culture) with disdain and expect it to have no consequence on how they turn up for work.

• Thank you for the dozens of people who got in touch detailing projects helping the NEET generation. I’d still love to hear more - tell me about your projects and plans please.

‘Many young people had spent years in their bedroom’

You’ll have probably seen the coverage of the UK’s NEET crisis, reflecting the million young people who now fall into the categorisation of not being in employment, education or training. Another brilliant TikTok by Dani Payne put me onto a report ‘Inside the Mind of a Young NEET‘ that explores the lived experience of the young people receiving the NEET label.

The document is a rich 72 page exploration of the lives of these struggling young people. Michelle Obama last week said that these young people need to be more resilient (puke), but the report explains something more complex than that. It opens by preparing readers that many of the stories it contains are heartbreaking.

What comes across is young people who have been written off by teachers but who are learning Russian in their rooms at night. Youths who have learned technical internet skills of editing or web design but have no way to showcase them

Along the way caring responsibilities, Covid and economic shocks have all served to upend hopeful young lives. The world they experience is the ‘rejection economy’ where hundreds of applications aren’t even met with a reply.

The report’s writers interviewed 400 young people as part of their research. ‘Many young people had spent years in their bedroom,’ they memorably observe.

‘They are not waiting for lower expectations: they are waiting for real chances, honest guidance and people who do not mistake uncertainty for lack of ambition.’

‘We have created circumstances - run the economy into the ground, locked children away during lockdown, regimented them in schools, turned a blind eye to bullying, given them the social media tools of destruction - and then let them drift.’

Once you’re immersed in the report you get an awakening sense that we all need to help solve this. We need to find a way to rescue some of these stranded young individuals. As the report concludes: ‘Unless we act, the country has no future.’

I’d love to hear from organisations or individuals who are striving to help here. Get in touch.

Read the report: Inside the Mind of a Young Neet

• This month I’ve really enjoyed reading Nick Epley’s book Hello (it’s titled A Little More Social in the US because publishing is super smart and understands the modern world). The book is a celebration of the life enhancing powers of interacting with other people - even if we might find such things initially anxiety inducing. I was especially interested in the chapter exploring extraversion and introversion, how they aren’t fixed traits but are adaptive conditions that we can seek to develop. Epley makes the case that being a little more extroverted is associated with us being happier, even amongst people who label themselves as introverted. His work has clear workplace implications. I hear repeatedly from leaders that their culture has become more introverted, more insular and less connected. Epley paints an alternative where organisations recognise that they become happier by leaning into the discomfort of connection. Inconvenience is the price of community, we might conclude.

  • Better culture translates into better patient results. NHS trusts that exhibited greater empathy also showed better financial results and had higher staff wellbeing:

    “The average NHS trust empathy score was six on a scale from one to 10. For every 2.5% increase, the researchers saw a 76% greater chance of the CQC rating a trust good or excellent for patient safety, and a 46% increase in being rated good or excellent for effectiveness. Trusts that scored highest for empathy spent hundreds of thousands of pounds less on agency staff and consultants.”

• The New York Times asked experts, including Ethan Mollick, to imagine what a mature AI-enhanced workplace will look like. (I’d recommend listening to it, rather than reading it).

• I liked this guy who tracked his stress levels at work, mapped it against who he was meeting at that those times to produce a leaderboard of agg:

• I’ve been looking for live examples of job displacement this week. In fashion Zara and H&M have started using ‘digital twins’ of models for clothing shoots. Interestingly they are (currently) paying models the full price but photographers are losing business. Martin Scorcese made headlines when he switched from human drawn storyboards to AI generated ones.

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Sarah O’Connor is a journalist for the Financial Times who specialises in writing about work and the evolution of our jobs. Over the last year or so that has meant a lot of reflection about AI job displacement.

In her new book, We Are Not Machines, Sarah reflects on how technological change is reshaping the workplace - and the invisible enshittification it often brings with it. Sarah has a strong message: firstly that we should have more belief in the unique strengths of human labour, and secondly that individual agency is the most important differentiator in our favour.

It’s a brilliant conversation that gives a flavour of her book.

Listen: website / Spotify / Apple

“Before saying hello I say: ‘Volume growth, positive mix, consistent growth margin expansion for profit growth in hard currency’” - this is Unilever’s CEO Fernando Fernandez’ dystopian attempt to implant his strategic priorities in his employees’ minds, as featured in this Bloomberg article. The article reports on attempts of senior leaders to dial up results; across earnings calls for the S&P 500 executives used the phrase ‘performance culture’ 633 times last year as they turned up the heat.

We’ve spoken previously about the danger of using opaque business jargon when it comes to communicating with employees, rather than assigning modelled behaviours or explaining what someone should actually do in their day-to-day role.

Imagine working at Unilever for Mr Fernandez. Maybe you’re a marketer selling Dove shower gel. You’re told to improve positive growth margin expansion (for profit growth in hard currency). What does that actually mean for you doing your job? Don’t you just blink, write it down and nod? How is this my life? I worked hard at school. Amongst senior bosses there’s an obsession with using strategic jargon to demand workers fall into lockstep. This stems largely from a profound anxiety: research suggests that the priorities for the top team aren’t top of mind for workers lower down their orgs.

In 2018 researchers at MIT found that only 28% of executives and middle managers could list their company’s strategic objectives. Top bosses get preoccupied that no one understands their priorities. But barking financial jargon at the frontline is a little like telling children to be happier, in truth improved results are achieved indirectly. We make businesses more successful by creating the conditions for success, not by ordering improvement.

It’s why the most important thing that these bosses can do is create high agency cultures, freeing people up to have impact in their own roles. I enjoyed reading the forthcoming book, Agency by Martin Seligman. Seligman makes one point emphatically, that human progress occurs, not when we have everyone following orders, but when you empower everyone to have an autonomy-imbued impact themselves.

I talked about it a little in the talk I shared last week. In that talk I mention how Ritz-Carlton gift agency to employees in the form of the discretion to spend $1000 to solve a customer problem. Or how Octopus Energy give their employees the autonomy to solve any customer’s problem on the first call (up to crediting someone’s entire bill). When you treat people like adults, explain the business to them and give them the tools to solve problems you don’t need to yell about margin expansion in hard currency. The performance takes care of itself.

Strong cultures create a sense of people being trusted not targeted with slogans. Whether it is opaque corporate values, or someone telling you that the strategic priority is margin expansion, next time you hear this chat should be a moment for reflection. Next time you hear these things ask yourself what would be a helpful alternative right now? What obstacle needs to be removed? The truth is that the most effective performance culture is high-agency culture in disguise.

(Also see below: the author of Empire of AI says the whole of the AI movement is a ‘political project [with the goal of] taking agency away from everyone’)

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Sport extravaganza

If you’re a fan of observing culture in the wild there’s been some wonderful stimulus in the last week on the end of season wrap-ups on Arsenal, Pep Guardiola (and more):

• Firstly former podcast guest Pippa Grange is one the main characters in the new series on Gareth Southgate’s culture transformation of the national football team in Dear England. The show’s dialogue is a little cheesy in places but the work of Grange and Owen Eastwood come across as the shining inspiration of the story. (Eastwood’s work is all about the players’ position in the timeline of historical players, but he’s not portrayed as a character in the drama). Listen to my discussions with Pippa: episode 1, episode 2.

• I have no dog in the fight but I’ve loved scrolling through a lot of the Arsenal content this week. (‘I just love watching happy people,’ I’ve explained to half a dozen people who’ve asked me why). There have been some fabulous reads about the culture of together that Mikel Arteta built at the club. When he joined The Telegraph reported the team was full of cliques and he set about building a shared identity, symbolised by a sign saying ‘We x Me’ at the training ground.

• The Athletic ran an extensive piece on the ending of the Pep Guardiola project at Manchester City. In one sequence the Spanish coach models his own fallibility telling his team to ignore a training exercise he’d been attempting, ‘Forget everything I just told you. All of it. It was nonsense. It doesn’t make sense.’

• Wired reports that the culture at Facebook is ‘uniquely grim’. ‘I don’t know anyone having a good time,’ says one employee. The workforce has been told that they are being constantly tracked to train AI models (the implication being that it is to do their jobs). When one employee protested that their messages were being read, CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth ‘belittled and berated’ them leading one Meta worker to say, ‘These billionaires can’t even feign empathy’.

• Another former Facebook employee posts about his own ‘Squid Games’ like experience at the organisation: ‘There are no repercussions for unethical behaviour. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it.’ He adds that ‘The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about perception.’

• The issue of young people not in education, employment or training is a big and rising challenge for the UK. The number of ‘Neets’ just hit a million and it’s set to be a major political discussion of how to avoid a lost generation.

• We’re all God’s creations but Standard Chartered wants ‘lower value human capital’ to know they’re going to be replaced by AI. He tried to wind this back when he got a savage response. Another sign of CEOs just being utterly out of touch with the realities of their employees.

• Fascinating to see UK’s growth on a long-term chart. It explains so much of the realities of contemporary politics.

• I have to admit a deep fascination for this sub Reddit dedicated to people doing multiple jobs:

  

• If you’re an AI sceptic there’s plenty to feed your doubts this week:

  • Uber’s head of operations said it was proving increasing hard to justify AI costs inside the company. It comes a couple of months after the firm’s CEO said that hiring was being slowed to pay for AI spend.

  • Bubbling up: Axios reports one organisation ran up a half a billion dollar bill on AI tokens by not capping the usage of them by engineers. Perhaps unrelated, Amazon have ditched their AI code use leaderboards

  • “AI is a political project. The central feature of that political project is taking agency away from everyone”, so says Karen Hao, the author of Empire of AI, a book about OpenAI. Quite an astonishing comment that I’ve been thinking about for 24 hours since. She said it in the context of Tony Blair saying we societally need to submit to AI.

Last week I was fortunate to speak at an impressive event by market research agency Watch Me Think.

My talk opened with the scenario, 'my work turned me into a NPC (and no one told me)’. An NPC is a gaming term for the inert non-player characters who wander past you in video games.

I opened with stories that explained how we’re seeing people at work having less and less impact in their jobs. Indeed a tracking study running since 1992 has found that the amount of workers who believe they have agency over the way they do their jobs has almost halved. Many of us really do feel like we’re non-player characters at work.

I lay out two solutions, one of them leaning on examples from Shopify, Octopus Energy and the Ritz-Carlton. You can check out the presentation here. The first three minutes of the talk didn’t record so you’ll first see me at my desk filling in the gaps before jumping into the talk itself:

My slides with links are here

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Gen Z boos the computer

I love booing. A very under-utilised way of giving fast feedback to people. And there’s no point having the power of booing in your locker and not using it. I’ve booed DJs, music acts, colleagues and bosses but little excites me as much as the idea of booing commencement speeches.

Commencement speeches, that art form where a successful person, intoxicated by the random good fortune in their own life, opines on the universal secrets of success. I loved seeing the kids of Gen Z putting their booing powers to good use this week. Former Google supremo Eric Schmidt (net worth $65B, currently in court with S.A. charges against him) got a wheelbarrow full of feedback as he gave a speech praising AI at the University of Arizona. ‘I know what many of you are feeling about [AI]. I can hear you. There is a fear.’

If you watch the clip the fear seems to be coming mainly from trembly-voiced Schmidt who no doubt dashed straight off to his underground bunker.

Gloria Caulfield, who works in Tampa Bay real estate, and probably had no business getting involved in AI-chat, found herself getting some timeline shame, when her own speech was booed. She excitedly praised AI ‘as the next industrial revolution’ and the kids asked her to dial down the froth a little.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the growing hostility towards AI is unprecedented in the speed of arrival and predicts that full scale protest is likely to follow next. Research suggests that young people have seen friends struggle to get jobs and have decided which side they’re on.

Microsoft warns of the Transformation Paradox

One of the organisations that might need to think about reframing AI is Microsoft. The tech giant released 2026’s Work Trends Index this week, research designed to pump up the tyres on AI usage in offices.

The new sweep finds that organisational factors - like culture and managerial support determine how the new technology is landing inside the workplace.

Two thirds of respondents said that AI was helping them switch to higher value work - but that there was frustration about the lack of corporate ambition. At the heart of the research was the ‘Transformational Paradox’ where employees are ready to reinvent their jobs but find themselves slowed down by the organisation and systems around them.

• One example of how top-down AI directives are going wrong is from Amazon. Reports emerged saying that quotas and leaderboards created to drive AI use were being worked around by engineers lining up dozens of pointless prompts (FT report)

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I knew Adele was ruining everyone’s buzz. For years I thought it, but it wasn’t until this week that it clicked that she had been. I should clarify, I’m not talking about singer Adele. Far from being the Grammy winning superstar, Adele was a sales person who worked with me about a decade ago. Superficially Adele was a dream colleague. Generous with laughter, willing to play her part in creating fun chatter at our desks. Often arriving at the office with a captivating opener: ‘you’ll never guess what someone said to me today…’ If you met Adele for 20 minutes you’d come away saying she was a joy.

The only issue was that in team meetings Adele was relentlessly negative. Outside of meetings Adele would unburden herself about her latest gripe with anyone who would let her pull up a chair. She would often stir up feelings of distrust in her team mates. To Adele, everything that went wrong was part of a calculated plan hatched by her enemies. And she saw enemies everywhere.

Every workplace has things going wrong: broken promises by the big bosses, colleagues disappointed about missed expectations, interpersonal interactions that misfire. Sometimes when things go wrong the best thing to do is just shrug and carry on with it. Replaying and reviewing every mishap ends up spending hours focussing on disappointment. Happiness is defined by what you pay attention to, as Paul Dolan reminded me.

My instinct was that, for all the energy Adele brought to the team, she was actually making it an unhappier place. This week I’ve decided that hunch was right.

Across decades of research, it turns the best predictor of team performance isn’t the talent of the team or whether it includes superstar individuals, but rather it’s the behaviour of the worst person. A bad apple really can ruin a team.

In 2006, a researcher called Will Felps decided to see whether bad apples really could have an impact on teams. He recruited a drama student, Nick Fascitelli, and injected him into 60 work groups of business students. Felps varied the drama student’s mission, sometimes telling him to be a slacker, other times a downer and sometimes to act like a ‘jerk’. He was expecting that groups would resist someone disrupting their rhythm, that the groups would regulate to group norms, rather than be disrupted by one lone trouble maker. Turns out he was wrong. Fascitelli ruined everything.

In slacker mode Fascitelli would lean back, look bored, he’d yawn loudly. Incredibly, within minutes other members of the team were leaning back too. People would start discussing wrapping up and leaving. In depressive downer mode Fascitelli put his head on the table. Again others copied him. People started describing the task as pointless. Other people went further, describing life as pointless. In the jerk mode, soon the team was in passive-aggressive sync with him. Everything he touched turned to disaster.

Felps was surprised but he’d discovered that people don’t just notice each other’s mood, there’s a process of contagion going on. For many groups that contagion is created by the most senior person, but in other groups it’s just the loudest.

I’ve been thinking about this research all week after reading it in a new book by Kate Murphy called Why We Click.

There’s a positive redemption to the story. In one group Fascitelli’s bad apple trickery didn’t work - a saintly good apple figure seemed to disrupt the flow of the sabotage. The good apple didn’t know that there was disruption afoot, none of the group members did, he just asked questions, leaned in to the follow up answers and pointed out when people were in agreement. He managed to bring the heat down and the energy up.

Fascitelli himself expressed frustration that his efforts didn’t work when the good apple was around. After so much success elsewhere it must have been confusing that his mischief was suddenly missing. One calm and curious person managed to undo the disruption.

A few years later a different pair of researchers tried to measure the scale of influence other people have on us, trying to work out if we all have an emotional fingerprint. Are there really ‘radiators’ who leave us feeling energised and happy? Are there ‘mood hoovers’? Drain-type people who just ruin everyone’s vibe? They called the fingerprint ‘affective presence’, and found there was a small pattern.

The contagion was especially potent when it came to negative energy. They found that how a colleague made you feel accounted for about a quarter of your negative feelings at work, whereas your own personality made up less than a fifth. The ‘drain’ sitting opposite you had a bigger impact creating your bad day than you did yourself.

It brings me back to the Adeles of the world. It’s one thing to focus on building a team culture, trying to get things set up for success, but the bad apple research shows us that who is in the room also plays an important part in how that culture lands.

It poses an interesting question about what we should do in our teams. Putting up with a nightmare person might feel like part of the normal ups and downs of team work, but the research shows that it imposes an invisible tax on everyone else in the group.

Also, shout out to the good apples: if you’ve got someone who can keep the team flowing in harmony, who can help everyone stay on track despite the moaning around them, then they’re probably doing more for the team than they get credited with. Your good apples must be protected at all costs.

Read the original paper - why not drop it into AI or Google NotebookLM

(Of course if I didn’t know that sport chat turns half of any crowd off, I might have opened this post talking about the 30 million people signing a petition against Real Madrid’s Mbappe this week, the state of the culture at that club is quite the story).

I discuss this research - and more - with Kate Murphy in this week’s podcast

Kate Murphy is the author a new book called Why We Click. It combines the very latest research into interpersonal synchrony - how we form bonds with others.

It’s an intriguing read - at times compelling, at times challenging.

I chatted to her to understand ‘the bad apple effect’ and her take on whether we need face-to-face communication at all costs.

Listen: Spotify / Apple / website

Always like hearing people’s takes on their jobs. This week is how people use CRM tools:

• I’m a regular listener to If Books Could Kill, an entertaining, forensic analysis of the claims made in non-fiction books. This week’s episode about Angela Duckworth’s Grit is jaw-droppingly brilliant. ‘This is straight up fucking lying,’ they say at one point - which is a good summary of the whole episode

• ‘I’m feeling really vulnerable right now.’ This long read about the fall of Chelsea’s Liam Rosenior is an interesting yarn. A good example that dropping something you read in a book doesn’t always work out the way you planned (especially in an alpha environment, I suspect)

• AI usage is reducing human connection at work. Fascinating survey asking heavy users of AI how it is affecting their flow of work: ‘They were turning to it for personal support, including career advice and emotional validation—things that coworkers traditionally provide. Nonetheless, more than half of our study participants were lonely at work’. Part of the issue is that heavy users were finding AI to be invaluable. People reported that it helped them get on in their career, "AI showed me opportunities that I never saw before in my company"

• Sitting all day will be the death of you (or will at least raise your risk of it by 57%)

• Anyone else been checking those chickens non-stop since Bieberchella? Genuinely non-stop in my head

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.

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