Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture

Pre-order The Joy of WorkFollow Stevyn ColganSign up for Eat Sleep UpdatesFollowing up the discussion with Andy Rhodes this week it's a second episode about the police. My original plan was to edit both of them to get one episode about the profession but both were too good to chop up. So I want to flag that It's kind of about work culture but also kind of just a brilliant chat with a fascinating person. Consider it as a box set with the other police episode. When it gets into its flow it covers dog shows, walking buses and all manner of brilliance.Stevyn Colgan joined the police after a bet from his dad - which he explains. I was put on him by our last guest Andy Rhodes who told me about ways they used dog shows to reduce the tension on council estates. Rather than chop it down to just cover the way that Stevyn led innovation in the workplace I've just left it intact. He's too interesting for me to butcher the chat.Stevyn is the perfect example of a multi level life via his illustrations he became friends with Douglas Adams and ended up being a writer on the TV show QI. He wrote a book about his police problem solving unit work called One Step ahead. He's actually just published a novel called a Murder to Die For.I'm not gonna lie we spent ages one summer evening sitting in the pub garden of a Amersham pub. My intro is me reminding him about this podcast but the chat it provokes is quite interesting.If you want to learn more sign up for our newsletter at eatsleepworkrepeat.fm - thanks for listening.Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pre-order The Joy of WorkFollow Andy RhodesSign up for Eat Sleep UpdatesThis is the first of two episodes on the police this week. One on dealing with stress in 'blue light' professions, one on how to be creative in stressful environments.Andy Rhodes is the Chief Constable of Lancashire - and has responsibility for the wellbeing initiative in the UK police force. He talks through the challenges of policing under pressure. What do you do to stop police profiling people they encounter? The answer starts with how you treat them at work. I think you'll be inspired with the lead that Andy is taking.To hear more about the evidence based approach to wellbeing in the police go to the Oscar Kilo website.Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pre-order The Joy of WorkFollow AdamSign up for Eat Sleep UpdatesWe’re talking work culture in different ways for the next few episodes. The next two episodes after this are in the police force. But today’s guest is the best selling author of the year - Adam Kay. This is Going to Hurt : Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor has sold over a million copies. It’s also won the readers’ choice book of the year this year. So there’s a chance you’ve read it and if so you will love the discussion with Adam Kay because he takes us into the working environment in hospitals. If you’ve not read it I could not recommend this beautiful, funny, principled book more. Adam explains in the book that the title Junior Doctor is a touch misleading - everyone who isn’t a consultant is titled a junior doctor. He is successful comedy writer who wrote the book 7 years after leaving the health service after a terrible terrible day at work. He wrote it because he found underpaid overworked health workers being politicised by the vampires who run government. Specifically the multi-millionaire former health secretary who claimed that in some way that doctors were greedy. The book is the funniest thing you’ll read this year and we covered that but we also talked through the working culture in hospitals. US listeners will know that the issue of single payer health care is a hot topic in the US - in the UK we have the NHS and it’s worth saying as Adam says it is a source of national pride. We just need to fund it properly. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I joined Adam for a chat at restaurant in West London.Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can painting the walls of a company change their culture? We explore with Jez Groom today's guest.An episode this week on behavioural science. It was prompted a little by discussions with Seth Godin and others. It was thinking can you change the culture in organisations by the way you engineer choices available to people - and I’m speaking to a behavioural scientist about these things.First a bit of background - we discuss a reading list in the show and I’ve included it in the show notes but it’s worth giving you an intro. One of the best books I love on behavioural science is YES by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini.In that book they spend chapter after chapter going through how the language that we use to invite people to do things has a big impact on what they subsequently do. TV shopping channels used to say ‘operators are waiting to take your call’ but they realised that that language made customers envisage rows of idle call handlers waiting for any sucker to buy something. So they changed it to ‘if lines are busy please try again later’. Similarly hotels evolved the notes about towels that you see when you stay as a guest. A lot of these things are built on the principles of influence made famous by Robert Cialdini.The authors split hotel rooms, half with a note saying please recycle your towel by hanging it up, the other used social proof by saying ‘most guests at our hotel help the environment by reusing their towels’. They looked at the results. The people who got the social proof message were 26% more likely to recycle their towel. They found that they could easily improve on this by using principles of reciprocation - saying the hotel would make a donation if they reused the towel, and then further by saying ‘to thank you we’ve already made a donation’. And a weird specificity ‘by saying the majority of the people who used THIS room had reused their towel.So if decision architecture can play a part in these things, can it make an impact on work. There may be decision architecture around your office. Maybe there are fewer waste paper bins than before - or you’re encouraged to use different recycle bins that are further away by the company alerting you to the benefits of these things.Today’s guest is Jez Groom who runs the behavioural science company Cowry Consulting.Jez told me at his old company Ogilvy they’d realised they could make breakthroughs in this area when they had introduced a hand stamp on the hand of workers in a food manufacture plant. No matter how much workers were told they needed to wash their hands to prevent kids getting ill or transferring dirt. But only 60% were doing it. They introduced a stamp a brown coloured e coli virus bug. It took 30 seconds to wash off. The bacterial count tumbled but most of this was kept after the 3 weeks of them doing it. The stamp had changed behaviour.Link in to JezFind out more about Cowry ConsultingThe books we discussedThe Joy of WorkYes! 60 Secrets from Science of PersuasionPigeons getting variable rewardsDrunk Tank Pink by Adam AlterBlink by Malcolm GladwellFreakonomicsPredictably IrrationalNudgeSign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(sound fixed) Seth Godin has been one of the world's freshest thinkers since before the internet was on solid food.After a first career packaging books, he then rose to his own fame creating permission marketing.His blog is many people's favourite stop on the web bus route picking up a million passengers every day.We use his latest book This is Marketing as the model to bring to reinventing your workplace culture. What's the way to use his influence strategies to improve your job?The chat is brilliant and goes everywhere. Clearly Eat Sleep Work Repeat isn’t a marketing podcast but everyone can learn something from Seth.Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fmSign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fmThis week's episode features the iconic Teresa Amabile - she's a professor at Harvard Business School. Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University.If you're interested in her work this YouTube clip is a great start point.Before the chat with Professor Amabile we talk through the news in work culture this week. Here's the explosive article on Netflix:WSJ on NetflixWSJ on Google's walkoutsYou can pre-order The Joy of Work at Amazon.Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan Cable is the author of the life affirming and brilliant Alive at Work - one of the most inspiring visions of what work could look like. The discussion covers big themes of purpose and motivation but brings simple practical tips. What are the simple things that any of us could do to our induction processes at work? How could we encourage our teams to bring their selves to work.I mention two articles. One by Sarah O'Connor in the FT and this one by Josh Hall about compulsory wellness.You can get in touch with Bruce here on Twitter. All of the previous episodes are available on the website EatSleepWorkRepeat.fmSign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s guest is regarded as one of the most influential management thinkers in the world largely because he considers themes and human behaviours that others avoid discussing. Jeffrey Pfeffer is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He’s author of books like Management BS, Power and most recently Dying for a Paycheck and it’s the last two books that we mainly discuss in today’s chat.Read Dying for a Paycheck and PowerJeffrey mentions this New York Times article about the stress of someone in the legal profession.His book Power has become a global best seller largely because it is a manual for the Machiavellian. It’s a modern day version of Niccolò Machiavelli’s 16th century book The Prince. It’s not that Pfeffer believes this is what we should behave like to be our best selves but rather if we don’t behave like this we’re going to be exploited.In the course notes for Jeffrey's stanford class on power he says that "insufficient sensitivity to and skill coping with power have cost Stanford graduates promotions opportunities and even their jobs".Fundamentally the mistake we’re all making according to Pfeffer is believing that the world is fair. I know I’m guilty of this. Whether you watch US politics or British politics but I certainly find myself looking at current events thinking that a reckoning will come when the good guys will win and sort things out. Spoiler alert. The good guys don’t win. And the source for that point is history.Pfeffer's belief is that in business they don't win so arm yourself. He believes that leaders often ascend to their position not through an innate goodness but because they understand the rules of power.Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Read more on the Good Jobs StrategyPre-order the Joy of WorkIf you like this the easiest way to get it is to subscribe on Apple podcasts - give us a rating while you’re there.Zeynep Ton is a Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.She studies the retail sector and the way that some firms have invested in paying more and doing more for their workers. She studied firms like QuikTrip, Trader Joes, Mercador in Spain - she found that firms that treat their workers better achieve better results. Quik Trips profit is double the retail average - all of her firms are more profitable and show consistent growth. And this is work that needs doing in 2012 The Independent reported that only 1 in 7 British supermarket workers earned a living wage. We’ll talk about how they make their jobs happier but the key parts are they make some key decisions upfront (1) offer less (2) standardise and empower their teams (3) they train their workers to do all of the jobs and (4) they operate with slack - with spare capacity.When I studied Zeynep's work - and even more so when I chatted to her I thought there's something in this that every single company can use.Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Adam Grant is the most important business writer in the world - a man who says his study is focussing on how to make work suck less.Adam is author of books like Give and Take, Option B, Originals, he's also the host of a chart topping podcast on work culture called Work Life with TED.Adam Grant has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for seven straight years - his books have told over a million copies .Give and Take examines why helping others drives our success. Originals explores how individuals champion new ideas and leaders fight groupthink; Option B, with Sheryl Sandberg, is a #1 bestseller on facing adversity and building resilience.For more about Bridgwater read here http://uk.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-ranked-employees-by-performance-2018-3The full episode is live on the website: eatsleepworkrepeat.fmPre order The Joy of WorkSign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.