Eat Sleep Work Repeat

If you’ve not already subscribed there’s a weekly email that goes out with the podcast. This week's includes a brilliant article on how small teams seem to be more radical, there’s a couple of discussions about Professor Adam Grant’s work and there’s a really good article on laughter in teams. The laughter in teams article is from some research that NASA is looking at when it comes to casting their first expeditions to Mars. NASA looked at the success of different teams in isolation in Antartica. And it seemed that when there is a joker in the team, someone gifted in the art of lightening the mood it helps the overall morale of the team. I found this one fascinating, in The Joy of Work i talk about the successful Cambridge Boat race team in 2008 whose performance was transformed from a losing practice tie to winning boat race performance when they promoted a funny colleague to the boat. They felt that even though this wasn’t the best performing athlete they all felt themselves to be in a better mental state when he was present. This is really neglected as a component of a happy team and if you’ve read The Joy of Work you’ll know I’m obsessed with it. And it leads on to today’s guest. Robert Provine’s 2000 book Laughter is a real page turner of research about one of the most enjoyable but least studied aspects of modern life. He has also gone on to cover laughter - and other human behaviours in his 2013 book Curious Behaviour - Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond. Provine is the world’s expert on the subject. When we talked to Professor Sophie Scott in the live episode on laughter at work this time last year she mentioned professor Provine several times, and he’s also been the consultant for products like Tickle Me Elmo. There’s some fascinating discussion. Laughter seems to signal a couple of things, safety and play. He makes a really interesting point at the end about the current state of politics being filled with the opposite of laughter - which is fear and anger There was an interesting exercise a few years ago (and this was called out in Dan Lyons book lab rats) the exercise was conducted by Dan Ariely looked at the data from Great Place to Work. Ariely wanted to see if they had anything that correlated with stock data, to see if it would give you good investment advice to put money in good culture companies. Great Place to Work has been running since 1981 and each year has surveyed thousands of workers. Ariely looked at the data they had gathered. There was one factor that leapt out. But it was an odd thing. It was safety. Companies where people consistently reported feeling safe at work tended to outperform the stock market average, sometimes by 200%. It applied to physical and emotional safety. The other factor that seemed to correlate was companies that had a strong sense of welcome. If you listen to Professor Provine laughter would be in service of making all of those things stronger. What follows is the science of laughter, why we laugh and what it does. I hope you enjoy it. Robert R. Provine, is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I called him on the phone to pick his brain  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Thanks to Penguin Random House here's a free extract of a couple of different parts of The Joy of Work. You can buy the full audiobook here.:  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work was a simple avocation of the process of using uninterrupted concentration to get things done. He’s now back with a new book about taking the same principles beyond work into life. It's a guide for achieving happiness by being more intentional in how you use technology. Some might call it a manual.   What follows here is a sensational discussion with Cal - Digital Minimalism is out next week. I heard someone say recently that if you hear a new idea and its not shocking, its not really new. On that criteria this is really new. You’re going to find it mind expanding. Maybe you’ll disagree with it but it will leave you thinking for hours afterwards.   Cal believes we should eliminate email. He thinks we should stop being connected to 100s of people on social media. He thinks we should distinguish between social conversation and digital connection. Where we should eliminate all digital interactions.   He’s got a way for you to get there. He speaks of three principles of digital minimalism - Clutter is costly - Optimisation is important - Intentionality is satisfying Here's a great article on the book. His suggestions in the book – that we touch on are that we should abandon weak digital ties with people. If you find yourself merely liking someone’s photographs in the course of your relationship then you should detach yourself from them. I remember when I was on Facebook thinking I was going to cull anyone I wouldn’t go over and greet if I saw in the street and he says something probably a couple of steps further.   Not only is this chat great but he tells me about his next book that sounds incredible. I won’t make a big introduction because I asked Cal to do that himself so here he is. He’s Cal.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Loneliness and long hours are two of the curses of modern work - why are they growing and what can we do about them  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you're looking to get a job sometime in the next decade - and that includes almost all of us - there's a very high probability that you're going to be exposed to a psychometric test. As they become enhanced by AI and made more scaleable via apps these tests are going to go everywhere. So what are the implications for what work is going to look at. This episode I'm looking into the evolving nature of recruiting and how its changing to accommodate the latest science and also innovations in technology. Firstly I'm going to get my hands dirty testing one of the new evolving candidate testing apps that are starting to emerge. Then I'm chatting to Rich Littledale and he is a chartered psychologist who previously worked at a leadership consulting firm and now helps start ups with their strategic people challenges. Buy The Joy of Work Follow Rich Littledale Read more about PeopleUp - Rich's firm Sign up for Eat Sleep Updates Just a reminder that all of the episodes are live on the website Eat Sleep Work Repeat. Rich Littledale runs a company called People Up. In the show he mentioned a blog post - you can find it here. As Rich there says most orchestras have now introduced blind auditions and in fact most them use carpeted stages to avoid the sound of shoes. Read more here: https://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-proves-bias-sneaks-in-when-you-least-expect-it https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Goldin_Orchestrating%20Impartiality.pdf  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rob Briner is an professor of organisational behaviour at London Queen Mary’s University. This is a brilliant chat. Very much essential listening for anyone interested in HR but also worth listening for those of us who sit thinking ‘what do HR actually do?’ or what should we do to improve things round here. We talk about ‘evidence based management’ - which you can find out more about here: The Centre for Evidence Based Management. I’d researched it but he explained it way better. He ends up giving me his take on work culture and lots lots more. Rob outlines some of the pitfalls that any of us make when we set about fixing work. He also explains the challenges of psychology - discussing something called 'the replication crisis' about large scale studies.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

innovation in the police  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pre-order The Joy of Work Follow Adam Sign up for Eat Sleep Updates We’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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 Jez Find out more about Cowry Consulting The books we discussed The Joy of Work Yes! 60 Secrets from Science of Persuasion Pigeons getting variable rewards Drunk Tank Pink by Adam Alter Blink by Malcolm Gladwell Freakonomics Predictably Irrational Nudge Influence by Robert Cialdini Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.fm  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Contact the show podcast@eatsleepworkrepeat.fm This 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 Netflix WSJ on Google's walkouts You can pre-order The Joy of Work at Amazon.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.fm  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 Power Jeffrey 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Read more on the Good Jobs Strategy Pre-order the Joy of Work If 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.