THE JOY OF WORK
THE JOY OF WORK 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job Again
Bruce Daisley
To Billy, Coco and Tula Photos reproduced from Unsplash: house p. 192 by Luke Stockpoole; bearded man p. 192 by Tanja Heffner; happy face p. 256 by Hian Oliveira. Photo reproduced from Pexels: angry face p. 256 by Pixabay. All tweets reproduced courtesy of Twitter, copyright © respective Twitter accounts. 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Random House Business Books 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA Random House Business Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Bruce Daisley 2019 Bruce Daisley has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published by Random House Business Books in 2019 www.penguin.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781847942470 (hardback) ISBN 9781847942388 (trade paperback) Typeset in 10.5/16.5 pt Casus Pro by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
Contents
Introduction 1
Part 1
Recharge: Twelve Performance-
enhancing Actions to Make Work Less Awful Introduction 17 Recharge 1: Have a Monk Mode Morning 23 Recharge 2: Go for a walking meeting 31 Recharge 3: Celebrate headphones 36 Recharge 4: Eliminate hurry sickness 45 Recharge 5: Shorten your work week 50 Recharge 6: Overthrow the evil mill owner who lives inside you 58 Recharge 7: Turn off your notifications 63 Recharge 8: Go to lunch 72 Recharge 9: Define your norms 79 Recharge 10: Have a digital sabbath 86 Recharge 11: Get a good night’s sleep 92 Recharge 12: Focus on one thing at a time 96
Part 2
Sync: Eight Fixes to Make Teams Closer Introduction 103 Sync 1: Move the kettle 126 Sync 2: Suggest a tea break 131
Sync 3: Halve your meetings 136 Sync 4: Create a social meeting 146 Sync 5: Laugh 155 Sync 6: Energise inductions 164 Sync 7: Stop (being) a bad boss 168 Sync 8: Know when to leave people alone 178
Part 3 Buzz: The Ten Secrets of Energised Teams Introduction 187 Buzz 1: Frame work as a problem you’re solving 213 Buzz 2: Admit when you messed up 219 Buzz 3: Keep teams lean 224 Buzz 4: Focus on the issue, not the people 231 Buzz 5: Introduce a Hack Week 236 Buzz 6: Ban phones from meetings 243 Buzz 7: Champion diversity 249 Buzz 8: Replace presenting with reading 253 Buzz 9: Conduct a pre-mortem 259 Buzz 10: Relax 265
Epilogue: #LoveWhereYouWork 271 Bibliography 277 Notes 283 Index 303 Acknowledgments 311
THE JOY OF WORK
Introduction
Love where you work What was your worst ever job? On my sixteenth birthday, eleven inches shorter than the six foot I stand now, I started working at a fast food restaurant in Birmingham city centre. I was the very opposite of a confident teenager, self-conscious about my unbroken voice and seriously lacking in swagger. Fresh to the world of work, I was also terrified of stopping to speak to anyone in case my bosses fired me. In the same way that no pupil would ever confess to liking school, I had it in my head that it wasn’t the done thing to aspire to like one’s job. My role was to go there and perform the task of wiping tables in silence. In my meekness I became a very compliant employee, once even fulfilling the store manager’s demand that I clear large amounts of rat excrement from under a sink using only paper towels. A good day was being spared cleaning and told instead to don a full body costume and venture out onto Corporation Street to hand discount leaflets to unsupportive football supporters. But, overall, was it my worst job? In retrospect, possibly; at the time probably not. Because once I’d learned that chatting to my colleagues was allowed, even the longest and most arduous 1
days felt enjoyable. It became clear to me that my own happiness was directly affected by how many times I laughed every day. As long as there were moments of levity I felt a bond with the people around me. Spending long hours grafting alongside them felt better than sitting at home waiting for someone to invent the Internet. Jobs in pubs, factories, restaurants and hotels followed (it has to be acknowledged that it’s a lot easier to be comfortable with these jobs when you’re not reliant on bringing home enough money from them to feed a family). And as I traipsed from one to the next I started to notice a peculiar phenomenon. The greatest places to work, I found, weren’t necessarily the creation of some visionary leader delivering his well-crafted plan; they often seemed to thrive despite the bosses. One Mexican restaurant I worked in positively came to life when the monstrous owner had performed one last tantrum and stomped off the premises. He was a weapons-grade arsehole but that place plated up an almighty chimichanga the moment he’d left the scene. And so I started to realise that the culture of a place is not simply down to the bosses. It’s the responsibility of everyone. All of us can play a part in making a workplace welcoming and rewarding. Steve Jobs famously once argued that: ‘You’ve got to love what you do.’ That’s clearly easier said than done, and it’s one of those casual exhortations that can leave people feeling inadequate. If we should expect to love our jobs, then who is to blame if we don’t? Is it our fault? Could it even be used against us? ‘If you really wanted this job, you wouldn’t be asking for more pay/saying you’ve got too much to do/complaining about stress. Maybe we should find someone else who really wants to work here.’ 2 the joy of work
But while I think it’s wrong to place the burden of fulfilment at work on the individual, there are things each of us can do to make our job, at the very least, a little more enjoyable. The trouble is all the evidence suggests things are going in the opposite direction. That suspicion that ‘work used to be way more fun than it is today’ really does seem to have a basis in reality. Many of us don’t love what we do, and we feel exhausted trying. A Gallup survey of the global workforce suggests that only 13 per cent of employees are engaged in their jobs, meaning that they are highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplaces. For the UK the figure is even lower: 8 per cent.1 We’re worn down by a gnawing feeling of job insecurity, and by a work environment that seems to be impinging ever more on our free time, as we battle to keep up with our emails or glance at our smartphone on a Sunday morning in case that ping we’ve just heard is the herald of some minor emergency. Despite my experience with the rat droppings, I’ve generally been fortunate during my working life. In the last decade I’ve been lucky enough to work for the likes of Google, Twitter and YouTube. Prior to that I worked at companies responsible for Heat and Q magazines, Capital Radio and Kiss. These have been great places to work, and as I’ve moved on to my current role and become responsible for teams myself I’ve felt a proud delight when visitors have said how much they like the atmos phere at our Twitter London office or have emailed to ask for some hints on how to improve their workplace. But the reason I decided to turn a long-term interest in work culture into a study was that there was a time at Twitter when things weren’t going so well. People didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves as much as they once had. Some were quitting. introduction 3
Others were looking drained and dejected. And the trouble was that I didn’t really know what had gone wrong or how to deal with it. In the midst of acute self-doubt I decided to take the perhaps puzzling step of starting a podcast. I felt that recording it would give me permission to pick the brains of experts in organisational psychology – the people who really understand what makes workplaces tick. To my surprise many of the answers they came up with seemed very simple. So with co-creator Sue Todd I stitched some of them together into The New Work Manifesto – a straightforward list of eight changes that anyone can make to improve their jobs. The response was extraordinary. Police forces, nurses, lawyers and banks all got in touch to ask how they could use and adapt the ideas to work for them. What I have discovered is that there is no shortage of science, research and investigation into what makes work more fulfilling. It’s just that none of the evidence ever seems to reach people doing everyday jobs. In this book I’ve therefore distilled the wisdom of experts into thirty simple changes that anyone can try out for themselves or suggest at a team meeting. Some are ones I’ve long been familiar with and have used successfully myself. Others are useful correctives to bad habits I’d developed and that I’ve noticed in others. A few may seem perversely counterintuitive – but they do work. Our jobs – no matter what they are – can help give meaning to our lives. While we might be reluctant to profess our fondess for them, we should never be ashamed of feeling proud of being made happy by our work. I hope this book helps you feel happier again. 4 the joy of work
Under pressure For all that he could project a carefree calm, Julian was a man under pressure. Everywhere he looked there were demands and rising expectations being placed upon him: people phoning him just to ‘check in’, but with a couple of extra notes of insistency in their voices; colleagues anxious to hear what he’d come up with from his latest creative sessions. Most of us probably think our own jobs are way too humble to be compared to those of rock stars, but the lessons we can learn from Julian Casablancas are an important step in helping us to enjoy our own jobs again. Let’s take a step back and tell his story. The Strokes’ first album, Is This It, was a massive critical and commercial hit from the moment of its release in 2001. A score of 91 per cent puts it in the top forty albums of all time on the Metacritic site. The Guardian rated it as one of the top five albums of the decade, NME considered it the fourth-best ever and sighed that the band could ‘save rock’. A critic for Rolling Stone magazine said it was ‘more joyful and intense than anything else I’ve heard this year’ and described it as ‘the stuff of which legends are made’. Within a year the band were playing sold-out shows in the most prestigious concert halls across the world. As with most debut albums from unknown artists, the creation process was unglamorous. The Strokes – a five-piece group originating from New York – had recorded the album in a raw, stripped-back recording studio in the basement of a Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan. Sole songwriting duty on the record fell to lead singer Julian Casablancas, his preoccupation with penning new anthems leaving him the unfortunate owner of only the fourth-best haircut in the ensemble. But the end introduction 5