This Working Life

Have you had to endure a bad boss?   What makes them so difficult, how can you spot them a mile off, and how can you avoid hiring them in the first place?   New research argues that it's far more important to avoid bad leaders than try and find the best ones. The damage they do can be terrible and they tend to encourage bad leadership traits in others as well.  Lisa sits down in the boardroom with...

How is your grey matter doing? Are you digitally overloaded? Spinning out even thinking about another notification?   Our brains weren't designed to operate in the modern workplace and it is showing.   Lisa dives into the cranial folds to figure out what your workplace is doing to your brain, and what you can do about it.    Guest: Professor Selena Bartlett , Group Leader for Neuroscience at Queen...

What are you like with conflict? Do you relish it or shy away?   Being uncomfortable with the fray may be holding us back at work and stifling our ability to work creatively.   Lisa laces up her boxing gloves to enter the ring of confrontation and disagreement at work!  Guest: Tim Duggan ,  Chair of the Digital Publisher's Alliance and the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Clear In Tension...

Believe it or not, it's almost summer!   A lot of universities are finishing up and high schools only have a few weeks until exams. All of a sudden people need employment until March, it happens quickly!    But the rise in casualisation and the cost of living mean there's more competition for temporary work and employers may not be as keen anymore on staff who depart with the leaves of autumn.   A...

How's your neck feeling? Tight? Falling forward?  You aren't alone.   In the first edition of our occasional series Workplace Physio we look forward, with our heads held high, at the impact of 'tech neck'.  Lisa steps on the wobbleboard and does her exercises to figure out what work is doing to our necks and how we can go about fixing it.  Guest: Jennifer Callaghan , Specialist Musculoskeletal Phy...

Is AI coming for your job?   Well, maybe not yet. But there are early warning signs that entry level jobs are getting squeezed and traditional career pathways are closing up.  Research from Stanford Digital Labs in the US has shone a light on what actual impact artificial intelligence is having on employment, and it's not necessarily what the big tech bosses have been telling us!  Lisa scales the...

Are you burnt out ... again?!   How does it keep coming round like clockwork?    We're entering burnout season, and author Karl Treacher agues in his new book Built to Burn that you burning out is a feature of the system, not a bug.   Are we facing an epidemic of burnout? What can we do about it?  Lisa's picked up her hose and is running towards the burning building.  Guests Karl Treacher , CEO of...

Are you drowning in digital?   Are the company sponsored mental health tools helping you at all? They've become the norm as they're cheaper and easier to apply than traditional methods.   But research is showing that these applications and online tools aren't always cutting the mustard when it comes to improving our mental wellbeing at work; especially when they're applied as a catch all.  What ma...

It feels like we’re constantly being asked to know things, to be rock solid in our information.   But is this desire for control and certainty stopping us from making better decisions both at work, and about our working lives?   Journalist and author Simone Stolzoff has a lot of ideas about our brains and how we go to work!  He’s  been circling the globe hunting out people who trying to understand...

Do you measure up? Digital and AI tools coupled with an increased desire for productivity means we’re being marked more closely than ever before.  New research shows that when we know how we're being measured we stop prioritising the work that isn't measured, especially if we think the systems aren't transparent or fair.  Lisa gets stuck into the modern map of "metricisation" to see how to defend...

How does your office make you feel? Are you an open plan convert or dying under the halogen lighting?  We spend a lot of time in our workplaces and the way they’re designed can have a huge impact on our mental and physical wellbeing.  Psychologists and architects are worried we've sleep walked into a world where the standard office design is actively burning workers out quick smart. It's a problem...

How do you react in a crisis? Are you fight, flight, fawn or flee?  We all react differently to moments of panic and stress but one thing we all have in common is that they cause us to make rash and poor decisions.  Are we stuck like this or can we re-train ourselves to respond to panic and act or lead with a clear head?  Guest: Dr James Donald , Senior Lecturer in Work and Organisational Studies...

Artificial intelligence use in the job hunt is happening so fast it's hard to keep track and applicants and employers are feeling harassed by the speed of the change.   Candidates find themselves trapped in a paradox where they need to write applications that make it through the screening while also standing out when an application eventually reaches a human decision maker.  AI interviews are incr...

Are you just too tired to work?  Australians feel exhausted. Eighty two per cent of Australian knowledge workers reported being on the verge of burnout last year, and businesses are scrambling to catch up with the cost of mental fatigue.  But sleepiness can be a killer too and a major shift is underway in how Australian industries treat tiredness in the workplace.  It's not a new phenomenon, peopl...

Australia’s richest person and long time supporter of Australian Swimming Gina Rinehart has been offering cash bonuses for Aussie swimmers at the Commonwealth games, $20,000 for a gold medal! It can be a nice to have after a huge challenge or a drawcard to make people work harder, but there can be a danger to motivating your team with extra dollars. So, Is Gina Rinehart right, do cash bonuses work...

Speaking out at work is hard. It's even harder in a culture of silence.  To take the decision to break the quiet is an act of bravery, ands it's one many of us are unwilling to risk.  But the dangers of a culture of silence are many, and they impact employers and employees alike.  While it can be a scary thing to do, research has found that people staying silent to protect their own heath and well...

After the 100th email auto reply, the AI application screening and writing the umpteenth cover letter of the week, the job hunt can feel like a real drain.  If you're feeling like it's harder to find a job now than last time you were looking you are not alone. A combination of people staying put, international forces and a tight economic market have all impacted the white collar worker world. And...

Are you being asked time and again to be the one who gets everything done, is your reward for crushing it, just more “it” to crush?  You might be paying a competence Tax!   Research consistently shows that people who are seen as high achievers are stacked with more of the same rather than being given pathways to doing new things. it's a story a lot of people can relate to but it can be a very diff...

When you’re under the pump, it can feel like taking a break at work is impossible. But that can be habit forming, and bad for your physical and mental health.  Learn the benefits of building breaks into your workday, and how to do it in a way that feels manageable. 

You may have heard of greenwashing, now experts are worried about wellness washing where workplaces paper over the cracks with wellbeing measures but leave the chasms underneath.  

You're starting a new job but you don't have what you need, or you certainly feel like you don't! Why is this such a universal experience and why are employers so happy to leave people to sink or swim?  We dive in to the good, the bad and the ugly of onboarding and try to figure out how we can be doing it better, for bosses and for workers.  Lisa also checks in with the Australian HR Institute abo...

AI usage is on the rise, but its implementation within jobs and workflows is causing problems.  Research shows there is a capability gap amongst Australian workers, and a lack of AI fluency and context-poor AI use is creating job strain.  What can leaders do to turn this around? Guests:  Dr Rebecca Hinds , head of the Work AI Institute at Glean  Dr Sean Gallagher , founder of Humanova and the form...

Tying together what your team does within your organisation’s strategy is a key skill for middle managers and something workers at all levels can benefit from.   Learn how a strategy is put together and ways you can work towards it.  Guests: Brandon Lee , Associate Professor at Melbourne Business School, consultant, researcher and executive educator    Rebecca Murray , principal of strategy consul...

If you’re always busy but feel as though you’re not getting on top of things, you may be experiencing cognitive and emotional overload.  Liane Davey, the ‘Teamwork Doctor’, calls this “thoughtload” and offers ways to manage overwhelm and focus attention, to improve productivity and wellbeing in individuals and teams.  Guest: Liane Davey PhD  organisational psychologist and author Thoughtload: Mana...

Once you’ve made the decision to quit your job, it’s worth considering how to do it in a way that fits the situation.  The researcher who coined the term, “The Great Resignation” shares his insights on different resignation styles, from the “grateful goodbye” to “bridge burning” and what managers can learn from the way employees quit.   Guest: Professor Anthony C. Klotz, UCL School of Management,...