Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture

"There's this concept called inbox zero, where everyone tries to get to their inbox down to zero. But I would suggest that a more noble pursuit is that of calendar zero". I chatted to Howard Lerman this week. I was blown away by this discussion - it captured exactly what is wrong about current work, and why back-to-back meetings are going to lead to many organisations missing the opportunity of th...

When Zach Mercurio’s new book,  The Power of Mattering , arrived on my desk I devoured it. It’s the most essential book about workplace culture that I’ve read in a couple of years. Read a full transcript and notes on the website. Read more :  Wall Street Journal: The Power of Mattering at Work Order the book:  The Power of Mattering Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or chec...

The next two podcasts I see as a piece with each other, today is about meaning the next one is about mattering. Collectively I feel they present serious substance about the foundations of good culture. Read Meaningful Work Read the latest newsletter There’s some overlap - the authors today,Tamara Myles and Wes Adams, have done research with next week’s guest Zach Mercurio. One of today’s guests Ta...

Sign up for the newsletter Someone posted on LinkedIn that the podcast had died. Or I had died. But he is risen! I'm back with a great discussion, powerful in its simplicity. Psychologists Dr. Patricia Grabarek and Dr. Katina Sawyer have created a guidebook for anyone who wants to make things better for their teams. In it they suggest that managers need to set the tone for our colleagues. Yes, of...

Join 100,000 other workplace culture enthusiasts by signing up for the Make Work Better newsletter Interested in how skills could enhance your business? Check out the short film I made with the Department for Education. Get in touch with Bruce What do your typos say about you? What's the right medium to build connection with your colleagues? How did Shopify and Netflix reinvent their communication...

Interested in how skills could enhance your business? Check out the short film I made with the Department for Education. Sign up for the newsletter Today's episode is an Avengers Assembled of podcasts about work. I join host Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis from the Squiggly Careers podcast, as well as Isabel Berwick from the FT's Working It and Jimmy McCloughlin from Jimmy's Jobs. We talk AI, asking...

Michael Morris's book Tribal covers the codes that bond humans together. It has been shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award 2024. It came runner-up to 'Supremacy' by Parmy Olson. He explains that humans are inspired by peer codes, human codes and ancestor codes when it comes to their behaviour - and he gives plenty of insight of how we could build more tightly bonded g...

Everywhere we look we see someone who is outraged - and plenty of that anger makes its way to the workplace. The last time President Trump was in power it led to employees becoming more active - who knows if the same will happen in 2025. Karthik Ramanna talks us through the way to deal with outrage - and the actions that any leader can take to make the workplace a better place. His new book is out...

Sign up for the newsletter Tiffany Gaskell outlines coaching as a route to transformational leadership Tiffany Gaskell is the co-author of Coaching for Performance , the top-selling guide to coaching first published by Sir John Whitmore the inventor of the discipline. It's curious to consider that there was a founder of coaching, and Tiffany takes me through the history of the practice, how it too...

Subscribe to the free Make Work Better newsletter Brigid Schulte is a journalist and writer who brings a reporter's ear for stories to her exploration of modern work. Over the course of a decade Schulte has talked to people about the impact their jobs has on their lives - and has explored any hope that we might be able to make this better. Her new book, Over Work and paints a hopeful image of how...

Colin Ellis is a consultant and author who spends his time working with organisations to improve their culture. He's turned his attention to why some companies go bad in a new book Detox Your Culture . He talked me through what has gone wrong at the likes of ITV's This Morning, the CBI, The Ellen Show and Boeing. Sign up for the newsletter Sign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out th...

Sign up for the newsletter How can any of us build a more effective team? Owen Eastwood is one of the world’s most in demand performance coaches, with a focus on team culture & leading. Owen has worked with some of the most successful sporting sides in the world. He also works with corporate teams wrestling with similar themes. Last year I talked to Owen about his work on belonging and identit...

Sign up for the Make Work Better newsletter How important is a happy workforce? According to Mark Price, the former boss of Waitrose, it's the main thing that leaders should be thinking about. Make your workforce happy and the profits will follow. Mark's new book is Happy Economics . To prove it Mark cites his experience running the supermarket chain, when with a goal of workers happiness he made...

This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office You might think an episode about improv comedy might be a stretch for a podcast about making work better. But in fact as Kelly Leonard explains today the skills of improv comedy are the most important ones that will determine our success at work.  Kelly helps to run Second City ,...

This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office In the 2000s a book calle d Fish! A remarkable way to boost morale and improve results became a bestseller. A small book, it was often used by companies accompanying a video of the same name. Together the two told a story of the culture of the fish market in Seattle, a noisy, bombastic...

This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office This is the second episode about rituals - the first one is next to it in the podcast feed, it's an interview with Kursat Ozenc about how rituals can be used to create culture. This episode goes into real life examples. Claudia Wallace talks about Crisp Thursday (Connection) Andy Pules...

This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office Kursat Ozenc is a product designer who he teaches at Stanford university, He teaches on the subject that we can all learn from which is the idea that culture can be designed. The specific tool he uses to design culture is the creation of workplace rituals.  Kursat's Substack newsl...

Flow is the state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity “that nothing else seems to matter.” Presence is to be in a flow state of connection with others. Here’s the last discussion about the Happiness Track Sign up for the newsletter Emma’s new book Sovereign HBR: The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy HBR: Proof That Positive Work Cultur...

To receive the newsletter and the forthcoming Presence project sign-up here Today’s top episode goes to the heart of an issue that a lot of people raise with me. They say ‘where do you start when changing a culture’. To some extent it’s what the episode about the hospital trust in Barking was about, going in and changing the culture of a huge organisation. I saw one of today’s guests Darren Ashby...

Isabel Berwick is a writer and podcaster who focusses on the evolving state of modern work. I’ve celebrated her podcast Working It many times here ( here’s her specials on the 4-day week for example , or her special on meeting-free days was essential listening ). I love its ability to react rapidly to the biggest news stories of the moment and to drop a snackable episode midweek. I talked to her a...

How should most of us think about the differences between Employee Experience and Employee Engagement. I first spoke to Emma Bridger, who is the author of a well respected book on this topic and the founder of the EX Space , a learning community focussed on raising the bar in the Employee Experience field. Then I picked the brains of Melanie Wheeler who leads People Communications at Sutherland, a...

Charles Duhigg’s bestseller The Power of Habit was the definitive guide to building and sustaining successful habits. His new book, Supercommunicators , grapples with the knotty topic of creating successful interactions with others. It’s a thorough and dazzling read that has many applications for the way we work (and how we live our lives). We talked about: the single biggest thing that builds psy...

Many of us have worked in environments that provided bonuses or rewards for success. Maybe they took the form of team rewards or individual incentives, or end of year profit-share schemes. But do these rewards achieve what they are designed to? Professor Uri Gneezy is the world's foremost expert on the science of incentives - and he comes with a huge warning about what such schemes actually achiev...

This week's Eat Sleep Work Repeat is hosted by Bruce Daisley , Ellen C Scott and Matthew Cook . Roll up roll up as this week we talk the major trends in work and workplace culture and the big stories of the last month. Including: Wellness programs don’t work - in TikTok form , or in Matt’s post on LinkedIn Research from Oxford University looking at the (in)effectiveness of workplace wellbeing inte...

I was flattered to be invited to visit the NHS trust of Barking, Havering and Redbridge last year. I spent an afternoon meeting the team and seeing the place in action. It was an inspiring question that CEO Matthew Trainer was asking: 'can we improve the results by making it a better culture?' What does that look like? And how is going for them? Matthew Trainer's CEO note at the end of 2023 Video:...