Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture

A couple of years ago a piece of work was published that ended up getting headlines across the world. The academic paper - the work of Oxford University’s William Fleming - found that workplace wellness programmes didn’t work. That meditation app, that burnout webinar, that healthy eating week - they had no impact on work. It raised questions about what was really going on at work, were organisations using wellness initiatives as reputational alibis, giving them deniability when workers inevitably became exhausted by an unsustainable pace of work?

While early in his career William Fleming has already started proving himself as one of the most exciting workplace thinkers around. He works as part of Jan Emmanuel De Neve’s Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University.

My conversation with him takes in not only what is often called the Oxford wellbeing study but also his latest work which explores the stunning finding about impact of compressed working hours as a means of going to a four day week. He talks about his brand new research into AI chatbots and what we’re learning about their impact on wellbeing at work. Overall it’s an outstanding discussion by someone who is examining the impact of accelerating work on the rest of us.

Will Fleming's greatest hits:
Employee well being programs - evidence of effectiveness
Reduce or compress? Evaluating the 4 Day Week vs Compressed working hours
Are wellness programs examples of depolicised labour reform?

A full transcript is on the website.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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Has hybrid working been a disaster? Should we stop pretending and get back to the office? That is the claim of In-Person, a new book by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington.

I read the book with interest. Despite entering with an open mind, I wasn't wholly convinced by the evidence. The authors seem to be challenging fully remote work, rather than hybrid work. Additionally the whole book seems to come with an ulterior motive, intent on trying to score points rather than reflect on the best way to work.

Natalia Emanuel agreed to chat with me to debate the evidence - it proves to be an engaging discussion.
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.

A few people have asked me to do episodes on office politics and office interactions - one angle I wanted to look at that was through the lens of professional services firms.

Laura Empson is a Professor at Bayes Business school having previously worked in professional services herself.

She’s focussed on understanding the way that these firms work. Many professional services firms are a highly paid collection of partners who collectively own the firm. It means that the organisations are different to the version of work we are most used to. Rather than being low agency and low control they are high agency and are able to elect their leaders. I wanted to understand the impact that this had on the running of the companies - does the ability to elect leaders mean that politics takes place in public? Or does the overt nature of debate change the need for backchannel and gossip?

We talk politics, collective leadership, identity, and also how to achieve elite performance in a collective organisation - whether there has to be trade off between comfort and success. We also discuss the growing impact of AI as a disruptive force on professional services firms and whether it is upending pressure from younger workers to make these firms less toxic.

Check out Laura's podcast 'Leading Professionals'.
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.

Our jobs have turned into the place where we’re told what to do: show up and follow orders. That was the finding of the latest cycle of the long-running Skills and Employment Survey.
When asked, only a third of UK workers say they are given the discretion to decide how to do their jobs, a number that has dropped from two-thirds in three decades.

When we hear this it’s hard not to think of the two other issues of contemporary work that have come to define the era: low engagement and low productivity. Professor Alan Felstead was one of the leads of the research and I asked him to explain the disappearance of workplace agency.

Check out the workplace quiz: How Good Is My Job

There's a full transcript on the 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.

Bruce speaks with Daniel Susskind, economist and professor of business at Gresham College, about how AI is changing work, education, and the meaning of our jobs.

Daniel's new book tackles AI and how we should prepare for the future.
Predictions of the future have shown it is too uncertain to predict, so what can any of us do to ready ourselves? Susskind says that we should prepare by learning the basics while training on cutting edge technology. Above all else he believes we need to teach the essentials of character.

We also discuss Ethan Mollick's posts on AI.

AI2027 updated, Reddit post. AI2027 gives a positive vision of what is next.

It's an important, timely discussion. The website has a full transcript and links to Daniel's recent lectures.
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.