Podcast 18: Feeling exhausted? Here’s how to reinvigorate your approach to work

In an increasingly fast-paced workplace, busy schedules and heavy workloads are impacting employee wellbeing and productivity. As a result, there is a need for individuals to alter the way they operate, to enhance their daily routine and maintain a positive attitude throughout the week.

In this podcast, we are joined by Bruce Daisley, EMEA Vice President at Twitter. Bruce has recently launched his debut book, “The Joy of Work”, which focuses on improving our working lifestyle and culture.

1. Bruce, I’ve just introduced you briefly there, but could you tell us a bit more about yourself?

Yes, so I am the EMEA Vice President for Twitter. I’ve been there for about seven years, so in that time I’ve seen us go from a tiny little serviced office infested with mice to something slightly nicer now.

I run the business across Europe, Middle East, Asia and Africa and I guess from my perspective, during that time and in my previous time running Google, I’ve just become workplace obsessive really.

So I guess the reason why I’m here is that I was just really interested in the work cultures that I was in and what made some of them special and some of them awful. And so I’ve just spent the last two years, firstly doing a podcast, now writing a book, just trying to understand what makes those magical teams and what makes certain teams special.

2. The world of work is constantly changing and I’m sure many of our listeners feel that their working lives have been increasingly busy and demanding. What do you think is driving this? I imagine technology’s a big part of that.

Yes, it’s a really big part of it. Since the arrival of email on mobile phones and I recognise for a lot of people, that was just a factor of life, but some of us lived through that era. During that transition, the average working day has gone up by two hours a day, so the average working day has gone up from seven and a half hours a day to nine and a half hours day. The consequence of that is just people are being pushed far closer to what their capacity is.

Probably the best piece of work looking at what the total capability of the human mind to do work is, suggests it’s around fifty-five hours work a week and I know that when we hear stats like that, we think “Yeah, that’s everyone else, but that’s not me”. But generally when people have done a big sort of set of data, they found that if you work more than fifty-five hours a week, then it tends to be diminishing marginal returns. So each hour you work, actually the total amount across the week goes down and you’ll recognise that -You’re exhausted, you don’t feel that you’re the freshest that you were on Monday morning.

Well, if you think about that working day going up to nine and a half hours a day, you’re starting to get very close to your limit. You’re starting to get very close to that fifty-five hours and so the consequent effect is that people are just feeling exhausted and it’s technology, it’s connectivity that’s playing a part.

3. And what kind of effect would that have on someone’s wellbeing and the quality of their work as well?

Well half of all office workers report feeling burnt out and obviously that has a direct impact on their experience at work. One of the worst things I’ve heard is that 60% of office workers report feeling lonely at work. 42% say they don’t have a single friend at work.

So, we’re in an environment where people’s experience at work was meant to be sort of full of life and engagement and full of interaction and actually it’s quite isolated and lonely and burnt out.

Why that’s relevant is, if you think about what the challenges are for work in the next ten, twenty years and what’s going to be more important than ever before, is creativity. But I want to be careful about using the word creativity because I don’t mean creativity in a sort of Disney animation sense or in a writing a screenplay sense. But, creativity in a sense, just working out cleverer ways to do things, new ways to do what you’re already doing. And one of the first victims of exhaustion is creativity. We can’t be creative when we’re exhausted.

4. You spent two years studying the psychology and neuroscience of work. From your research, what would you recommend listeners start doing to help them re-energise their working week and ultimately become more productive?

My whole feeling, the way I got into this, is I was really interested in workplace culture and you know when you’re in a good team, everything seems to be possible and people are working hard for the cause, and someone asks a favour and everyone’s willing to do it. I was really interested in what created the dynamics for that, but when I started to look into what created good workplace culture, I quickly realised that when people are exhausted, they can’t even participate in that team dynamic.

And so that’s why for me it was about taking a step back and thinking, “Until we deal with the exhaustion that people have got, your not going to make a great workplace culture in here.” You can’t initiate good team dynamics if everyone’s a zombie and leaping in and out of the office everyday.

So that was the first thing and what really struck me was, the ways to improve the impact of work upon us are often really trivial, they’re really small. So when we’re thinking about work, thinking ten years ahead, there’s going to be no one doing a Steve Jobs unveiling of the new way of working. We’re going to gradually evolve towards it and so I was interested, what are the little changes that we can all make in the way we work that can gradually improve the impact of work on us?

And so they are often really small things. The most effective thing bar none, one I often advise people to do first, is to turn the notifications off on their phone. Turn the email and the notifications off on your phone. And the reason why is, the guy who did that research actually worked for a mobile phone company. He worked for Telefonica and he wanted to see the impact of people’s headspace by turning notifications off for a week and he couldn’t get enough people to do it. And so he was about to scrap his research and he said, “Okay, I’m going to ask people to turn the notifications off one day,” and in that action, people did it. He went back to them two years later and half of all the people who turned their notifications off for one day were still doing it two years later.

So it’s a demonstration really. I think when you hear that you think, “Okay, so these changes aren’t going to be a big unveiling of the new work, but we can actually make work feel less oppressive, less claustrophobic by these sort of small hacks really.”

So, that’s my take on it. We’re all doing jobs that are probably more demanding than they were ten years ago. We have more meetings than we have ever had, but what are the ways to try and feel less overwhelmed by those demands upon us?

5. They can consume a lot of time and I’ve got a stat myself here actually, according to research, both the length and frequency of meetings has increased over the past fifty years, which is quite believable. How would you recommend listeners go about evolving their approach to ensure that they use their time more sensibly? 

So when I wrote this book, my view was: bosses don’t read books like this. So this wasn’t a mantra for bosses to try and improve work. So my feeling was, “How can the rest of us, sitting in meetings, how can we try and find a way to change the way we’re working?” And some of that is going to be persuasion. Some of that is going to be bringing a discussion to the team meeting saying, “Guys, I wonder if we could do this in half the time,” or, “I wonder if we could do this every two weeks rather than every week.”

Probably the best evidence for that is bringing along articles and maybe even a TED talk or a video, something where people can watch it. Maybe it’s on a team away-day or when you are sitting there thinking about next year and you sit there and you say, “Okay, maybe if we change the way we’re doing meetings…”

One of the best things I saw is a big utility firm contacting me and saying they are introducing technology where before every week’s meeting they send a little voting form out asking, “Do you have anything big for this week’s meeting? If not, should we cancel it?” with the objective of cancelling three-quarters of their meetings. Because if you give people space to get stuff done, they often find that they are far more productive.

I think the problem is that so much work that is permeated with guilt. So you go home and you haven’t answered forty emails and you didn’t get back to that person and you think it’s your fault, so you find yourself ruining that hour of TV that you get by typing out an email on your phone and because of that guilt, we’re actually not doing our jobs as effectively as they could be.

If you look into the way that the brain actually comes up with ideas, the brain often doesn’t come up with ideas by sitting there concentrating, although it can, deep work’s really important. But often the ideas come when you think about something and then you give your brain time to relax. It’s sometimes called the default network, it’s the daydreaming part of your brain.

So by daydreaming, albeit it is being squeezed out by all the things we fill all our waking hours with. But the daydreaming part of your brain can be incredibly satisfying, just sitting out a window and staring at things and as soon as you recognise that the default network, that daydreaming is really powerful, often people notice, “Oh, I’m getting really good ideas there.”

My favourite thing is Aaron Sorkin, the guy who wrote, “The West Wing”, he wrote “The Social Network”, he noticed he was having all of his best ideas when he was in the shower and so his response was to install a shower in the corner of his office. He says he takes eight showers a day. So a moment when he’s sitting there thinking, “I don’t know what to do now. Right, okay, let’s go and have a shower.” And he steps in there to try and find new ideas.

If you think about how we try and find new ideas, the average British person has sixteen hours a week of meetings. You come out of those meetings, with forty emails waiting for you. Where’s the space for ideas? Where’s the space for thinking? There’s no space and so to some extent, you’ll improve work by just trying to get rid of some of those meetings.

It’s an interesting thought exercise for anyone listening to this. Ask yourself, the next time you have an idea, to note when you have that idea, because you don’t have it when you’re staring at a piece of paper thinking, “I need an idea.” You have it when you’ve been staring at that piece of paper for an hour, you go off and you make a cup of tea, you’re chatting to someone and then as you’re walking back to your desk you’re like, “Oh, actually, maybe that.”

The ideas come, that default network, when you’re not thinking of them and as soon as you recognise that, you think, “Okay, this idea that my diary needs to be filled with six hours of meetings today is the enemy of good ideas.”

6. You mentioned emails there and staying on the topic of communication, what steps would you recommend that listeners take to re-energise the effectiveness of their communications with their colleagues?

I met a wonderful guy who’s one of the leading British experts on workplace, a guy called Professor Sir Cary Cooper. He’s at Manchester University and he did an exercise where he asked workplaces to not email on Fridays and I’ve heard this a few times now. I’ve heard no-meetings Thursday, I’ve heard no-email Friday -just little hacks to try and get you to interact in different ways. Probably the best way I’ve seen it is where organisations think about creating little social interactions between people.

What you find is that if you’ve chatted someone socially, you’re ten times more likely to chat to them for business purposes in the following week. So this little bumping into each other, they do have a benefit to them and one agency told me they have something called ‘Crisp Thursday’. So Crisp Thursday and it sounds too silly to ever mention it, but their receptionist came up with it. She bought eight packs of Kettle Chips. She put them out on paper plates one Thursday. She said it’s Crisp Thursday. Anyway, people enjoyed it so much, going to chat to random different people or chatting to that person you’ve meant to speak to all week. They said, “Okay, we’re going to do this again,” and so it’s become one of those sort of weird family rituals that you have. So they’ve got this thing that every Thursday at four thirty, people just gather, when it’s a special occasion there’s a glass of prosecco or a can of beer, but it’s just an opportunity for people to come together and just quickly say things. With the best will in the world, even when we’re a good typer, typing takes far longer than having a 30-second chat with someone. But what you find is a 30-second chat often leads to good things.

7. And lastly, this is a question that we like to ask all our guests: if you could give our listeners one piece of careers advice, what would that be?

I’ve spent some time thinking recently because I’ve been doing some sort of speaking in schools. I grew up in a council estate in Birmingham and after university, I spent a year unemployed and probably the thing that changed my life was that after a year unemployed, I drew a cartoon CV of my life and I have to tell you, you can imagine, I didn’t have much to go in there, but it was a four-page cartoon CV and it was transformational for me.

I was getting rejected. Well, I wasn’t even getting replies to all these letters and all of the sudden I would get people phoning me up, I was just invited in and it really changed my life and the thing that makes me think then is that it’s probably far easier than you think to get someone’s attention if you show that there’s something different about you, there’s some value in you.

And I have to say, just to illustrate, there was nothing special about me. I got a job at Capital Radio and when I went to the interview, they said, “You were the worst person we’ve ever interviewed”, but because your CV has gone around the office and everyone was rooting for you, we have three jobs and we thought, “We’ve got to give cartoon boy a chance”.

But you know, it’s just an illustration for me. So I always say to kids, “Look, I get zero letters a week, zero. Occasionally in relation to Twitter, I get someone who’s angry about something writing to me, but if you send something that looks like it’s been created with love and attention that lands on someone’s desk, you can reach anyone’s desk in the country. You can reach Richard Branson’s desk, I bet you. I bet you can reach anyone you want to reach, you’ll reach their desk.

And so as soon as you realise that, you’ll be like, “Okay, it’s just a question of what I’m going to do to get their attention.” So that cartoon CV changed my life.

 

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