Running one of Europe’s biggest tech companies by day, a giant of the podcasting world and best-selling author by night, Bruce Daisley might just be the workplace superhero we need for these troubled times.
He’s here to save us from open-plan offices, from smartphones and, perhaps most of all, from ourselves. “Half of all office workers feel burnt out,” he says. “They just feel exhausted. I was personally exhausted. People I worked with were exhausted.”
Armed with a mouse and a keyboard, he went online for a solution. But an Amazon search for books on improving the working environment yielded little. So instead he picked up a microphone, quizzing experts for a podcast that would perhaps run to six episodes. There are now more than 70 episodes of Eat Sleep Work Repeat. Its focus on happiness and work culture, with a blend of interviews with psychologists, neuroscientists and workplace experts, has made it the number one business podcast in the UK.
This year Daisley added another weapon to his arsenal. His book, The Joy of Work, quickly became a Sunday Times business bestseller.
“The podcast became a success way beyond what I expected. Penguin approached me asking me to turn it into a book. None of it was ever intended. It has all developed as it went along.”
A very modern malaise
Daisley’s crusade taps into a very modern malaise: we spend more time at work and we spend more of our time away from work still working. “Half of us are in this cortisone-drenched state of anxiety and stressed,” he says. “If the first thing you to say to people when they ask you how you are is ‘busy’, you are probably in a more of a stressed state than you would readily admit.”
In part he blames the workplace itself. “One of the issues we’ve probably got in regards to the modern workplace is they’re constructed too much for aesthetics and too little for utility,” he says. “When we look at the modern workplace, something that photographs well – a beautiful, modern, open-plan office with big windows – seems to be the enemy of productivity.”
He recognises that this view – that open plan is inherently flawed – is not universally shared. The other side of this argument is that it’s bad deployment that is to blame. To Daisley this is a “force of nonsense”.
“You can’t say the use of open-plan offices is bad but the design is good. If something is continuously being used badly then it’s badly designed.” (Twitter, where Daisley is vice president for EMEA, has an open-plan office, albeit one with “space to escape”.)
State of continuous partial attention
We are all also complicit, of course. The smartphone, says Daisley, has rendered us in a “state of continuous partial attention”. Our efforts at multi-tasking are far less successful than we think. Here, he says, we should go into ”monk mode” for periods and focus on deep work. And our best work – or our best creative work – doesn’t come when we put ourselves under the most pressure.
“While a small amount of pressure can make us more productive, when we are at those excessive levels of pressure it is at the expense of our creativity.” Ideas often come when we are in a “distracted daydreaming state”, perhaps in the shower. Consider this: Aaron Sorkin, writer of the West Wing, has 8-10 showers a day.
How to fix a broken work culture
Daisley identifies 30 ways to fix a broken work culture – from the importance of eating, sleeping and laughing to diversity.
And he’s not averse to putting the boot into his own sector. “There has been much misdirection by the tech sector, so much peacocking of their cultures. I love working at Twitter and it has been an incredible cultural environment to be in, but I know there are other parts of the tech sector that hide often quite toxic cultures behind the guise of being quite well-loved consumer products.”
So is he optimistic that work – and the workplace – will improve? “I’m not optimistic at all,” he says with disarming frankness. “Some places will get better and some will get way, way worse. The lesson of the last few years is that we have taken work and just added more and more to it – more e-mails, more meetings – and that’s why everyone is increasingly exhausted and burnt out.”
While the likes of Daisley can help, ultimately we may need to reach for the work-related superhero inside.
The Joy of Work is available on Amazon and in bookshops now.
Bruce Daisley will be speaking at EG’s Future of Manchester event on 4 July at the city’s Victoria Warehouse. He joins a fantastic line up, which includes Manchester International Festival creative director Mark Ball, WeWork senior director Sarah Walters, Manchester City Council chief executive Joanne Roney, and Ged King who has been offering free haircuts to Manchester’s homeless. His Skullfades Foundation now also offers food, hygiene kits, help with addiction, even providing training in becoming a barber. Tickets cost just £49 and are available at www.egi.co.uk/future-of-manchester/
Click below to listen to Daisley on EG’s Future of Real Estate podcast
To send feedback, e-mail damian.wild@egi.co.uk or tweet @DamianWild or @estatesgazette
