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Transcript:

Hello! Welcome to the final episode of series 4, where I draw together some of the pearls of wisdom that my brilliant guests have shared throughout this series. Think of it as a pick and mix treat, where you can dip in and out of the different episodes and decide which conversation you want to go back and fully indulge in!

But first my brief news update, starting with a public service reminder that on Saturday 25^th March, the end of of the week this episode airs, the clocks will be going forward in the UK. Whilst I’m so ready for the warmer, longer hours of sunshine that BST heralds, I do hate losing that hour! It’s hard enough to stick to a good sleep schedule plus being the early riser of the family, that first hour of the day is some very cherished time for myself. It’s hard enough to protect our downtime or deep thinking time as it is.

If you or your team are feeling overwhelmed and overworked right now, don’t miss my free 30 minute webinar ‘Tackle team overload’ this Wednesday 22^nd March at 12 noon GMT. I’ll explain how to 1) frame this problem so your boss will listen 2) help your team get more done in less time, and 3) give your colleagues their time back. Find out more via the link in the show notes or visit helenbeedham.com/work.

And on the topic of giving people time back, I’ve come across a fascinating MIT Sloan study from January 2022 where 76 companies and more than 76,000 employees across 50 countries had introduced between 1-5 meeting-free days each week. This included 1:1 meetings.  What they found was that 2 meeting-free days per week increased productivity by 71% and employee satisfaction by 52%, while 3 meeting-free days per week increased collaboration by 55% and decreased stress by 57%. So if you haven’t slapped a ‘meeting free day’ sticker on at least one day a week in your calendar, get a move on! And share those stats with your team or boss too!  If you want the full findings there’s a link in the show notes, you’ll just need to register on their website first to access it for free.

Finally there’s still time to take advantage of my special offer running throughout March. If you order 100 copies of my book direct from my publisher (via me) before 31^st March at a generous 40% off the retail price, you can book any one of my virtual webinars for your team/network/organisation absolutely free, saving yourself a huge 65% overall. The webinar just needs to be delivered on or before 12^th December this year. If it feels like a headache to distribute physical copies of the book to colleagues, if you’re dispersed globally for example, you can order 100 e-books instead. It’s also possible to order a bespoke edition with your company logo on it, contact me for details about that.

Right, let’s hear now from each of my guests in turn. And when I looked back over our conversations, I noticed they all had insightful and different things to say about how we can stay enthused about work.

Here’s my first guest Professor Jim Detert, Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration and author of 'Choosing Courage: the everyday guide to being brave at work' published by Harvard Business Review Press. Jim reflects here on what led him into researching workplace courage and how our motivations at work generally have evolved since the pandemic.

Jim: I have often thought when I see people, particularly in executive MBA or consulting, people in their let's say forties, people who have been working 20 years or so already. And there's a little bit of a sense of like Thoreau's quote about, most men - of course nowadays it would say people - lead lives of quiet desperation.

And by no means I'm saying the people I work with are desperate, but that sense of, you've been working 10, 15, 20 years and that sense of, is this it? I got 20, 30, 40 years left. Is this it? Am I just on this path where I'm not fully engaged or satisfied, I don't feel fully respected or included or alive, but I don't know what to do. I don't know how to be more agentic. I don't know how to stand up more for myself. I don't know how to be bolder. I don't know. In a lot of cases, I don't know how to have the courage to change organizations or jobs.

And I think that at some level it was that, that continuous emotional sense I got from people of there should be more. How can we find more? That really made a difference in motivating me to to learn more.

Helen: Yeah. And would you say that with the relatively recent rise or focus on purpose-driven careers and responsible purpose-driven businesses that you've seen that need increase and become much more conscious in people over the last 5, 10, 15 years? Or is it that it just varies by age that people get to, is one reference point you just mentioned and I guess the pandemic has inevitably led a lot of people to question what they invest their time and their weeks in, and whether it's worthwhile.

Jim: Yeah. As I know, from your own background and work, it's a little hard to discern which signals, which things we're seeing a lot more of now are really new in the underlying causes versus are just manifesting because the pandemic has finally led people to say enough, or my priorities are now finally different.

As you well know, if you look at things we've been tracking for a long time, like employee engagement, if we look at job satisfaction, true feeling of inclusiveness or commitment to an organization, these have been frankly, bad for a long time way, way, way decades before the pandemic.

It is not news in the pandemic that many people didn't feel trust in their manager, didn't feel the culture of their organization was healthy or fulfilling; all of these things, as you well know, they've been around for a long time. And listeners know that, listeners know their job didn't just suddenly become any of those things in the pandemic.

 What has probably changed for quite, for millions of people around the world is the overall calculus of what will I put up with or what do I want for my life, or what trade offs have I now. I think that has changed. But we've known that the world of work is not really all it could or should be for a really long time.

***

So if you’re the CEO, how do you respond to this, with your leadership team? Alastair Douglas is CEO of the FinTech business TotallyMoney, the credit app for the 20 million adults otherwise overlooked and underserved by the financial services industry. Alastair has pushed the company to build a diverse and inclusive workplace with a rich culture where people love what they do, develop innovative products, and feel empowered to deliver their best work for customers. Here’s Ali talking about how they foster this strong sense of motivation and empowerment.

Ali: So for me it's all about understanding that if you want to have a customer focused product, you need to have a really highly engaged team building that product. Because you can imagine a scenario, I always use tobacco or arms companies , you know, but I'm sure they've got really talented people working for them.

But do they believe in the product and do they get excited about it? Maybe, maybe they do, I don't know. But fundamentally, you're not going to have that good culture. And so the first point is always, okay, well if we want, in the long run, if we want to have the best culture, you can't just be a big company and be like, oh, we're just going to effectively buy a team of 200 to build us something which is customer focused. Because they won't care. People actually need to intrinsically care. So my focus is all about trying to create that environment.

So one of the ways we do that is it's very clear when we're hiring that that's what we're about. We want people to join us because they want to help us make a difference. We don't want people who just want to work in FinTech because they've read that it's cool or, but it's like top five trends in employment in 2019 or whatever it was .

And then secondly, we put a lot of focus into improving staff engagement internally. So we use a tool called Peakon to help us continuously monitor how staff are feeling, what's working well and what's not working well so we can have this continuous build-measure-learn approach to building a better culture.

And we also put a lot of thought into how we can make sure that the team is intrinsically motivated. And that's because our team is effectively very small, there's only less than a hundred of us and everyone is a specialist in what they do.

So you really need to put a lot of thought into making sure that those people have the right environment to succeed. And for us we have drawn a lot of inspiration from the theory which is called self-determination theory. And there was loads of research years ago by Ed Deci and, and so on. And obviously there's been a million books and blog posts written about it all since then. But we've put a lot of thought into autonomy which has always been something we've been very strong on. So we're creating the environment so that our teams can go off and achieve stuff.

***

So you’ve got a motivated team, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all the individual parts are going to work seamlessly with one another. Particularly when we’re not usually taught how to collaborate as part of our education or career development. And experiencing a bad or painful collaboration can really damage our enthusiasm for our role, as my next guest Deb Mashek explains. Previously Full Professor of Social Psychology at Harvey Mudd College in the US, Deb is the author of Collabor(h)ate: how to build incredibly collaborative relationships at work even if you'd rather work alone. An expert in the psychology of close relationships, Deb is Founder of Myco Consulting, where she speaks, advises and provides professional development to those seeking to build better workplace collaborations. Here’s Deb unpacking the psychology of collaboration for us:

Deb: Like we have to figure out who are we interested enough in to pursue a collaboration with? What are our expectations around that relationship? What happens to us internally when people fail to meet those expectations? Are we actually communicating our expectations?  All of these things are relevant in our close relationships with our friends, with our families, and certainly in our workplace relationships.

And now she explains the impact, positive and negative, that collaborative relationships can have on our levels of engagement and motivation and why she wrote Collabor(h)ate:

Deb: I think so many of us who write these books are noodling on some sort of challenge. And so figuring out for myself and then wanting to share it with others, around this question of what is relevant about the psychology of close relationships to these workplace relationships that are so critically important.

So we know when our collaborative relationships at work are going well, that we're more engaged at work, that we're more satisfied at work, that we have better mental health, so lower anxiety, lower depression. So all of these things matter.

And I imagine we might talk a little bit about some of the things that we get wrong about collaboration, but it's ... It's really hard to do well, and so the goal was to make this curriculum, as it were, about the psychology of relationships available to a wider audience, because so many of us really do want to collaborate well.

We know it's essential. We can see how good things happen in terms of how we solve the world's most trickiest problems through collaboration. But if we don't have a roadmap, we encounter problems, we encounter pitfalls, tension mounts and projects fizzle, and you can end up with really good people walking away.

So I wanted to bring some wisdom to this shared challenge.

***

That conversation really got me reflecting on all the different collaborations I’ve been involved in and why some felt like a joyous breeze and others I just wanted to run a mile from!

A big part of staying engaged and motivated at work is about knowing how to deal with setbacks or what to do when things don’t work out the way we’d hoped. Part of this is about resilience and being able to bounce back emotionally from difficult or unsuccessful experiences. Part of this is also about a willingness to experiment and to use the results to inform what you do next. My guest Jonathan Bond, Global Director of HR and Learning at the law firm Pinsent Masons, shares a great example of this from his own work.

Jonathan: There's lots of things that I have a go at and I think it's important not to be too reserved and not to be too cautious and, okay the legal sector is probably not known for it's wide innovation, but I think it's important to, to try new things. And so last year, I decided, I had this instinct that we could create what I called an attrition risk dashboard.

And my instinct was telling me if we get the data and we look at lawyers, for example, who've got a high sickness, very busy, high utilization, and very low usage of holidays. If you put those things together, my instinct was telling me that those people, we are at risk of losing them to a competitor.

Because that does sort of make sense logically, and quite rightly one of my great team members said to me, "well, yes, that sounds as though it makes sense, let's run a proof of concept, shall we?" I agreed, then ran a proof of concept and it proved there was absolutely no correlation whatsoever between those factors and high attrition rate in lawyers!

So on one level you could say my idea was wrong, and you could say, the time we spent on that was worthless. But I don't see it that way. The way I see it is it was right to explore that instinct. . And once I discovered that on that occasion my instinct wasn't correct, that then led to a further conversation about, well what can we do with this information? How can we present attrition information better to the Board? And what other trends can we see? And we're now on a second iteration of that. So a bit like Edison on the light bulb: all these previous attempts, they're not failures, they're just sort of early prototypes, which ultimately lead to something more valuable.

So I have this enthusiasm. I don't really give up, and if something doesn't work, I'm, I'm more than happy to say to my team, "yeah, okay, that didn't work. Let's find something that will" and stay positive and try and build from that.

Helen: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think, you know, encouraging that experimentation, trialing stuff, looking at what the data says about when you've had a go at something, when you've designed or implemented something. Does it support your hypothesis at the beginning, that's very scientific thinking, isn't it? And it's very growth mindset oriented. It's like, let's have a hypothesis, let's try something, let's test it, let's look at the data and then let's decide what we do from there, and I think that scientific experimentation can really help move you forward as a business.

Jonathan: It really can.

***

Something that has garnered much attention lately is the question of whether reducing working time is a better way to foster more engaged, productive employees, with the success of the UK’s pilot of the 4 day working week being widely shared and celebrated. A recent podcast guest was Joe O’Connor, Director and co-founder of the world's first Centre of Excellence in Work Time Reduction and former CEO of 4 Day Week Global, co-leaders of the UK trial. It was really interesting to hear Joe talk about the substantial motivational benefits of moving to a shorter work week. Here’s Joe:

 Joe: What we've seen with a lot of the leaders and organizations that we've worked with over the years is that often when you use the four day week as a forcing function to really take a hard look under the bonnet of your organization and of your business to figure out how can we become more efficient?

How can we become much more prescriptive in terms of how we spend our time? What ends up happening is that the four day week becomes something which is not just a conversation about the number of hours that people are working, but there's a much more fundamental conversation about the way in which we work.

I think the other really powerful dimension that's at play with the four day week is the psychological one. It's the behavioral one.

And it's this idea that, if framed correctly and if positioned correctly within your business, this can really align the objectives and the targets of the business very powerfully with the individual interests of employees. Because let's not forget, this is something that is just so life-changing, so transformative for people individually within their lives, whether it's giving them extra time to spend with family, caring for elderly relatives, childcare, learning new skills, endeavours, spending more time on hobbies, whatever it is that, that people use that extra time. It really holds such value for people that people are very focused and motivated to meet those goals and meet those targets so that the policy can be sustained.

***

Whether you’re up for exploring the 4 day week or considering other ways of managing working time, what’s clear to me is that the deal needs to 1) feel fair to all and 2) allow for a reasonable degree of personalisation within some clear collective guidelines. The details of how to make this work successfully are best developed and agreed by each team; this is exactly the goal I help clients achieve through my Time-Savvy Team workshops, where we identify (and prove) the small changes that will enable the team to work more productively and sustainably. It’s a great way to support colleagues and to get the conversation going about the way people are working. Why not think about organising a workshop or two to mark Stress Awareness Month in April, Mental Health Awareness Week in May or National Work Life Week in October; drop me a note if you want to trial this with one of your teams.

And talking about teams, my next guest shared a fantastic, tried and tested technique for helping team members to process difficult or uncomfortable interactions they have at work, perhaps where they’ve had some feedback that was hard to hear, or when they’re feeling overloaded with all that needs to be done, by yesterday. Alison Jones, founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing, who published my book The Future of Time, launched her second book late last year called ‘Exploratory Writing: everyday magic for life and work’. First, let’s hear Alison explain in a nutshell what exploratory writing is:

Alison: So really what exploratory writing boils down to is putting a decent question that's going to take you forward at the top of your sheet of paper, and then just giving yourself six minutes to write into that. And it's that simple.

Alison goes on to explain how we can use exploratory writing to reflect on what we’re hearing, seeing, thinking and feeling, so that we can re-engage more positively with our work and our colleagues and clients:

Alison: I think there are very few reflection points in the day. We go from one thing to the next; we're talking, we're writing, we're doing. Getting ourselves offline for a few minutes builds in a breathing space and that ability to bring our attention and our focus and give ourselves permission to process an emotion or an experience or a thought or an idea that's niggling away at you before it's lost, is really important.

If you think about when people are studying, if you're doing an MBA, if you are doing a, a professional qualification, they build in reflection because they know how important it is for you not just to do the doing, but to reflect on the doing. And if you think about Kolb's learning cycle, reflection is that really, really key point.

But actually there's very little of that formally built into the workplace. Probably the only really formal space you get to do that is at an end of project reflection or during your appraisal, and both of those are quite politically weighted and in your appraisal, it's linked to your pay! You're not going to be completely honest in that , you're motivated to have a particular approach to something. So having again that neutral, safe space where you can do the reflection that needs to be done to learn the lessons that really are there, rather than trying to manipulate the truth, to reflect a view that you want to give to somebody else, is invaluable. Because then you actually DO learn the learnings and you can take them forward and you can ask the question that's bugging you because you've formulated it properly, or you can respond to the person who has irritated you in an appropriate rather than a passive aggressive way because you've understood what was triggered in you. Whatever it is you've done that work, you've done that work on yourself, and that better equips you to then reengage back in the workplace.

***

It works, I promise you, so give it a go and then spread the word!

A big question that we all wrestle with from time to time is when to persist in an endeavour, or a role, and when to call it a day. How do we weigh up this ‘stick or quit’ decision? My guest last week, Eileen Burbidge MBE, shared her perspective on this as a technology venture capitalist who invests in early stage businesses and looks to grow them on successfully. Eileen is a partner at Passion Capital, non-executive director on a number of fast growing SMEs, the UK Treasury's special Envoy for FinTech and Executive Director at Fertifa, the leading reproductive benefits provider. Here’s a short clip:

Helen: And I'm curious to ask, is there a point at which, is there a a timeframe you'll give yourself to start seeing progress or the benefits or outcomes you're looking to achieve before you decide, okay, maybe this one isn't going to be a runner or maybe I need to pivot in some way? Just curious to hear your take on that.

Eileen: Yeah, I think it depends because it depends on the cost that's being invested, right? And typically again, if it's something where I need to pay my rent or I need to pay school fees, and there's a a meter on that because obviously I've got a very practical consideration.

If that's not at risk, I usually measure it by, am I learning something? What am I getting out of it? Not in, not in terms of materially, but am I learning something? Is this going to help inform something else that I want to do? Something I want to do next? Something else that I saw that was tangential? Somewhere else that I want to go but this will lead me there.

So am I still learning and am I still enjoying it? Is it still net positive as an experience for me because of either what I'm learning, what I'm observing, what I'm soaking up or what I'll be able to apply to something else?`

***

How do you measure the advantages and disadvantages of continuing on your current path vs switching direction? How do you know when you’re no longer engaged or wanting to re-engage in your present role? I’d love to hear, so tweet to me at @helenbeedham, get in touch on Linked In or drop me an email at hello@helenbeedham.com.

My final 2 guests are both Diversity and Inclusion leaders, whose role it is to help ensure that every employee feels supported and able to do their best work and to thrive in the organisation. Dr. Julie Humphreys is Group Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the media group Reach plc, the UK's largest commercial and regional publishers; and Natasha Whitehurst is Global Inclusion Lead at Rolls-Royce, the industrial engineering and technology firm, and Natasha and Julie are the co-founders and co-hosts of 'D&I Spy: Inclusion uncovered', the weekly podcast that brings diversity to life. After a great discussion about what’s on their D&I agenda for this year and how D&I is evolving generally, I asked them both what has helped them to flourish in their own careers and to feel motivated to continue in their line of work. Here’s what they had to say:

Helen: And it sounds like you've been pretty good Natasha at figuring out what is it that I'm enjoying about the work I'm doing, on a regular basis and then following that thread of interest and enjoyment.

Natasha: Yeah. And I think I didn't necessarily have, from an external perspective, those people to help influence or direct my thought. And so actually I've been surrounded by people in my working life who've helped bring that out of me. So that coupled with just curiosity and going, oh, I really like that bit there, how do I make that my day job? So finding the bit that I really love and then following it and finding out along the way that actually I really like certain things that before I'd never really explored.

Helen: And just before we close, looking back on your own careers and the things I guess that have helped you progress or brought you joy as you've worked in your different roles, is there a particular reflection or piece of advice or a resource that has helped you that you would share for the benefit of our listeners?

Julie: For me personally, it's people. Take time to really understand who your supporters are and make the most of them, because that's really helped me in my past where I've been at different crossroads and I've leant into some of the advice that people have been offering and it's been career- changing for me.

Helen: That's wonderful thank you. Natasha?

Natasha: Quite similar. I think for me if we go back to talking about the thread that's gone throughout a career, I think for me there's two things. There's kindness and, and relationships. I think, take the time to foster those relationships.

You don't have to have an official mentor to be mentored and it's by creating and cultivating great relationships with people and stepping out of your box and being a bit uncomfortable, reaching out to people and saying 'can we just have a coffee chat?' And learning a bit more about people's roles and experiences, because that's when I've had those 'aha' moments or I've gone, oh, actually, I'm really interested in that bit about what you do.

***

I hope those snippets of conversation have inspired you to think about your own motivation or your team’s motivation and given you some ideas for ways to reenergise your work mojo if it’s a bit lower than you’d like or nosediving fast.

My thanks to all my guests on this series for sharing their time, experiences and wisdom with the podcast.