The Secret To Loving Your Work with Bruce Daisley | E66

You were the VP of Twitter. Obviously, Donald Trump has just been booted off Twitter permanently. What do you think about that?

There's a 70-year-long study out of, uh, Yale University looking at what these- the secret of longevity and happiness is. And the secret of longevity and happiness is...

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Work, the thing we spend the majority of our lives doing. Today's guest is an expert on exactly that. How can you be an expert on work? Bruce Daisley spent the last five to 10 years studying what makes work joyous, what makes it miserable, how we get burnt out, and what matters the most when it comes to work. He's been named one of the most influential Londoners in the UK. He's been named as one of the most influential Britons in the United Kingdom. Bruce Daisley's book, The Joy of Work, became the best-selling business hardback book in 2019. He has his own podcast, so he's one hell of a talker as well. And as the world has transitioned over the last 10 months to this Zoom-centric remote working lifestyle, I think now is a great time to ask ourselves the question, what makes work enjoyable? How can we get the most out of work? How do we avoid burnout? And how do we maximize our motivation? Bruce has the answers. So without further ado, my name is Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. And I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

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Bruce, you, uh, you wrote a sm- I feel like that's an understatement. You wrote a smash hit book about work called The Joy of Work, and I've seen this book absolutely everywhere. It's been an absolute phenomenon. So you know, considering the fact that the world has fundamentally shifted over the last nine, 10 months because of this pandemic, and the way we work has changed so much, I wanted to get your view of this remote working, Zoom, um, sort of working culture that has now been forced upon us. Just before I let you answer, I'm gonna give a little sentence around- around my take on it. I hate it, um, and when- when- in March, when we were forced a- as a CEO of a business to tell my employees that we're gonna be working from home, and we have this amazing office which gives us all this community, um, I know that about 50% of my workforce liked the idea, but I 100% hate it for a number of reasons. What's your take?

So I think at the outset, I shared some of your reservations. Brené Brown talks about this thing which is collective effervescence, and it's a- it's a good way, she's- she's coined a term for something you see quite a lot in social science, that even the introverts amongst us actually quite like being around people in- in some scenarios. And we get, uh, far more of our energy from the tribe we're in and the people we're surrounded with than we'd probably admit. And so when it first happened, look, the defining thing about work for me is laughing every day. I- y- if I laugh every day, and I, you know, in the organizations I've been in, they've been at times incredibly stressful. We've had, you know, at times when I was at Twitter, there was just, for good reason, there was like big headlines demanding stressful scenarios. But either the sort of the dark humor that you find in those moments or the moments of levity that you can just get if you're around people that you trust, soldiers talk about this or firefighters talk about this, you know, you can find humor, and I used to love that. And so the idea of shifting to a world where somehow we're plugging into the matrix and we were losing that camaraderie, that kinship that we get from being around other people, I wasn't necessarily the- the- the biggest advocate of it. I think what's clear though is that we've fundamentally moved into a- a different world, and some of those preconceptions that we might have had might have been partly ill judged. So- so- so working through those things, the- the number one thing we know, uh, 91% of people say they want to continue working in some capacity. When you look at the numbers of that, people say, broadly say they want to work at home three or four days a week. So there's f- some firms saying, "We're gonna let people work one day a week or two days a week at home." People, workers want to work more than that. So there's gonna be some degree of- of balance and we're gonna achieve an equilibrium. That's, so that's the- the demand side of it, and in fact, when you look at all age groups, uh, young or old, there is a slight difference. So younger workers have said that they were, they're happy at home, but they- they, it's close to how happy they were in the office, and we can partly understand that. A lot of young workers don't have home offices. They don't have nice desks. They're sitting on their bed or they're- they're sitting on their table that sits at the- the end of their bed. So they're working in slightly different scenarios. But even they report they're more productive and happier than- than they were in a big open plan office. So that's the first thing. Older workers are significantly happier. If you've got a bit of space, it seems to correlate with you feeling really happy. So broadly, all of the evidence suggests actually the- the experience of it has been at least on balance positive.