I’m absolutely delighted that my guest this week is Bruce Daisley, VP EMEA at Twitter. Not only is Bruce a senior Twitter executive he is also a passionate advocate of using science to improve workplace culture. He runs a hugely successful podcast on the topic called Eat Sleep Work Repeat and is currently at the top of the bestseller lists with his book The Joy Of Work.
In our interview, we talk about some of the things he has learnt studying workplace culture as well as Twitter’s plans for the future.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why Bruce started his podcast and who he feels has been his stand out guests
• Why science often flies in the face of everyday workplace habits and practices
• Interventions to stop burn out.
• Why most meetings are ineffective
• Physiological safety in the workplace
• The science of diversity
Bruce also talks about what’s next for Twitter.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:08]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 168 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’m absolutely delighted that my guest this week is Bruce Daisley, VP Emea at Twitter. Not only is Bruce a senior Twitter executive, he’s also a passionate advocate of using science to improve workplace culture. He runs a hugely successful podcast on the topic called Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat and is currently at the top of the bestseller lists with his book, the Joy of Work. In our interview, we talk about some of the things he’s learned studying workplace culture, as well as Twitter’s plans for the future. Enjoy.
Matt Alder [00:01:51]:
Hi, Bruce, and welcome to the podcast.
Bruce Daisley [00:01:54]:
Thank you. It’s nice to be on someone else’s podcast for a change. So it’s. It’s good to be a guest.
Matt Alder [00:02:00]:
Absolutely. Well, it’s a. It’s a pleasure to have you as a guest. For anyone who might not know who you are, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Bruce Daisley [00:02:10]:
Yeah, well, I work in my day job at Twitter. I help run Twitter’s business in Europe. So sort of we’ve got very capable leaders in France, in uk, in Spain, and so I work with them, so I’m responsible for that. And then I guess my side hustle, in the modern vernacular, is that I’m a work culture obsessive. So one of the expressions of that has been that I’ve basically done a podcast for the last couple of years about work culture called Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, where I was just following my passion, my. My personal interest of how to make my own job more rewarding and to make the team I worked with more satisfied. And then about a year ago, I got a request by Penguin Random House. They said, would you be interested in turning that into a book? And so. So I’m also the author of the. Of the book called the Joy of Work. So, so I’ve got multiple things that I do.
Matt Alder [00:03:15]:
Really fantastic. And I want to talk about the, the, the book in a second. But, but before we do, you know, always interested in talking about, talking about podcasts. So, you know, your podcast is great, incredibly successful, and, you know, I’m obviously a big fan, as you can tell. Could you, for people who, who may not have listened to it, could you just kind of give us a flavor of what it’s about? Maybe sort of talk about, you know, who have been sort of a couple of standout guests that you’ve had on the show in the last year or so?
Bruce Daisley [00:03:46]:
Yeah. So the podcast is about happiness and work culture. It’s about sort of making work better. And so I was just interested. Here’s what happened. My, my job at Twitter, the. I’ve been very fortunate that people used to say, you know, the London office of Twitter was this remarkable, energizing, positive place to work. And then I observed a couple of years ago that, you know, things were getting a bit harder. There were, you know, the thing, the things that previously had been motivating, maybe sort of were no longer as motivating. And so I was just interested. And I found myself one Christmas thinking, I’m gonna look into a bit of this. I’m gonna maybe go on Amazon, search for a good book on work culture, and maybe spend my holiday reading how to improve the work culture. I noticed there was nothing on work culture. So I’ve spent about 65, 66 episodes interviewing the world’s leading experts on worker culture. And I’ve been very fortunate that tenacity has often got me to speak to the biggest names in the world. And, you know, the thing I was, I found remarkable, and the thing I was swept away by was the fact that a lot of the stuff that we do in our jobs is completely undermined by the science. So people who’ve done science investigation into how to improve work often recommend something very different to what we end up doing. So, you know, whether that’s open plan offices or whether that’s just, you know, the way that we over schedule our day days, scientists seem to say that actually we should be taking a very different approach. So my feeling each week is, can I give people, you know, 25, 30 minutes science of how to. How to improve their jobs?
Matt Alder [00:05:34]:
Fantastic. And you kind of mentioned that you’ve had, you know, some of the sort of world’s leading experts on, I know it’s really unfair to ask, but, you know, who have Been some, some of the sort of standout guests for you.
Bruce Daisley [00:05:44]:
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the world’s number one expert on work is a guy called Professor Adam Grant. And a few people might have encountered him. He’ he’s a Wharton professor, and he’s just incredible. He spent his, you know, his short career, he’s only sort of mid-30s, but he’s publishing some of the most captivating papers about work and purpose and our jobs. So he’s done a fabulous job there. And he, you know, the remarkable thing is that I found emailing people saying that you’ve got this podcast and you just want 30 minutes of people time. People, sign people are remarkably generous. And so he was, you know, he was astonishing. I spoke to the world’s number one architect because I wanted to understand when architects are designing offices, are they aware that the toxins that open plan is creating? And so I spoke to the world’s leading architect, a guy called Bjarka Ingalls. And it was, you know, the process of learning about architecture. I spent three weeks preparing for that interview, you know, every night reading architecture websites and papers and books, actually. So it’s, it’s, you know, when you then get set to sit down with those people, that was captivating. And I guess, you know, there’s a couple of people who, through finding their research, probably less well known, but I was just blown away because I was so inspired by their work. And a woman called Zainabtan, who won’t mean her name, won’t mean anything to anyone, but she set around trying to create good jobs for people in retail. Actually, she found that. She’s a professor of operations, and she found that businesses that created good working cultures were twice as profitable as those who weren’t. And so armed with that evidence, she started to find a way for firms really to create good working cultures for their retail workers. And then she’d set about saying, hang on, now we’ve got the proof that retail companies that create good culture are more profitable. Could we use that evidence to improve the lives of 10 million people in retail? I mean, what a sense of mission, what a sense of purpose. And I think, you know, a real inspiration for me. So Zeynepton might not be a sort of household name, but. But in terms of changing people’s lives, I think if any of us could find ourselves changing 10 million lives, then what an honor. You know, what an incredible service.
Matt Alder [00:08:23]:
Fantastic stuff. So moving on to the. Moving on to the book, the Joy of Work. Now, the subtitle is 30 Ways to Fix your work culture and fall in love with your job again. Could you sort of give us a bit of a taster of what some of those, some of those, some of those things are?
Bruce Daisley [00:08:42]:
Yeah, well, my obsession was work culture, sort of. As I mentioned at the outset, my, my obsession was how can we make things better around here? How can we improve what it’s like to work around here? And, and what I immediately realized, what I came to the realization was, was that quite often you can’t improve things until you’ve made people feel less overwhelmed by their jobs. So, you know, so the, the book, actually, the reason why it ended up being 30 interventions is that 12 of them are just a way to feel less burnt out in your job yourself. You know, I read an article the other day, yesterday actually in GQ magazine, saying maybe it’s not too early to call 2019 the year of burnout. And I think, you know, we’re increasingly seeing this narrative of burnout. It’s, it’s permeating all corners of the dialogue and the discussion about modern work. And, you know, my feeling was let’s try and give people interventions to try and feel less burnt out. And I think then I go on and look at the way that, I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily describe this job as a book for a leader, but I think, you know, these definitely leaders could buy it for their teams or it could be something that you could actually have as a team off site to discuss the content in there. Because the next 10 interventions are how to improve sync in your team and the final eight, how to create sort of a buzz state where quite often, you know, you’ll hear leaders say, you know, there was a real buzz to that place. And what I found was that there was very clear science of how create a bud state. So I was interested in that and I’ve just been blown away by the response. So it’s been Sunday Times number one bestseller for the whole of January. It was, you know, it was just behind Michelle Obama in the overall hardback sales. So it’s just, I think the sales have swept me away. But the, probably the really interesting thing is that a lot of people have contacted me saying, you know, I bought this for my whole, I’ve read it, I bought it, and I then bought it for my whole team. And it seems like there’s something in there combination of answering the burnout that a lot of us are feeling, combined with some very practical ways that we could all improve our jobs, that seems to have really hit a Chord with people.
Matt Alder [00:10:55]:
Fantastic stuff. I particularly like the section that you did about meetings and how ineffective they are.
Bruce Daisley [00:11:03]:
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, meetings are the tax of modern working. And the average British person spends 16 hours a week in meetings or two days a week in meetings. The average manager, according to Harvard Business Review, spends three days a week in meetings. So, look, you know, it’s this sort of tax on us. It’s demanding so much of our time. And I think increasingly we find ourselves in this sort of conflicted state where we know that the meetings that we’re in are awful and are a drain on our energy, but we’re scared, we’re reluctant to admit it. And so, you know, my feeling was, okay, is that. Is that just my feeling, is that universal? What I found was, look, you know, a lot of people are feeling exactly the same. And so consequently, I wanted to. I wanted to look at the evidence of when meetings are good, when meetings are bad. And what you find is like one of the secret sources of great work culture is something called psychological safety. When workplaces achieve psychological safety, then it seems. Seems to. It seems to put their culture into an elevated state. And psychological safety is this fascinating thing where it’s the ability to speak up to bosses, it’s the ability to speak candidly. And what you find about psychological safety is that small meetings are better able to achieve it than big meetings. So if you’ve got five people in a meeting, people are more likely to tell the boss what they really think than if you’ve got 20 people. Now, that’s also the quickest way. Reducing the amount of people in meetings is the quickest way to reduce the burden of meetings on us. So. So, you know, the more time, the fewer people we have in meetings, the less time the whole company is spending in meetings.
Matt Alder [00:12:56]:
Really, from a recruiting perspective, obviously many people listening are in recruiting roles within, within companies. What would your message be to employers they take from the book that’s going to help them attract the talent they need to their businesses?
Bruce Daisley [00:13:14]:
I think, you know, I talk about a number of things and a number of things that I think are relevant to recruiting. One of the things that was really interesting for me was the science on diversity. And I don’t think any of us have escaped any messages about diversity over the last couple of years, but it’s just a good reminder that, you know, diversity, quite often when recruiters are recruiting, they might find themselves hiring for culture fit. You know, you quite often hear this, that people say, People say, oh, you know, we want to Hire people are going to fit in, people who, who are going to be good to go down the. The pub. You know, I’m chatting to one person who said, you know, we do exactly that. We want to hire people who are going to have the same energy that we’re going to have. It’s going to be sort of people we’d love to have a beer with. And so for me, it was just a good reminder to go and look at some of the science of diversity. And what you find with diversity is there’s a wonderful case study from Harvard where they put groups of Harvard frat house and they put them into teams and they had two of them in a team and they gave them a murder mystery. And then 10 minutes in, another team member was introduced and that was another member of the frat house. And then about five minutes later, a final member came in. Now, half the time this was a member of the frat house, and half the time this was a stranger, someone who wasn’t in the frat house. What happened? Well, the people who had another member of the frat house come into the game enjoyed it considerably more. They loved it. Being around people like us was way more enjoyable. However, when you look at the results, the people who were just in all frat house teams got the answer right on the murder mystery puzzle they were given. They got the answer right 29% of the time. The people who were in the diverse group with the stranger got the answer right 59% of the time. So diversity, even though it was less comfortable, it made the teams twice as effective. And I think that’s one of the important things when it comes to recruitment. Quite often people might say, look, we want someone who’s going to fit in. It’s going to have someone who’s got to have the same energy, someone who, you know, feels like they’ll fit in. And it’s just a good reminder that that might be the first person who gets through the recruitment process, but actually doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in service of being a better team. And I think it’s good reminder for me.
Matt Alder [00:15:45]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:15:46]:
I mean, that makes. That makes perfect sense. So normally on the show, my final question is to kind of ask my guest about their vision for the future and what’s kind of going on in their world and what’s on their radar. And I think it would be really remiss of me not to ask you a question about Twitter. So what’s. What’s kind of next for Twitter? What can we sort of look Forward to over the next sort of 18 months, two years. When it comes to the sort of, the further evolution of. Of the platform.
Bruce Daisley [00:16:17]:
Yeah, I think where Twitter’s at its best, I think, you know, it’s a recognition that it’s a. It’s a platform for. It’s not a look at me platform. I think, you know, right, we’ve got a lot of apps on our phone which are all about, look at the beautiful meal I’m eating, look at the beautiful sunset I’m watching, look at me glammed up to go out somewhere. And Twitter’s decidedly not a look at me platform. It’s a look at that platform. Right. It’s like, oh, wow, I’m really fascinated with what’s happened here. Or here’s something funny that happened on my train this morning. It’s a look at that. It’s sort of, you know, we share links with something that inspired us. So I think, you know, now we’re really clear on that. And I think, you know, our audience is continuing to grow. We just, just posted sort of 9% growth figures. Our audience is continuing to grow for that, that news case. You know, if you’re in recruitment, then it’s the quickest way to connect with other recruiters. If you’re. If you’re interested in work culture, it’s the quickest way to see what people are talking about, worker culture. So it’s a great gift be to. Connected to. To people in that way. I think our focus then is focusing on facilitating those conversations. How can we make those conversations? Could it feel like you’re in the biggest WhatsApp group for recruitment? So imagine that, but you’re in a WhatsApp group with the best recruiters, the WhatsApp group with people who are maybe in your field. And that’s what we want it to feel like. We want it to feel like it’s an open, global, public conversation, but around the things that you’re interested in. So I think we’re going to do a lot of things that are in service to that. We’re doing a lot of our thinking in public. So, you know, if you follow a few of our product leads and, you know, you can see some of them, if you follow Jack Dorsey, our founder, he’ll often retweet them or people like me will retweet them. And so you’ll see quite often, we did something last year where we tweeted out, we’re saying, look, because we want to facilitate conversation, we’re thinking of having just an Icon at the top of your timeline of who’s online right now. A lot of people immediately replied saying, I don’t like that. I feel that that would be unwelcome. So that’s what we’re trying to do at the moment. We’re trying to be transparent, to do our sort of product development in public. And really, Twitter has always been at its best when the people who use it have inspired us to develop the changes. So we’re trying to do more of that, really.
Matt Alder [00:18:41]:
So final, final question. Where can people find you? Where can they find you? Where can they find the book, and where can they find the podcast?
Bruce Daisley [00:18:48]:
Yeah, so I think I mentioned, you know, the book was number one business bestseller. So, you know, it’s. It’s sort of very discoverable on Amazon. I was, you know, so the joy of work is the book. And, you know, I’m always keen for people to reach out to me on LinkedIn if they’ve. If they’ve read the book or if they’ve listened to the podcast. So the podcast is Eat, sleep, work, repeat, where it all began, really. And look, I think all of us are inspired and motivated to try and improve the jobs we’re in. And that’s not just if you’re the boss. That’s just all of us, really. So, yeah. And you can also find me on Twitter, of course.
Matt Alder [00:19:27]:
Bruce, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bruce Daisley [00:19:29]:
Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m so grateful.
Matt Alder [00:19:32]:
My thanks to Bruce Daisley. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
