Q &A
A best-selling author and ‘tech supremo’ discusses how constant connectivity can lead to burnout.
You believe connectivity is one of two megatrends (along with artificial intelligence) that are profoundly altering the way we work. Talk a bit about how near-constant connectedness affects our lives.
Smartphones have fundamentally transformed our relationship with our jobs. We are now connected to work on the train, on the bus, and even on the couch. If you ask workers ‘what makes for a good boss?’, one thing they will mention is how quickly their boss responds to their emails. We all want people to answer us as quickly as possible, and the end result of this is that the average work day has increased by two hours in the last 15 years. Work has also invaded our weekends. One study found that 60 per cent of professionals remain connected to work for 13.5 hours per day during the week and another five hours on weekends — adding up to over 70 hours of connectivity per week. It is no coincidence that at the same time this is happening, more and more people feel exhausted.
You have held senior positions at two of the world’s most high-profile companies, Google and Twitter. When did the issue of workplace burnout become apparent to you?
A few years ago, I found myself in a situation where the people I worked with were exhibiting clear signs of burnout — and it made me realize that I was exhibiting some of the same symptoms. Then, in a single year, 40 per cent of the people in Twitter’s London office left. When that volume of people leaves in such a short timeframe, it forces you as a leader to be honest and to confront things.
In some of the early episodes of my podcast, you can literally hear the penny dropping for me. I would be chatting with someone and they would say, ‘You know what? Open plan offices are actually a disaster.’ I thought, really? I had no idea that there was research on that. I had a dawning realization that there are actually a lot of things we can do to make work less awful for people. I looked around for evidence from Psychology, Neuroscience and other sources about the causes of burnout, and I found plenty of it — but it was fragmented, and very little of it was reaching the people who needed it most. That’s why I wrote the book.
Is workplace joy the responsibility of the employee or the employer?
In a dream world, enlightened bosses would reduce the amount of emails and meetings we all have — but I have seen no evidence that many such bosses exist. We could wait around forever for our employers to work this out for us. I realized that changing a culture is something we can all contribute to. During my research, I found one organization where the receptionist had changed the culture; and I went into a high-burnout hospital where a nurse had taken steps to change her culture for the better. We can all stage interventions that will make our experience at work better.
More than anything, I’m hopeful that if enough people look at the way we’re working right now with honest eyes, they will realize that it isn’t right. But we can fix this. We need to accept that the demands on us have changed and adapt to them. My hope is that the small interventions I write about in the book will allow everyone to improve their work life a little bit.
What are some of the key lessons you have learned about workplace productivity?
I was blown away by some fascinating work out of MIT: The researchers put tracking devices on people and could tell within a few weeks which offices were creative and productive and which ones weren’t. One thing they quickly established was how little meetings and emails contribute to getting things done. In this study, the number one thing that determined creativity and productivity was the amount of face-to-face conversations. That is so interesting, because face-to-face conversation is becoming an endangered behaviour. We need to dial down the number of meetings and dial up the number of conversations.
The next thing that comes to mind is that many of us feel physically overwhelmed by the number of people that surround us — particularly when we work in a big, open floor plan. Should organizations deliberately put walls up, rather than take them down? And more broadly, are teams and organizations just too big? Should we aim for teams of 30 people, rather than 200? I don’t know the answers, but we’re not even asking these questions at the moment.
You held a series of prominent roles at Twitter. What learnings can its culture provide to other organizations?
At Twitter we always worked from the perspective that we didn’t yet have it right, so we experimented a lot. For one thing, we tried a very ambitious program to see if we could cut the amount of time we spent in meetings in half. I’ve been a long-term advocate of this. We published a set of rules and we expected our people to hold us accountable. We also did a lot of ‘silent meetings’, where we used laptops and Google Docs and we all read the same document and added comments to it. It was deeply uncomfortable the first time we tried it, but by the third time people realized, ‘This is way more productive’. That sense of experimentation is an important takeaway from my time at Twitter.
One of your suggestions is to have at least one ‘Monk Mode Morning’ each week. Please explain.
This means setting aside a few hours each week where you avoid all distractions and interruptions. You silence your phone and log out of email. Georgetown University Professor Cal Newport coined this term along with ‘deep work’, which he defines as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to the limit.” He told me that he is seeing more entrepreneurs — especially CEOS of start-ups — doing Monk Mode Mornings, where they say, ‘As far as anyone is
At Twitter we tried to see if we could cut the amount of time we spent in meetings in half.
concerned I am only reachable starting at 11 a.m. or noon on Tuesdays; before that I am not available for meetings, I’m not going to answer an email and I’m not going to answer the phone.’
Entire organizations can adopt the idea that the first part of each day is depth time, and the second part is for other things. This is an approach that resonates with Harvard Professor Teresa Amabile’s recommendation that we adopt a ‘mixed model’ of work — a blend of quiet time and co-mingling. To Amabile, getting meaningful work done “means ruthlessly guarding protected blocks of the work week and shielding staff from the distractions and interruptions that are the normal condition of organizational life.”
How important is it for leaders to model this approach to work?
It’s very important, but sadly, most do not. Elon Musk was in the news just a few months ago talking about how the secret of his success is working 100 hours a week. There are a lot of young people who will think, ‘I want to be like him, so that’s what I need to do’. They’re actually putting themselves on a surefire path to burnout.
No one wants to be a bad boss. What does a good boss look like?
There’s an old truism that people resign from their managers, not their job. According to University of Tulsa Professor Robert Hogan, three-quarters of American adults say the worst aspect of their job is their immediate boss. If you want to stem the flood of people resigning from a team, the first thing you should do is look at the manager.
What makes for a good boss? The first thing is, quite simply, to be supportive. Our desire to be valued by our manager is so great that even if all they do is say how amazing we are, that can actually improve our performance because it encourages our sense of engagement. Researchers who studied people working for very generous bosses — who, if anything, overrated their teams — found that ‘praise inflation’ invariably worked. In contrast, those whose bosses were more critical often ended up quitting. They tended to interpret negative feedback not as a spur to improve but as a brake on likely future success.
Indeed, it has been shown that good managers have even more impact than higher salaries. That is the conclusion that was drawn from a role-play experiment carried out in Spain and the U.S. in which teams were given a challenge and managers were instructed to direct them as they saw fit. It was found that managers who communicated motivationally were more effective than those who offered rewards. In the view of the researchers, the best thing that managers can do is to tell their team to work hard, remind them that they are well paid — and get out of the way!
I’m basically saying that no matter where you work, here are 30 interventions you can try, and each one can make your work one per cent better. If you implement just five of them, chances are very good that it will take the edge off of the exhaustion you feel.
Take the importance of laughter. If you ask someone how important it is to laugh with their colleagues, they will probably downplay it. But when you then look at the research, it shows that laughter forges better connections between teammates and makes them more resilient. Everyone wants that. These hacks can help start a team discussion around the importance of things like laughter, ‘no email weekends’, and committing to taking a lunch break at least two or three times a week.
Last night I found myself plowing through emails at midnight after putting in a 10-hour day. What’s the one joy-generating hack you think I should adopt today?
Sleep is a very important one. I run to work four days a week, but when I’m really exhausted, I choose to go for another half hour of sleep rather than exercise. That might seem like a poor choice, but I’ve realized I feel much better when I get a good night’s sleep. As proof of that, researchers have found that Prozac gives users a 1.8-point lift on the scale that is used to measure depression, while a good night’s sleep achieves a six-point lift. It’s just about the best thing you can do to improve your mood and productivity.
So, close that laptop screen early (so the light doesn’t affect your brain) and get a good night’s sleep. It won’t make your work disappear — but you will feel much better when you tackle it the next day.
Bruce Daisley is the author of Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job (Harperone, 2020). He hosts an Apple #1 business podcast called Eat Sleep Work Repeat and formerly ran Twitter’s business in Europe, Middle East and Africa.