Eat Sleep Work Repeat

This week I talk to Josh Krichefski (CEO, Mediacom UK) and Liz Fosslien (co-author of No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed).

Josh explains how they put mental health on the agenda on his firm by starting an honest, open discussion on it. Then we talk to Liz who gives us a users' guide to emotions at work. What can we do to make work a most empathetic way.

The Seligman model we discuss is the '3Ps'. Personalisation, Pervasiveness and Permanence.

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Today's episode is for anyone who is curious about how human's tick. Work ultimately is a practice of the brain and how our brain processes and reacts to things is a fascination to me.

I have a friend who is studying neuroscience and a couple of years ago at someone's wedding I was chatting to him and said 'who should I be reading?' and he said the best voice in the field was a psychologist called Lisa Feldman Barrett. Sure enough I looked her up and her book How Emotions Are Made was dazzling and brilliant. it covers themes of understanding emotions.

One of the things that Lisa believes is that we don' t arrive programmed with emotions, we learn them along the way. The more emotions we're taught to understand the more we can feel. In her book she says people who read fiction books and learn to appreciate nuance of emotion end up feeling a wider range of emotions. She has a new book out. How Emotions Are Made is several hundred pages and her new book 7.5 Lessons About the Brain is much shorter and is very accessible. So if you're looking for a simple explainer about the brain it is a brilliant summary (I have disclose I way preferred the first book).

Along the way you're going to discover that no your dog isn't capable of feeling guilt, we talk about the test (that was in a previous episode) called the Reading The Mind in the Eyes test.

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Around 12 months ago myself and Sue Todd created the new work manifesto. It was an attempt to start the debate about simple things that we can change. You can find it on the podcast website eatsleepworkrepeat.fm.

It's had a briliant response, research companies have asked to help validate it, different professions like doctors and police have been in touch asking if they can adapt it for their working. Lots of companies have told me they've been trying it out with their teams.

One person contacted me and offered to share the experience and learnings of the New Work Manifesto in their team. And that was Tom Kegode. I went down one lunch time a few weeks ago to meet Tom and his team at Lloyds Bank Group. Tom is an innovations programme manager who has helped share the new work manifesto across LBG.

You're going to hear discussion of various parts of the manifesto and the way that people at Lloyds are trying to make work more positive and enjoyable. Round the table were Lloyds employees Sam, Kate, Miranda, Verica, Ben, Jess, Heather, Shirley, Alastair, Dave and of course Tom himself.

If you're interested in using the New Work Manifesto it all on the website, it's not copyright. Use it, change it, remix it, edit it but whatever you do please hit me on linked in or via twitter to tell me how you got on.

This is the last in the series. I'll be back after the summer with a stellar list of the people who have done the best research on work, laughter, philosophy and workplace creativity.

if you want to hear those episodes you're best subscribing via your podcast app.

I appreciate you listening. Please do get in touch.

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"Tuesday and Thursday, see you there. BOOM!"

A lot of us are starting to long for human contact again and the office feels like a happy place to be. But what does the office of the future look like? I chatted to the brilliant Antony Slumbers (follow him on Twitter here). Antony is regarded as a visionary thinker in the real estate market and runs a course for you to learn to be the same.

Antony is incredibly incisive:

• "in the same way we realised we didn't need a shop to go shopping we've realised we don't need an office to do work".
• "no company wants an office, they want a productive workforce"

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Zeynep Ton is a Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

She studies the retail sector and the way that some firms have invested in paying more and doing more for their workers. She studied firms like QuikTrip, Trader Joes, Mercador in Spain - she found that firms that treat their workers better achieve better results.

Quik Trips profit is double the retail average - all of her firms are more profitable and show consistent growth. And this is work that needs doing in 2012 The Independent reported that only 1 in 7 British supermarket workers earned a living wage.

We’ll talk about how they make their jobs happier but the key parts are they make some key decisions upfront (1) offer less (2) standardise and empower their teams (3) they train their workers to do all of the jobs and (4) they operate with slack - with spare capacity.

When I studied Zeynep's work - and even more so when I chatted to her I thought there's something in this that every single company can use.

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