Bruce Daisley - The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love With Your Job Again

Bruce Daisley is European Vice-President for Twitter and host of the UKs number one business podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat. He is also a regular on the conference circuit, addressing business leaders on the main stage of the CBI Annual Conference in 2017, and at that years Management Today annual summit and Financial Times 125 Club, as well as at many tech industry events around Europe. He has been one of the Evening Standards 1,000 Most Influential Londoners for four years and is one of Debretts 500 Most Influential People in Britain. Campaign magazine asserted that Bruce is one of the most talented people in media.

What does your office look like? The chances are its an open-plan space. Increasingly the only debate about offices is what sort of open plan youre going to end up with, and this in turn generally boils down to a discussion about whether your boss has an office or whether they have a desk outside a meeting room that they end up working in.

The boss of Google has an office. Boss of Gap office (but no desk, just keeping you guessing here).

What our bosses do is a reflection of the two conflicting factors at play here a desire to appear connected with their teams and the struggle to get anything done in open-plan offices.

Offices started to disappear as work became less formal, as fewer firms asked us to wear ties all day, as we were allowed to be something a touch closer to our real selves. For many, offices seemed a relic of hierarchy. A lack of corridors and delineated spaces implied the company was keen to promote a flatter structure and was not concerned with layers of management.

Of course, the other reason why open plan became popular was because it is very, very cheap. When property rentals are high, one of the most economically sound things that a business can do is to take walls down. One columnist in the Financial Times cited evidence that the cost of workspaces for desks in London in 2017 was around 15,000 per year for open plan and personal offices clearly cost even more. So down tumbled the walls. Big open-plan spaces came to every workplace. Many ended up looking beautiful and stylish. The extra space permits wall art or better decoration. It allows in more natural light.

And, its adherents argue, it also creates a better work environment one of serendipitous encounters, colleagues coming together and reaching delightful epiphanies across their desks. Jony Ive, Apples design chief, described the vision for the companys new 13,000-employee office in California as a statement of openness, of free movement. He told Wired magazine: The achievement is to make a building where so many people can connect and collaborate and walk and talk.

The only problem with this utopian view is that its not true. Open-plan offices have been studied time and time again, and the conclusion is always the same: in productivity terms, theyre a disaster. Take the findings of a survey of one particular oil and gas firm. The psychologists assessed the employees satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward, the preamble to the report stated. And what they discovered was not encouraging: The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied and resentful. Productivity fell.

When presenting the dream of their own space at Apple, Jony Ive painted it with beautifully empowering words. But, in the event, many of the employees disagreed. Indeed, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal, some of the most senior engineers chose to work in separate buildings. Quite simply, it said, the noise and distraction of open plan wasnt consistent with the way Apple teams had created their world-famous products.

The evidence in favour of open plan is singularly lacking. People in open-plan offices take significantly more sick days than those who work in ones where there are only a handful of colleagues (fewer than six) nearby.

Business school professor Sophie Leroy describes whats going on here. People need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another, she explains. Yet results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.

Constant interruptions and distractions also make us feel that were getting less done. And this has a significant impact on our sense of personal worth. Psychologist Teresa Amabile, who has done extensive research in this area, has established that people feel satisfied at work when they are confident that they have made progress on something: not powering through a mountain of email but focusing on a single task.

Amabile observes that these moments of flow dont need to be prolonged in nature. Often the benefits can result from short periods of concentration. Having delved through 9,000-plus daily work diaries that she had asked volunteers to keep, she and her team discovered that a fulfilling day for participants in her study was invariably one in which they reported making meaningful progress on something they had been trying to accomplish. It was a day when there was a moment of normally solitary headspace where ideas seemed finally to come together. As one of the participants recounted: The event of the day was that I was able to concentrate on the project at hand without interruptions. [Earlier] there were so many interruptions for chit-chat that I couldnt get any decent work accomplished. I eventually had to go work very quietly in another room to get some of it done. No distraction leads to quiet, quiet leads to flow, flow leads to progress, progress leads to satisfaction.

This may seem counter to what were often told about creativity these days: that its a collective effort, that its about teams. At a certain point, of course it is, and group discussion can happen productively in open workspaces designed for it. Nevertheless our meaningful work is more likely to be done in solitude. If youve ever found yourself saying, I cant get anything done at work, or I go into the office before everyone gets in, because I can power through my work, then youre quietly recognising this, too.

Writer and academic Cal Newport has his own term for the flow this involves: Deep Work, defined by him as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to the limit. And he has a practical suggestion as to how to achieve it. Im starting to see more entrepreneurs, he told me, especially CEOs of small startups doing what I call the Monk Mode Morning, where they say, As far as anyone is concerned Im reachable starting at 11 a.m. or noon and I never am available for meetings, Im never going to answer an email and never going to answer the phone before then. Their whole organisation adapts to this idea that the first part of the day is