A working life

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Bruce Daisley thinks we are sleepwalking into a crisis of our own making. Technology has blurred the lines between work and home life so much, he says, that we’re all more overwhelmed and exhausted than ever. “The really critical thing is that we’re in the zone where we’re not enabling creative thought – the sort of stuff we need over the next few years.”

He is on a one-man mission to change that – even if it means unpicking assumptions about work that are so deeply ingrained that we barely stop to question them.

Daisley may seem an unlikely candidate to be questioning the role of technology in our lives – as vice-president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Twitter, he’s in the thick of it. And while there are many tech executives who don’t use their own social networks – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, has a carefully crafted personal page, run by a team of moderators – Daisley, who tweets often and honestly, isn’t shy about his affection for the platform. “I’ve always loved it. It makes me laugh every day and it’s my main source of news.”

Daisley joined Twitter from YouTube in 2012, as the microblogging website’s first UK managing director. In 2015, his remit was expanded to include EMEA. “We’ve been on a fascinating journey – it’s been a fun place to work,” he says.

Historically, that has been the perception of companies in the tech industry – fun places to work. Exciting, dynamic, filled with highly paid, creative employees brimming with ideas, hacking and solving problems in plush offices designed to meet their every need, from snack bars to games rooms. While some of that may be clichéd assumption, it certainly seems like an appealing place to be at surface level.

Yet tech isn’t immune to the strains faced by other industries – long hours, stress and toxic working cultures. Blind, an anonymous network for tech industry employees, conducted a survey in May 2018, in which more than half ( 57%) of 11,487 respondents said they were suffering from workplace burnout. In addition, Bima research published in April this year showed that 66% of tech industry respondents are stressed by their work – 13% constantly.

Indeed, it was poor workplace culture at Twitter that spurred Daisley into action. “There was a time, a couple of years ago, when the culture at Twitter wasn’t as good as it had been.” He noticed that people seemed drained, as if they weren’t enjoying their work as much as they had previously, while others were leaving. “I found myself trying to understand what I could do – as sort of nominally a boss – to fix the culture.”

Such was the impetus for Daisley’s foray into the science of working well – a journey that began with the launch of his business podcast exploring the topic Eat Sleep Work Repeat, and that has just resulted in him publishing a book, The Joy of Work. He says he did it for himself in an attempt to understand more about the subject and figure out the best approaches to work. “What I found is that there are no books on it – so I started doing the podcast out of self-education more than anything else. I was reading little articles mentioning these experts’ names, but I couldn’t find anything about them, so I wanted to chat to them.”

While there is a huge body of evidence on work and what makes it more fulfilling and productive, very little of the research Daisley came across was being applied in real working environments and businesses. In fact, the reality of work often runs against the advice of organisational psychologists and other experts.

“A lot of the stuff that experts recommend is the opposite of what happens in work,” he says. “The science against open-plan offices is really powerful, but I suspect every person who reads this article sits in an open-plan office.” Likewise the evidence against spending too much time in meetings is strong, but many find their working week dominated by them.

“It seems that every time you look at the evidence of the best ways of working, it’s the opposite of what we should be doing. Yet these things are unchallengeable foundations of the way we are working.”

Manifesto for change

His book is timely; more attention than ever before is being placed on mental health in the workplace and there is increasing awareness of how our relationship with technology is changing our relationship with work. Likewise, flexible and remote-working arrangements are more commonplace in the digital and marketing industries, although there is still a long way to go before such practices become the norm.

As is often the case with manifestos for change, however, the solutions to some of today’s workplace problems – many of which Daisley sets out in his book – are often dismissed as being unrealistic or unworkable in practice. There’s also the damaging narrative, held by a minority, that the new generation of millennial and Gen Z workers are simply too demanding of employers, and are actually just work-shy ‘snowflakes’.

Bankers, for instance, have always done punishing, demanding hours, so when there was an increase in workers collapsing and having breakdowns, the industry old guard dismissed it as part of the territory, says Daisley. “The veterans of the banking industry were like ‘this is a snowflake generation, they can’t handle it’. But the fundamental difference was that, when you did a 120-hour week before, when you left the office you were off. You were only out of the office seven hours a day, but you were switched off,” he adds.

“Now, they are connected to their phones – and that fundamental difference turned something that was brutal but sustainable into something that is brutal and unsustainable. It wasn’t that somehow the DNA of workers had changed but that the invisible demands were often neglected, and were taking a toll.”

This belief that a new generation of workers are somehow less capable or less hardworking is just one example of what Daisley calls a ‘mill-owner mentality’ residual among some business leaders. “Someone described it to me as ‘I’m one of the good guys, but inside me is an 18th-century mill owner’ – and I think we all, to some extent, have a part of us where, if people aren’t at their desks at a certain time, we’re thinking: ‘They’re not online, are they taking the piss?’ We presume that other people aren’t working as hard as we are – and it’s taking us the wrong way.”

So what’s the biggest change Daisley has implemented at Twitter as a result of all of this research?

Before writing the book, he – alongside Sue Todd, chief executive of marketing agency Magnetic – compiled an eight-point manifesto on ‘the simple ways to improve work’. The first point was ‘presume permission’, prompted by a member of staff at Twitter asking Daisley if they were allowed to go home to finish a task if they were struggling to finish it at the office – as the company doesn’t have a ‘working from home’ policy.
“I thought: ‘God, how embarrassing; we’ve basically got people putting their hands up to go to the bathroom and people not knowing what they’re allowed to do,” says Daisley. “We’ve turned this 30-something into a child. I just said ‘presume you’ve got permission to do stuff. Get on with it.’”

While it may seem obvious, however, the freedom to proceed until apprehended isn’t so readily available in all organisations. People won’t presume permission unless they feel secure, which is something Daisley talks about a lot – psychological safety, or giving people the benefit of the doubt. It’s one of his big talking points, and a feeling he strives to create at the tech giant – because Twitter is facing bigger worries than whether or not its staff can work from home.

Like all of the big social media firms, the company’s dealing with various, well-documented challenges – from heightened scrutiny by governments and regulators over data privacy to how it handles harmful content. One of Daisley’s biggest priorities is making sure people who work there are able to say what they think, even if they are the most junior person in the room – which he says is critical to addressing these big questions.

“It’s making sure we’ve got people’s backs on the decisions they make, but also being rigorous and honest. One of the most important things is building psychological safety – that’s the ability for someone to say ‘guys, this isn’t good enough’.

“It’s very easy for any company to have groupthink, where you just go along with what one person says.

“If you’re going to have rigorous analysis, if you’re going to have effective decision-making, anyone in the group – often the most junior person – has to have the freedom to say ‘I don’t think that’s the right way to do it’.”

Quiet voices

It’s refreshing to hear a tech executive talking about breaking out of groupthink. In an industry infamous for its Silicon Valley ‘bros’ and a platform where women disproportionately experience trolling and abuse, I ask Daisley if he thinks Twitter would be different if it had been designed by a woman.

“Some of our leading developers are female, so I wouldn’t necessarily say so,” he says. “The one thing we’ve been very focused on over the past three or four years is ensuring quiet voices are heard – which is one of the things Twitter does when it’s at its best.”

All platforms, whether they are TV panel shows or social networks, have a responsibility to make sure they’re not prizing the loud male over voices that perhaps aren’t as vocal, he adds. Some may argue there’s further to go to redress the balance on Twitter, but Daisley says: “What we’ve tried to do is ensure that female voices are heard as powerfully as male ones. We’ve worked hard to do that. It’s a constant process. I don’t think the platform would look different, but we’ve tried to ensure one form of communication doesn’t win over another.”

Another of the challenges facing Daisley at Twitter – and, he says, anyone looking to make a big change at work – is ‘learned helplessness’. This is when we believe that others just don’t understand the everyday realities of our job.

“I was chatting to people at an ad agency the other week,” he recalls, “and they said: ‘You don’t understand our job – we can’t just have an evening off email’.”

In a way, this conundrum affects all parts of society; from building more inclusive workplaces to living more sustainably, many people feel their hands are tied and they can’t make the requisite changes. It’s the age-old frustration for researchers that the evidence is there but it isn’t being listened to. Daisley thinks the problem lies with people in positions of power looking to guard against unstable times by sticking to the status quo.

“The highest paid person has come up through a different work environment to the one that exists now,” he says. “Often, when there’s uncertainty around us, we want to assert control, so people who are surrounded by instability at unprecedented levels want to assert the best way to get more control on it. That’s the critical thing: we want to push back against that – and research is one of the ways we can do it.”

When it comes to small changes that individuals can make, it may seem paradoxical for a senior executive at one of the world’s biggest tech companies to talk about reducing the time we spend on our phones.

Daisley believes this is exactly what needs to happen, however, to redress our relationship with technology, reduce stress and foster more creative thinking. Turning off notifications on your phone, he insists, is “one of the biggest things you can do to liberate yourself”.

A third of British people think about work the moment they wake up, he says – so we need to find ways to break out of this. “Maybe we do our jobs best when we don’t think about work all the time and allow ourselves looseness of thought. Our brains often find creativity not in an overscheduled 80-hour week, but rather in finding looseness.”

Daisley himself works best when he doesn’t layer more guilt on himself for not following his own rules. “One of the things I advocate is taking a lunch break – but if I only take three lunch breaks a week, I don’t beat myself up about it. Instead, I think, ‘well done for having those three.’

“The perpetual state of modern work is guilt – you’re guilty that you didn’t get back to someone; you’re guilty that you weren’t paying attention in that meeting – and reducing the amount of guilt we feel is a good thing.”

This article was first published in the July 2019 issue of Impact.