Episode 34: What do Business Leaders want from HR? (Interview with Bruce Daisley)

What do business leaders want from HR? How is this changing as the fourth industrial revolution unfurls? How can business leaders and HR work together to create the right culture that drives business success as well as a highly engaged and motivated workforce? Who better to ask than a successful business leader themselves? Our guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast this week is Bruce Daisley, who for eight years led Twitter's business in the EMEA region.

Bruce is also the host of the brilliant top business podcast Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. His first book about improving work and work culture was a Sunday Times number one best seller. I know you will enjoy listening as Bruce is an engaging speaker with a unique and fascinating perspective on how to make work better.

You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Bruce and I discuss:

• Why making work better for everyone is so important

• The role of HR in helping to create the right culture to help make work better

• The key skills that HR needs to develop to have more impact with business leaders

• What business leaders really want from HR?

• How you can fall in love with your job again

• Whether AI and automation is a threat or an opportunity for HR

This episode is a must listen for HR and business leaders looking to develop a healthy culture within their organisations, improve the employee experience and create more impact from their workforce.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Crunchr. To learn more, visit https://www.crunchrapps.com.

Interview Transcript 

David Green: Today I am absolutely delighted to welcome Bruce Daisley, author, former head of Twitter's business in EMEA and host of the brilliant Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat Podcast to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast and video series. That is a lot of podcasts in one sentence, Bruce, welcome to the show.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you for having me. Longtime listener, first time caller.

David Green: Fantastic. It is great to have you here. Can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to you and your background and what you are currently involved in?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. So I was eight years at Twitter, before that I was four years at Google, sort of running YouTube for the UK for Google. I have just quit actually, as I hit eight years, I did eight years and two days and that is two days more than Barack Obama. So different job. But as I hit eight years I have been really enjoying the nuances of building business culture, I guess like the experience side of everything that you talk about.

I have been consumed with it largely because I was a leader trying to enact changes that created strong cultures at Twitter. As I hit 8 eight years things like my podcast, my book were just providing such entertainment and satisfaction to me, I just thought I am going to take a bit of a break going into that.

To be fair, I am also planning to do some quite intense work on climate change, so I just thought, if we all want to wake up in the morning and be motivated by what we do, I thought I am going to take a chance and do two things that really passionately inspire me.

David Green:  We might come back to the climate change stuff at the end actually, it sounds very interesting. I think the underlying theme of what we are going to talk about today as a business leader is what does a business leader expect from HR? And how can HR help the business create the right culture for success? And actually make work enjoyable for people as well. Whilst you are being successful. When we spoke earlier this week, it is clear that you are passionate about making work better, I think that is one of the taglines you have for the podcast. I hear that quite frequently from HR professionals, but not so often from business leaders. So why do you believe that making work better is so important?

Bruce Daisley: Fascinating thing for me was that my interest in this originates back to when I was doing evening work, Saturday work, to pay my way through school and college. I noticed that sometimes you would join a bar and there was just a real buzz, it didn't feel like work, even though you would be putting in long hours, working late because the rapport, the camaraderie, the esprit de corps was so strong that there is something motivating and energising about it. Then I observed when I was into something more of a proper career that sometimes those things were in place and sometimes they were absent. So I always had this fascination with those things. I was fortunate enough to go and work at a couple of big tech firms and I think probably one of the tech firms I worked at, it really struck me that this might be the place that outwardly people regard as one of the best places to work in the world. Yet the firsthand experience of almost everyone that I knew who worked there was not that. So that was a really fascinating conundrum.

David Green: Could you unlock as to why that was?

Bruce Daisley: For me there was a total absence of autonomy. So I think one of the fascinating things that we wrestle with as companies get bigger and bigger is how do we manage the need to give people a job that they feel that they could bring some agency to, but then simultaneously not create legal liabilities or not to encounter challenges from scale. I saw something that someone told me that their friend works at Oracle and the advice given there was that no one was allowed to follow each other on Facebook. Largely because what it would inform you about understanding someone's private life that then might have a consequent impact on the way that you interacted with them. At Google, I have been told by repute, not in my time there, not to hug your colleagues. Now what you are effectively observing is a lawyer has said this mitigates risk and no doubt this mitigates risk if no one has any physical contact with each other and if any physical contact is sanctionable you have breached the rules, then of course it is far easier to manage. But it also talks of creating a version of work that has an absence of humanity to it.

I was more fascinated with was there any way that you could create system thinking from the inside, that would enable work to feel motivating, inspiring and filled with autonomy. So I was just really taken with that. When I first set up Twitter in the UK, we could have fit in a mini bus there was a handful of us. You mentioned the Scooby van, the mystery van, we could have travelled around in that. So my feeling was very strongly, I want to build a culture that I would love to work in and it sets yourself a challenge. Now one of the things that is of interest or that you can be distracted by is that it is very easy to build a good culture with 12 people, with 15 people, with 30 people, and you start testing how effective that is when you get to 60 or a hundred. That became the fascination for me. Everyone used to, rather wonderfully come from our other offices and say “wow there is this real mojo. There is a real buzz to the London office. If we could only capture it we would love that to be cross pollinated across the rest of the company”

But the really interesting thing for me as a leader was that we reached a stage, probably three years ago, where it went decidedly sour. Within one year 40% of the team left and we had a lot of people leaving with no job to go to. Now as a leader you get signals that are of varying intensity and strength, but when you have got a lot of people resigning with no job to go to, you know that something has gone fundamentally wrong.

And I think ultimately when we thought about it, what it came down to is that we had, actually let me take the responsibility for this. I had created actions where there was a breach of trust, so our financial situation was in far worse state than I probably wanted to let on, that lack of transparency can lead to teams quietly catastrophising. So teams recognising that what I am being told has a dissonance from what appears to be happening. So as a consequence, if you have then combined that lack of safety with burnout and people feeling like I am working 80 hours a week, 70 hours a week, and I am not sure I trust what is happening.

I think those two things are like nitroglycerin, they are such a tinderbox, they are so explosive. I think what that propelled me to do is I thought, okay, you were very willing to take the plaudits when people said this London Twitter office was best practice, the people were being recruited from around the world.

Now it is time for me to take responsibility for what has gone wrong. I made sure that my HR professional, my HR business partner sat next to me, we were sort of partners in crime and in trying to work out how can we make sure that every single thing is about HR and leadership being as one. The daily dialogue rather than interacting via meetings, this was the level of rapport that you get when you put two people utterly in sync with each other sitting together really.

David Green: I guess that transparency and trust in that relationship, but also with the workforce is so important. As you said, if people start to lose trust then they will put two and two together and make five.

So even if a situation from a business perspective is not as good as it perhaps was if you are not telling them what is happening and what the potential impact could be, they actually make it to be worse and then they make the decisions, as you said, they do leave without a job to go to.

Bruce Daisley: It is really fascinating. The Chief Executive at Twitter is like a polymathic, incredibly accomplished guy, Jack Dorsey. Sort of invented Twitter in his twenties and now is the chief executive of two businesses but one of the things that he models as a really instructive pattern of behaviour, he is almost unflinchingly honest about things. So let me give you some examples. We have had a couple of data breaches where one example was it seemed that a certain number of million Twitter users passwords were stored in an unhashed status. What that means is that somewhere the passwords were stored but they were not encrypted. There was no evidence that anyone had accessed but he said we need to tell people and we need to tell people straight away. Now very clearly the legal advice you would get in that situation is you do not need to tell people, best not to tell people. We were also told that it could be stock price damaging if you reveal this and yet nevertheless, despite both of those little bits of advice, people coming in saying, you do not need to do this it could have a downside impact. Jack's whole philosophy was, okay, well let us work on the basis we are telling people, so we need to tell them ideally tomorrow, if not tomorrow, the day after. And what that does is that it models a pattern of behaviour where you start thinking, okay, so the right thing to do is honesty and then it is just a question of when we do the honesty. Another one, we transitioned from publishing our monthly audience to our daily audience. Now the thing that everyone in the organisation knew was that our daily audience was lower than some of the conjecture externally and probably lower than a few other competitive products.

So again people came along and said, let's not do this. It is bad news. The sales team did not want it. The investment team did not want it and his belief was, okay, if we do not do it now, tell me when we are going to do it and let us work to that. In fact actually sort of planning for that. It led to a cycle of bad news for 24 hours and then broadly the second day's coverage was this feels like it is deeply filled with integrity. I think that was the lesson for me when it came to practices about our own business fortune. People are often more able to take bad news if they can contextualise it and if it paints a picture of what the job to be done is than if they discover it themselves. So bad news is generally going to get out, but if you hear it as someone whispers to you by the kettle, it is significantly worse than you hearing it from your chief exec or your regional manager standing up and telling you it. So I think that is a really important lesson for me. Hearing news from the top rather than over a glass of wine after work is a really important way to understand how that message is then taken in.

David Green: But obviously in certain companies you can have a glass of wine after work but you can not hug.

Bruce Daisley: Fascinating that though isn't it? Because you can definitely see the steps how they got to that, but I think as soon as you remove any agency from people to behave in a human way, it starts making work feel deeply depersonalised.

David Green: I think it is a bit big brotherish to be perfectly honest with you. You can do this, you can not do that and as you said it is just down to risk, to avoid having a lawsuit at the end of the day.

Bruce Daisley: Yes because there are fundamental truths that we all understand about work, if people have got a close friend at work, they often report that they enjoy their job.

If people feel like they have got a good relationship with their manager, again, they feel like they have got a good job. And these are actually far more soft emotional aspects of our job, than we would probably want to admit when we're describing ourselves as rational adults.

David Green: Which leads us quite nicely onto the next question, you gave a hint of it I think when you were talking about how you sat on a daily basis with their HR business partner. How did you work with HR at Twitter both locally and perhaps with HR corporate HQ as well in the US? What role did they play in terms of helping set the culture within the organisation?

Bruce Daisley: Yes. My feeling very strongly is that the closer that those functions can be owned by experience the better. So I think my best relationships have always been when there has been someone who has power in each office or power in each region who can get things done. I have always felt HR is a top table C suite job, and I have always had my best relations with HR and observed the best culture when I have sat next to the HR person that I am working with. So for me it was like the vital relationship to maintain.

David Green: In terms of culture, obviously I think leaders really are responsible for culture, but obviously HR are enablers in helping filter that through the organisation or the London office as it were.

How did that kind of work?

Bruce Daisley: I was running Europe, Middle East and Africa, broadly we have got offices in the bigger countries in those spaces. There is a degree of listening, the HR function was very attuned to listening and we broadly had a cohort of employees some of them were engineering. Over half of our staff were in what we call the engineering product and design, so people who create things, there is lots of sales or commercial people. A few very scattered group of different functions. So there is actually different needs for different functions and it is just about trying to adapt to that.

We had 70 different nationalities, so the service that we were providing quite often was trying to interpret the consequence of Brexit and we were trying to message that to 70 different nationalities who might have more or less concern about what it meant for them.

David Green: It would be great to hear some examples. Obviously when you started Twitter in EMEA as you said, you were in the Scooby mystery machine van, and then obviously you rolled it out over so many different countries and 70 different nationalities. So are there some examples that you could share with the listeners around how you worked very closely with HR either to solve a problem or enable some of that growth?

Bruce Daisley: I think one of the things that we were setting out to do was, especially when we were in the remedial action of trying to get back to being in a good place, we tried to create very clear norms. So we tried to establish the ways that we wanted to work. So when we were in that catch up stage.

The things that we were observing were that there were very high levels of burnout and that was largely because probably we had not adequately modeled the way we wanted people to work and the inevitable state that a lot of people find themselves in, especially in a highly connective environment where there's teams in San Francisco at the end of Slack messages or there is always an email to answer, we had not modeled what good working looks like. And so by some estimations, I observed that a lot of American companies, they require connectivity, people are clocking up a 70 hour week.

David Green: Especially with the 8 hour time difference.

Bruce Daisley: Exactly. And we would see in execs coming over to London, they would say “wow, I did not realise you did a full day's work and then people expect you to do another day's work.” People can often only empathise when they have experienced it firsthand. So we set about thinking how can we model the version of culture that we want? Let me give you an example. I created this brief manifesto, this new work manifesto.

One of the things in there was trying to model norms that people should expect to have, working 40 hours a week, this was a really interesting one for me. Firstly tech is full of misdirections. There is no shortage of people who will say from Elon Musk down that their success comes from working a hundred hours a week and so consequently, when you have got those role models, it is very easy for that to pervade the way that everyone is working. I set about in this manifesto saying, okay, 40 hours is enough. So what does that look like? Well with my HR professionals when I was sitting down and we would do a twice annual promotion cycle, and so if anyone was given their promotion case, if someone's case for being promoted was, this person works late every night, we would always push back on that without exception. But we tend to then think we have got a job to do with their manager because it is clear that the norms that we are trying to establish, the experience the employees are having is being let down because their manager is not shining the light in the right direction.

So those were the sort of things, trying to create norms of what are good patterns of behaviour and bad patterns of behaviour. Especially when you are in the zone where I think a lot of us are experiencing burnout.

One charity contacted me and said “so any chance you can come in based on all your experience of running culture. Can you come in and chat?” And they describe to me a scenario that sounds incredibly familiar. They said “we tried to have a culture reboot meeting a three hour meeting, it went into everyone's calendars. No one came because everyone has got too many meetings already.” I think that is it, my feeling as a curious outsider, this is why I always listen to your podcast, I see myself as someone who, I am not a practitioner, but I am a curious person trying to understand the tools of the profession. What I realised very quickly was for all of the actions that I might try to take to improve team cohesion, to improve creativity, connectivity, it seems like the levels of burnout that we are witnessing are preventing any of that sticking. So very often and I am always cautious of this, but very often especially if you exist in the tech community, the solution for anything is proposed to come in app form. So someone will say “Oh, we hear that everyone is having too many meetings. We have got a new app that we are using.”

And this is literally what happens all the time, or I hear what everyone is saying about not being able to relax. We have bought everyone access to a new app. I am not critical of that, apps have transformed our lives, we love apps, but I am always cautious that the solution is technology.

Maybe it is the fact that having been inside technology, the competitive advantage I have got is that I witnessed that not being the case.

When I was sitting down writing the book, I wanted to write something about workplace culture and how anyone can change culture, yet the first 12 things in it are personal interventions to feel less burnt out. Because going back to that charity I went to, there is no point telling those people that they should feel more bonded to their team members when their experience of work is they are in an open plan office beset with constant interruptions, have 16 hours a week of meetings. They have 200 emails. Effectively work is what they are trying to squeeze into their evenings on the sofa, work is what they are doing on the train and unless you address all of those things the experience of work for those people can never escape that Bermuda triangle of burnout.

David Green: And I guess as you said it is less a technology thing, it is a behavioural thing, It is a leadership thing, it is a management thing, It is a cultural thing. I think it is great what you are saying about when you are looking at the promotion slate and if one of the justifications is they are always working late, actually that is something that the manager is doing wrong. Either managers are forcing people to work late because they actually give them too much work or they see someone working late and think that is quite good instead of telling them to go home. You are supposed to be doing 40 hours a week not 70.

Bruce Daisley: Absolutely. My take on it is with all the talk about employee experience, unless we are candid about the amount of hours people are spending in meeting rooms, unless we are candid about the fact that we do not treat work as zero sum.

So normally what will happen, the amount of organisations I have gone into and I have said the average British person spends 16 hours a week in meetings, and almost without exception, people will go, it is way more here. So that is interesting because if we are spending 20 hours a week in meetings, and I think most of us would be candid, especially if you are in a big organisation, you are quite often in meetings where you do not know everyone's name and you do not know what that guy over there does. That woman, you have seen her twice but she is on a different floor and we are in a zone where, naturally as humans, we stop paying attention. Yet unless that is captured in your employee experience understanding, then for a lot of people it is no wonder they feel that they do not feel any autonomy because they feel like they are being held hostage for three working days a week in meetings that they do not feel that they can meaningfully contribute. So my feeling was very resolutely, we have got to be honest about those things.

Just as I was leaving Twitter we were on a major initiative to try and abolish half to three quarters of all meetings. Largely because that old thing that started as a joke and that has become a truism, that most meetings could be an email and most emails could be a text.

We set about thinking what can we do to abolish it? There were two strands of action. There was a lot of people, especially in the engineering side of things, who had introduced silent meetings. Fascinatingly I had a long chat with my colleague, for anyone who is interested in that there is a medium post that you will get by searching silent meeting manifesto, one of my ex colleagues created it. The idea of that is it originates from something that Jeff Baseoff introduced at Amazon where he said, so much of meetings are performative. So number one, we only have meetings when there is a decision to be made. A weekly catch up is not a meeting we only do them when we have decisions. And he realised that a lot of men use PowerPoint as part of the art of performance, they would come in and they will blag and bluster their way through. So he said no PowerPoint and we are going to read the document. So normally he creates a four page document or the person who wants the decision creates a four page document and you read it collectively in the meeting. That makes the silent part.

The way we adapted that is we read it on our laptops and people add comments as they go. So then you have someone, and in the blog post you will read this, but then you have someone who runs the meeting.

The person will say, there seems to be three issues with the decision today. Let's go through each of those in turn. As an experience of a meeting it is transformational. You leave a meeting and rather than being made to listen to someone drone on about their PowerPoint for an hour, you actually feel informed about what went on and normally the meetings are a lot quicker.

So we were going through and attempting to experiment and innovate with things that were patently broken. I was really intrigued by email as that has not changed in 30 years, I mean it has marginally changed you can delay sending sometimes, but now meetings are this broken format where most of us are reluctant to change them. So I was just inspired that we were finally bringing a bit of innovation to things that were evidently broken.

David Green:  I like the idea of the silent meeting.

Bruce Daisley: You should give it a go, read that guy's medium post, the silent meeting manifesto, it is beautifully illustrated with cartoons.

It is just an interesting way to try and do something different. Like anything. I am a big advocate for walking meetings as well. Like anything, the first time you do these things, you have got to bake in the fact that you are going to feel deeply uncomfortable. So accept the fact that the first time you do it, it is going to be awkward,

There is lots of things in life where that is the case. But once you accept that and you say, we are going to try this for at least four weeks, that is what we do, after four weeks you will be like, okay, this is actually working a lot better.

David Green: I worked in France for a while and the company I worked for very much had a meeting culture and I got fed up with being in meetings because as you said, you can't do any work and then you have got less and less time to actually do the work that you have got to do. So in the end I would turn around and say, okay, what is the objective for the meeting? Why do you want me in the meeting? What is my role? And then if people could not articulate what those were then I would say I could not come.

Bruce Daisley: That's a power play that, because Elon Musk said, if he does not value a meeting, he gets up and leaves, I guess though he is a billionaire several times over.

We have got to imagine, like when I was writing my book, I was thinking about a 28 year old woman because she is focused on wanting to do her best job, but is surrounded with all this, emperor's new clothes lunacy that no one is willing to say this does not work.

I think when you start from the perspective of zero power, then solving those problems has a different spin on it slightly.

David Green: Yes I think you are right. I love that concept, so perhaps we should delve in to it a bit deeper on the podcast at some point.

As a business leader what do you believe the role of HR is? What do you want from HR as a business leader?

Bruce Daisley: For me it was about implementing strategy. I think so often we use HR as the cleanup police. We bring HR in to a situation to get us out of a spot or to try to deal with under-performance or to deal with hygiene matters.

And for me HR, if companies talk about people being their secret asset or their culture being something that propels them to 20% better performance than their peer group, then HR have to be involved in all of those decisions, setting those norms and trying to bring those norms to life.

The challenges, very often, the way that HR is treated it is not given the seat as the most important voice in the room it is given the final say on logistics. That is a fundamental difference for me when the best relationships I have had with HR is when they have been in the room when we have been designing strategy.

They have been in the room when we have been thinking about what we needed in the next cohort of people we were going to hire.

David Green: So they are involved in creating a strategy rather than just delivering in the people element of it.

Bruce Daisley:  Absolutely and what you generally find is that with HR professionals, firstly, when you give them that opportunity they often jump at it, but so often they have never been afforded that position. Which is a challenge. And that is the interesting thing. So what you often find, and I have observed this, is that quite often you can bring people who have been in that disempowered HR world into an environment where you are trying to use them systematically to build something. They often go back to previous patterns of behaviour.

A couple of organisations I have worked in, I have worked in a magazine publishing business before, where HR was very much top table. Chief exec would work with, it was styled head of culture at the time, but the relationship there was night and day compared to one of my in between jobs.

Really instructive for me and it helped for my own take when I was thinking of what is the best relationship that I want. I found that when we brought our HR professional, our HR leader, a brilliant woman called Caro, when we brought her in on the strategy sessions, not only was it a voice in the room that made us honest about some of the things that we were suggesting, but also just meant that there was not that gap between strategy and execution. There was not that dissonance where what we are trying to do was just not remotely matched to the people that we had.

David Green: So I think you have alluded to some of it in your previous answer. From a business leader perspective, what are some of the skills that HR needs to develop to have more impact in the business and as you say, help devise strategy rather than just implement it?

Bruce Daisley: Just a business sense, you know business acumen. I think the most critical thing for me is a directness and a transparency, the HR professional more than anyone needs to be the person who has to tell you this is not working or something has gone wrong.

If there is not that fully permeable relationship where everything is transparent and everything is up for discussion, I think that is where it goes wrong. We had a couple of cultural issues in different countries and they always came from a bit of behaviour that was being observed that someone did not want to flag because they were worried that if they flagged it, it would have repercussions on them as much as anything.

And whenever we had the full business understanding combined with direct, transparent communication, it was always the best.

HR professionals more than anyone is the person who, if you do it well, can be your ears on the ground almost without exception. Every team at the entry level, the team will be presented with trying to deal with the realities of management decisions that do not make sense at the customer level.

So they are out there, they have been given a message. The people they are dealing with might be members of the media, might be sales partners, might be whoever it is, there is recognition that there have been bad decisions made up the chain. HR more than anyone is the function that will help you bring that level of understanding that exists at your lowest level of the hierarchy but bring that level of understanding to the top and that you can only work when there is honesty.

David Green: Particularly when I guess they bring data to the table, which as you probably know from listening to some of the podcasts, has been a challenge for the function in the past.

Bruce Daisley: Yes very much so. I have worked in organisations that are obsessed about data, where everything is about, unless you can bring data it is not a discussion, it is not going to be something that we even debate. So where you can bring data I think it is critical.

One of the things evidently is that you can not bring data to every situation and especially in HR and that should not be the barrier to you not discussing very important issues.

David Green: Yes of course because you can always go out and collect the data to support the issue afterwards.

So you are also the host of, I do not know how you manage to do everything you did, but you did. The host of the Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat Podcast, which has proven to be very popular. It is all about making work better essentially, based on the passion that you mentioned at the start.

What are the key learnings that you have got from the guests that have been on your show or the topics that you have covered that you feel would be good to share with our audience?

Bruce Daisley: More than anything else I started that podcast from the perspective of we were in the lowest ebb, so three years ago the culture was in a bad place. It might have therefore seemed a bizarre decision. The wheels are falling off, how on earth are you starting a podcast about making work better? It was almost transparently because I was trying to make work better for the people around me. So what you will discover about that is that my voice is pretty muted in it, it is very rarely me giving my opinions. It is more me picking the mind of people and generally what I have found is that I became fascinated with the works of academia about fixing work that never reached people in jobs. So I became bewitched with these incredible people originally from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who produced these people meters, these little badges that everyone in the office would wear and what they were very quickly able to do was track what was going on in workplaces. The professor behind it, a guy called Sandy Pentland, he said within three weeks they knew what was a creative office and what was an uncreative office just from the data. Interesting, right. What was the thing that pointed it out to him? He said, face to face conversation seemed to be the thing that was common in creative offices that was not happening in uncreative offices. Really interesting. So data starts pointing you in a direction that you did not even know you wanted to go in and so for me, that has been what I have been so fascinated with.

I chatted to a wonderful woman at Carnegie Mellon University about collective intelligence. I guess all of us in our jobs now creativity is collective, teamwork is collective and she did a piece of work trying to understand why some teams are more collectively intelligent than other teams. One of the things she found was that there is a test, an autism test, created by Simon Baron Cohen. So Sacha Baron Cohen’s cousin. It was a test for autism, it is called reading the mind in the eyes test. If you search for it sometimes it is called the collective intelligence test. What they discovered was, autistic people struggle to read people's emotions but your performance in these tests as a non autistic adult strongly governs how good your contribution is to a team's collective effort.

Really interesting. Right? And so we all did this test at work. A woman, Neve the marketing director, sat next to me. She got 36 out of 37. I do not know why the tests are out of 37, anyway she was delighted she demanded to be carried around the office. Someone else got 10 out of 37. He was sort of the blunt grumpy guy and you start going, okay, this is really interesting because this is a tool number one that anyone can use and not that it gives you direct answers but it can pollinate a conversation. Because then you can sit there and go, okay, so we have got some people who seem to be really good at reading the room and their collective intelligence is therefore higher. There is other people who do not read the room but they have got sort of a maverick input, so maybe they help originate ideas for the rest of the team. Fascinating.

So the podcast is sort of nonlinear in the sense that I often do not know what I am going to be discussing. One of the ones coming up is I am really taken with how Microsoft reinvented their culture.

Biggest company in the world, but regarded as bombastic. Steve Ballmer was the boss, this almost pantomime alpha male character, and then they transitioned to Satya Nadella, and they have gone back to being the biggest company in the world again but with a very different persona. So I have done an episode where I have gone and chatted to three or four experts on that to try and understand, can any company go on that journey?

Could any company reinvent their culture? If they can, what are the specific actions they need to take? So very much, I am a sort of a lay persons curious mind, trying to understand how to improve culture.

David Green: Learning is so important because then you can take that learning and apply it in your own workplace. What is interesting about the MIT stuff you mentioned, Sandy Pentland, one of the biggest voices in people analytics Ben Waber, was one of Sandy’s students. The work he is doing at Humanyze with those badges is right at the pioneering edge of people analytics. Very interesting.

You have also found time to publish a book, Sunday Times best seller, The Joy of Work, the biggest selling business hardback of 2019. Very impressive. The book provides 30 ways to fall in love with your job again, we are not going to get you to talk about all 30, because obviously you want people to buy the book, but can you give an example of two ways that people can fall in love with their job again?

Bruce Daisley: I guess the first thing I mentioned to you was that what I discovered when trying to get people to love their job again was they needed to be able to exhale. They needed to get themselves out of this overwhelmed situation that a lot of us find ourselves in and just to put that graphically, the average working day has increased in the last 15 years, from seven and a half hours a day to nine and a half hours a day.

It is generally in the areas we do not measure. So if you are sitting there and you are scolded by your partner for answering an email while there is a TV show on, or if you are the person who is just answering this quick email whilst you are out for a pizza or whatever, then you are probably one of the people who have seen the work day go up. So my first feeling was, what can any of us do to just push back a little bit against that? Taking a lunch break in aggregate all of our lunch breaks over the course of a year can add up to six weeks of vacation. So it is no wonder if you get into the habit of taking a lunch break two or three days a week, you feel better for it.

In fact the best thing that you can observe is people's energy levels are better on Saturday morning if they take a lunch break, really interestingly.

But the thing I became most passionate about was the evidence behind laughter. I think most of us, if we recollected a job we loved, remembering times we laughed would be probably one of the first associations we have with that job. I had a job along the way where my boss said to me, now is not the time to be seen laughing. We were in difficult times. We had job cuts around the corner. Do not be seen laughing.

As I was setting about trying to find all the academic papers, all the research on things, I thought, right, I am going to find out the truth on that because honestly I expected that there is some degree of truth in what he said. And what I discovered was completely the opposite.

The world's leading expert on laughter is a guy called Robert Provine, a brilliant guy. He has written books on it and the way that he describes laughter, he says laughter is like an impoverished birdsong. Meaning what do birds sing for? Birds sing to connect with other birds, laughter is how we connect with other humans.

That's really interesting because then laughter is less about you sort of dissipating some joy and more about you signalling connection to other people. As soon as you start hearing that you go, okay, so a team that laughs together their endorphin levels go through the roof and they feel more cohesion.

And so if your team, maybe they are remote, the experience of remote work is obviously top of mind for a lot of people now, or maybe they are in back to back meetings. And maybe there was a time and a place where people used to go to the pub after work, that is less the case now for lots of people, probably for quite good reasons.

But those moments forged connectivity and so if you understand that when a team laughs together, it is not like this indolent waste of time, but it is a moment of strengthening the team. Resilience often comes from laughter.

I chatted to someone who had been in a war hospital in Afghanistan and he said the amount of laughter in an operating theatre where you are dealing with the most gravely serious situation, the amount of laughter would look bad to outsiders, and yet it was the way for them to reset their stress levels and to connect with each other in adversity that you or I would never have to experience.

As soon as you start understanding those things, you are like okay, so laughter could be our secret weapon. Laughter could be the way that we build our resilience, we build our connection to our colleagues. So rather than my old boss saying, now is not the time to be seen laughing, it should have been, okay, times are tough but let's make sure we do not give up on laughing.

David Green: Yes and it is interesting because everyone refers back in Britain to the spirit of the blitz during the second world war and actually there was an essence of laughter, perhaps gallows humour, but that certainly pervaded and kept people's spirits up. Another thing about laughing, I was once told by a trainer, Stuart Lowry, I can remember his name because he was such a good trainer, he said to me, if you are laughing, you are learning. I actually genuinely believe it because I think you are opening yourself up far more and I do not think it is just the endorphins.

Bruce Daisley: But back to when people used to come to the Twitter office from other offices, it was the laughter they observed. They said, we are really surprised how much laughter there is in the office. And probably for me as I am thinking about what I enjoy about my work, laughing every day is just an indelible part of that.

David Green: It is very important, isn't it? Which leads us on to the last question, which moves from something that is very human to something that is perhaps less so.

So we have changed the question that we are asking everyone at the end of the podcast episode now.

AI and automation, do you see them as an opportunity or a threat to HR?

Bruce Daisley: Very resolutely an opportunity. I think the more that we can learn, in Twitter we were observing various things at scale that no human could ever do. So let me give you an example. 54% of any accounts that are suspended now on Twitter no human has ever seen them. That means that the firsthand experience of Twitter for people becomes better because they are not having to report this abuse.

One of the things that we can observe in employee engagement is if people stop going to social events, if people stop engaging with meetings, if they stop interacting in certain ways, it is a really clear signal that they are detaching themselves from the business. If people stop going to the social parts of work, generally the data suggest that they leave the company within 12 months.

No human would ever really be able to spot that, but it starts giving you signals about, okay, so this boss might seem superficially like he or she is doing a good job, but there seem to be signals of disengagement here and humans just can never spot those things. So I think the secret with everything is it needs to be done well.

The amount of people who have pitched me AI recruiting tools or AI, in fact I tested one myself, where the critical element within all of these is being able to see inside the algorithm and try and understand what are the things that are directing the hunches, the instincts within it.

But I think it is a massive opportunity.

David Green: Great. Well, I have to agree with you on that. Bruce, it has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much for being on the show. How can people stay in touch with you?

Bruce Daisley: All of my stuff is on my website, eatsleepworkrepeat.com. and I answer every message I receive on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Green:  Fantastic. The culture, the climate change?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. And you know, here is the strange thing. I was a Greenpeace collector when I was 15, I could not get into pubs when all my mates were going into pubs and so my energy went in to collecting for Greenpeace, and I have just decided that if I give a year of my life to dedicate all my energy to climate change, who knows what might happen.

So my plan is I want to extend that to 18 months to two years and try and keep going. But I feel really passionately that unless a few of us start doing something, that moment might pass.

David Green: Well, I expect to see you alongside Greta Thunberg maybe at the UN next year. Bruce, thank you.