This Working Life

When’s the last time you had fun at work? Really had fun? FUN. What is it, and how can it  help us enjoy work more, which of course will help us work better! How can we bring more fun into our working lives? 

Catherine Price is a science journalist and author of The Power of Fun. She also wrote How to break up with your phone. 

Are you seeking leadership nirvana? Is there even such a thing? Leadership development is such a lucrative, multi-million dollar industry but are we just throwing resources at the executive level managers with little benefit to the broader organisation? Are we going about leadership development all wrong?

Burning out has become a phrase thrown around almost as often as anxiety. But being stressed and overworked is not actually burnout. There is  more to it.

Individuals can’t fight burnout alone - things have to change in our organisations. This is what the ‘pioneer’ of burnout theory and research has found.

It’s Christina Maslach's measurement tool that’s been used by workplaces and the World Health Organisation to assess if someone’s burning out - the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

What's it actually like to be a teacher these days? There’s a worldwide shortage of teachers at the moment, so what’s going on in the classroom and school yards? In this episode we meet a bunch of teachers and former teachers and hear first hand about the new pressures, and what’s driving them out of the profession. What needs to change about the working lives of teachers?

Have you heard of the Dunbar number? 

It’s the number of social connections one person can maintain at any one time. 

It turns out that this also plays out at work. 

How is Robin Dunbar’s  research relevant for your workplace?

What are the optimum numbers for teams and factories? 

How important are social connections and friendships at work, and how do these affect our productivity?

Guest:

Robin Dunbar is professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. He wrote Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships and his new book, The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups, comes out next year.

Mindfulness … being mindful,  meditating, you know it’s good for you, but it just never feels like there’s enough time.

Using meditation to create mindfulness is an ancient practice, and the science backing it has been piling in for years now.

But how can we be motivated to make meditation part of our essential routine? How will it actually help our working lives? 

What’s your relationship with feedback? Maybe you’ve thought you could learn how to be better at giving it…but how about switching it round and considering how you receive it? Turns out, if we hone our skills at receiving we also get better at giving feedback.

What happens when the career you chose at 18 just isn't you anymore?

Have you ever sat at work thinking “Houston we have a problem, common sense has left the room!”? Brand and culture transformation expert Martin Lindstrom, walks us through how to bring common sense back into our workplaces by establishing what he calls a “ministry of common sense”. 

Martin has advised multinationals including Pepsi, Google, Burger King and Swiss Air but he started this movement in what traditionally has been a bastion of bureaucracy, banks.

Does your inbox make you miserable? Cal Newport walks us through why our relationship with email is dysfunctional and what a world without email looks like. Cal's book: A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in the Age of Overload

Producer: Maria Tickle