This Working Life

Lunching with 100 strangers helped Kaley Chu find her voice.

Kaley works in finance and as a business development manager, dealing with people was a big part of her job. But Kaley was afraid of talking to new people and it was hampering her career. So she decided to attack it head on.

She launched a personal experiment, to ring strangers and invite them out to lunch. 100 lunches with 100 strangers in one year.

Over lunch, we explore what drove her to embark on the 100 lunches, how it transformed all aspects of her life and work - and what she learnt along the way. (Her book is 100 Lunches With Strangers.)

We then dive deeper into the power of networking and chat with careers coach Leah Lambart (founder of Relaunch me) and executive recruitment specialist Sinead Hourigan (Queensland director Robert Walters) to find out what are the big changes to networking - does it still involve boozy cocktail parties and business cards?

Can you measure and then fix workplace culture? This episode we speak with two experts who emphatically believe the answer is “yes!”

Didier Elzinga is CEO of Culture Amp, Australia’s newest unicorn start-up. What Didier offers is the tools to measure culture, based on the theory that if you can measure it you can then improve it. Didier shares why he became obsessed about culture, how you can capture meaningful data about culture and what he learnt from working in one of the toughest cultures in the world - Hollywood!

Colin D. Ellis is a culture change facilitator and author of Culture Fix. He shares his hard-earnt experience of turning cultures around including: what are the uncomfortable truths around culture, what are the biggest mistakes and what are the greatest levers when it comes to successful turning cultures around.

Before we kill it off work-life balance, what are the benefits and risks for employees and companies in this move to integration?

Recorded live at Pause Fest 2020, this panel brought hard-core honesty to this conversation.

These leaders shared their personal stories, fast fails and tips for those trying to make their way in a modern work world of mixed messages.

Guests: Ed McManus, CEO of Deliveroo Australia, Natalie Feehan GM sales and marketing at MYOB and chief people officer with Estimate One, James Law.

They debated (at times hotly) whether job flexibility is good for companies and how it needs to be managed, and whether working part-time limits your career.

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Producer: Maria Tickle

What do Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Hillary Clinton all have in common? They are all famous American leaders but they are also self-professed introverts.

While it may feel like it's the loudest voice in the room is the one that gets heard, the quiet person sitting down the back may have as much (if not more) to contribute because they have thought long and hard before they speak.

This is according to our guests today writer Megumi Miki, partner at Ernst and Young Ruth Picker and former Rear Admiral Simon Harrington. Each are introverts, each are powerful leaders in their field.

Our quietly powerful guests share how managers can lead their introverted employees, what those quiet by nature can do to have their voice heard, why quiet people make powerful leaders and what extroverts should do in meetings to help understand their introverted colleagues.

How do you find your work mojo now that your holiday halo has started to dim?

January is the most popular month to give your job the flick (and to file for divorce apparently - but this is outside the scope of our show!). We talk motivation with sports and organisational psychologist Dr Travis Kemp and Chris Low, head of vibe at Canva which has twice been named Australia's best place to work.

We discuss why things come to a head in January - just what's going on in our brains? Plus why personal values trump free beer, why money isn't our primary motivator, and how eating breakfast and lunch together helped online graphic design business Canva become a unicorn company (a privately-owned start up worth more than a US one billion dollars).

Chris also refers to the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. To hear more about this, listen to our previous show on this topic:

After ramp up your motivation, you might want to tackle one of the toughest challenges in the workplace and have that difficult conversation. Karen Gately from Corporate Dojo gives us her very practical and imminently doable take.

Producer: Maria Tickle

Data showed a 70 per cent reduction in face-to face-interactions when two Fortune 500 companies move from private offices to open plan. Harvard Business School's Ethan Bernstein conducted the research and he explains how he tracked interactions using advanced wearable devices, the phenomena of "the fourth wall" and advises how businesses can actually increase collaboration. Spoiler alert, it doesn't involve office design.

Japanese philosopher holds the keys to a happy work life. Or does he?

In the inaugural This Working Life Book Club we dissect a book that's a blockbusting best-seller in Asia, The Courage To Be Disliked by Japanese philosopher Ichiro Kishimi and writer Fumitake Koga.

Billed as a self-help book, it is a Socratic dialogue between a philosopher and a lost, rather angry young man. In it they explore the ideas of the 19th and 20th century Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in attempt to help the young man find direction in life. Philosopher Patrick Stokes and entrepreneur Catherine Robson help Lisa Leong sort the guff from the gems and hear how Adler's principles can help us perform better at work.