Wow @ Work

Ethical marketing is a vital ingredient to a workplace where everyone feels good about themselves. The alignment of values, purpose, and how the organisation treats its suppliers and customers can be a big contributor to workplace happiness.

Simon Batchelar is the author of Reframing Marketing, and has been a marketing mentor for the past 20 years. Simon has a unique perspective on ethical marketing, and believes that marketing should align with the values of the company. This means it’s not good enough simply to talk the talk – organisations must put into practice the values they espouse.

When SEO agency Reddico made employee wellbeing a key requirement, it accelerated their approval as a B Corp. Reddico's approach to unlimited holidays and self-managed teams shows that implementing these policies as part of a larger strategy can lead to positive results, like decreased sickness rates and increased trust within the team.

In his conversation with Stephen, Reddico’s Head of Culture Luke Kyte advises us not to copy what other companies are doing wholesale, but to adapt and build upon ideas to create something unique that works for each organisation.

Since 1995, over 300,000 Indian farmers have taken their own lives. When software engineer Apurva Kothari read about this, he was compelled to leave his dream job and return to India to do something about it.

Apurva is a software engineer who fulfilled the dream of many young boys by working as a software consultant in San Francisco, New York, and eventually Sydney. However, while in New York, Apu read an article about the cotton crisis in Indian farming, and learned that 300,000 farmers from India had taken their own lives, with these deaths linked to GM farming in the country.

This tragedy prompted Apu to leave software engineering behind and create a sustainable clothing company called No Nasties in 2011. No Nasties uses only organic cotton and other sustainable materials, closely monitors and informs the consumer about the carbon footprint of their products, and even has a returns policy for used clothing.

Through his chat with Stephen, you'll gain a greater understanding of the unsustainable nature of our current consumerism model and learn how to purchase clothing in a more ethical way.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

– Mahatma Gandhi

What if work didn’t have to be miserable? What if the memes people shared to help them get through the week weren’t needed? Beth Stallwood began asking these questions through her work as a coach, and during lockdown started putting her ideas down on paper.

Beth is a coach, facilitator, speaker, consultant, and author who has spent 20 years developing her approach to helping individuals and organisations with their people challenges. Her book on finding joy in work is a practical guide to creating a balance between work and life. She believes that work is a part of life and not the other way around, and that boundaries between work and leisure have been disappearing for the past 20 years.

The book provides a step-by-step process to help readers identify areas of their work life that can be improved and create a plan for achieving balance and joy. She emphasises that work should not be a source of stress, but rather a source of satisfaction and fulfilment.

When his wife left him and the business they’d built, Ray Martin found himself feeling like a character in a play, with no script and no idea what to say next. Returning from a trip to Australia presented the possibility that he could rewrite that character, and change the story entirely.

Ray is an entrepreneur and award-winning business leader. Inspired by Bronnie Ware, author of The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, he left England to answer the question “How do I live true to myself from this moment onwards?”His nomadic adventure went global, from London to Chiang Mai, New York, the Himalayas and beyond, and unexpectedly lasted fourteen years.

Ray joins Stephen to discuss his new book, ***************Life Without a Tie***************, and share some of the incredible stories and insight he picked up along the way.

People transitioning from working five days to working four are getting the same amount of work done. Joe O'Connor from the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence discovered this when speaking with women who’d come back from maternity leave, who were being given the same amount of responsibility but for four fifths the pay.

In his discussion with Stephen, Joe posits that organisations will need to compete for new talent on quality-of-life. And at the forefront of that is reducing – not simply compressing – the amount of time we spend working.

In his work with 4 Day Global, Joe discovered that 80% output was already in place, but that it was “buried under the rubble of wasteful practices”. Digging through that rubble means putting in place ways to signpost when team members are in deep work, and focusing on the drivers of results rather than the mere amount of effort.

The world seems custom-made for extroverts, and has been for a long time. But for author Pete Mosely, being quiet doesn’t have to mean being ignored.

Pete is the author of The Art of Shouting Quietly, and A Quiet Person’s Guide to Life and Work. In his conversation with Stephen, he breaks down the myth that introversion and extroversion are linear, the benefits of slowing down, and the importance of promoting diversity in thinking and communication styles.

What do we do when life or work throws us a curveball? In her new book, productivity expert Grace Marshall explores ways we can reframe struggle as the place where the magic happens.

Grace is an author, keynote speaker, and a Productivity Ninja with the Think Productive team. In her conversation with Stephen, she uncovers ways we can hold plans and expectations less tightly, and how we can find joy in our work when we push ourselves a little out of our comfort zone.

We are all prototypes, with a lifetime of learning ahead of us. That’s the insight that led Wouter Smeets to cofound Prototype You, an organisation that runs workshops to help people work towards their ideal work experience.

For Wouter, the office is just another tool, and moving a mouse or typing at a keyboard are not signs of productivity. And conversely, sometimes working less is the better way to achieve good, sustainable work.

Wouter is a Dutch entrepreneur, innovator and ideas guy that loves to hang out on the beach. By reinventing why and how we work, he helps move the needle towards a society that optimises wellbeing over wealth. As co-founder of Prototype You, he helps organisations create a positive impact on employee wellbeing, happiness and productivity through programs where employees experiment towards work-life harmony.

A third of all carbon emissions are created by the food system – in production, packing, distribution, and consumption. Ruth Anslow spent 15 years in the corporate sector and formed the HISBE supermarket brand to try and change that.

Ruth is a social entrepreneur and a keen advocate of doing business for social benefit, beyond just making profit. In 2010 she decided to take on supermarkets and cofounded HISBE Food with her sister, Amy. HISBE is a supermarket chain with a difference, built on a social enterprise business model and designed to support a sustainable future for food and farming.

Alongside running HISBE, Ruth cofounded The Good Business Club, to connect entrepreneurs who are starting, running and growing a “business for good” with the support and resources they need.