This week a new series on BBC Radio 4 focussed on our jobs debuted. I was delighted to be one of the main contributors to Payslip Britain, hosted by Sean Farrington and produced by Nick Holland.
The first issue that the show tackles is the growing number of people who are choosing to leave the workforce in their fifties and sixties. It tries to understand what it is about modern work that is proving such a turn off for us. ‘Work intensification is increasing… People are progressively working harder,’ concludes Dr Amanda Jones, a lecturer at King’s Business School. A call centre worker recounts how his job had become a ‘numbers game’ where even a visit to the toilet needed to be less than 4 minutes to avoid having to provide an explanation to his manager.
The programme takes time to compare the impact that meaningful interactions have on our experience of work. When work is organised around quotas and targets, it often serves to squeeze out the parts of the job that prove rewarding to us.
There are broader societal implications to this obsession with measurement too. The small micro-interactions we have with strangers, whether the barista who makes our latte or the checkout assistant who adds up our weekly shop, have an impact on our lives. In one study, students who were asked to interact with the people they met reported that their happiness levels were higher after the encounters. In another paper, participants who spoke to strangers reported higher levels of life fulfilment. But if the people serving us are too busy, or curt with us it has the opposite effect. It serves to make the world around us feel hostile and unwelcoming.
The programme highlights how hurry sickness is robbing our jobs of meaning. We sit at our desks with headphones on, trying to avoid getting drawn into conversations that will keep us from our inboxes. Meanwhile it was those side conversations that added richness to our experience of work in a previous age.
Those who do computer-based jobs can find themselves spending 70 to 75 hours a week connected to email, Slack or Teams.
Dr Amanda Jones gave a snapshot of the realities of work for many, ‘Now we can attend lots of meetings, so there’s an expectation that we will. So when do you do the “real work”? You can fit it into your day but we still have deliverables, you still have measured outcomes. So when do you do that? Well, your time that you used to use for family time or hobbies you’re doing the work that should have been doing when you were in meetings all day.’
After the programme aired, a nurse got in touch with me saying that he’d quit his job because all of the parts of nursing he’d loved had been stripped from the role. Now he was just filling out forms to please a manager who didn’t seem to care about anything other than the reports he was producing. The programme was the first time he’d heard his experience of contemporary work fairly represented.
When I was asked to contribute to the programme, I wasn’t sure what form it was going to take so hats off to Nick Holland and Sean Farrington for producing something that is tackling the realities of work in 2025. Payslip Britain is set to be an important series drawing attention to the challenges facing us in our jobs today.
Listen to Payslip Britain
Some of the themes about meaning at work are covered in this week’s podcast, below.
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‘Since 2011 our HR industry has grown at four times the rate of the rest of the workforce and is now the second largest in the world relative to population’. Editorial in The Times claiming that HR is a source of bureaucracy at work and causes an acceleration of administrative burden on managers
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Hybrid working has (of course) killed going to the pub after work on Fridays reports London Centric, Thursday has become the new Friday in London but after work socialising has become less common than pre-Pandemic everywhere else.
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After ad agency Accenture Song dropped their DEI policies in an attempt to appease President Trump in turn they found themselves dropped by Transport for London who demand all suppliers show a commitment to equality.
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It’s estimated that 2 million people in the UK (and 20 million Americans) suffer from long covid a condition that is unpredictable in its impact. Some sufferers have enduring brain fog, others suffer physical impairment. ‘My average patient was previously very fit, very successful, and is desperate to get back to normal life,’ said one doctor. ‘Researchers have found brain atrophy in areas related to memory and emotion regulation among patients with even mild cases of covid,’ says the Washington Post.
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Be careful of simple answers to complicated problems: a study into 11-13 year olds found that having a mobile phone led to increases in wellbeing. ‘We went into this study expecting to find what many researchers, teachers and other observers assume: smartphone ownership is harmful to children. Not only was that not the case, most of the time we found the opposite – that owning a smartphone was associated with positive outcomes,’ said the lead researcher. This doesn’t stop a lot of people citing Jonathan Haidt’s prolific media appearances and falsely claiming that we have proof than phones are evil.
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Partner piece to the P&G research from last week that found that AI made work easier and better quality, a study from Microsoft found that using Copilot made work less effortful without any decrease in quality
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I appeared on the BGF Good Growth podcast talking about resilience and working at big tech
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This a long, but brilliant read, exploring routes to better team work
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Focus on the bigger goal: frequently disputes with other departments drain energy from within. If your team talks about ‘the other floor’, or talks in us/them
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Use internally inclusive language: don’t make reference to the ‘demands of the sales team’ or ‘concerns of marketing’. (The authors also wrote about it in HBR).
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I spent about an hour trying to get Chat GPT to build me a useable version of the Team Machine exercise that Laura Kriska described in the articles (and in her book), but it never quite had enough detail, I’ll happily share it if someone does better than me, the photos and videos seem to be a rich source of detail)
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The next two podcasts I see as a piece with each other, today is about meaning the next one is about mattering. Collectively I feel they present serious substance about the foundations of good culture. Today I talk to Tamara Myles and Wes Adams about creating meaning in our jobs. There’s stacks of notes – and a transcript – on the website.
Listen: Spotify / website / Apple
Read Meaningful Work
#deep #Payslip #Britain
