Pioneers Podcast by Lyreco
The podcast from Lyreco that explores the Future of Work, from Lyreco's innovation team.
Each episode we talk to a pioneer of the future of work, exploring the themes and trends that will shape the workplaces of tomorrow.
Pioneers Podcast by Lyreco
Bruce Daisley - The Future of Workplaces: Resilience, Culture, and Meaningful Change
Bruce Daisley is a leading in voice in the world of workplace culture, a best selling author and past leader of some of the biggest technology companies.
Bruce is one of our keynote speakers in the Future of Work conference in Brussels on June 5th.
Bruce Daisley pulls back the curtain on tech company workplace cultures in this illuminating conversation about what really creates thriving workplaces. The former VP of Twitter EMEA and bestselling author of "The Joy of Work" shares how the celebrated cultures at companies like Google and Twitter were often carefully constructed illusions designed primarily as recruitment tools rather than genuine attempts to improve employee experience.
"Most organizations feel like organized chaos on the inside," Daisley reveals, challenging us to move beyond superficial perks like office slides and snack rooms to create meaningful workplace environments. As our working patterns become increasingly homogenized across companies—hybrid schedules, messaging platforms, and endless meetings—the critical question becomes how organizations can truly differentiate themselves.
Daisley offers practical, actionable insights for businesses of all sizes. He explores how meeting-free days transformed productivity and employee satisfaction at companies that implemented them, and explains why intentional use of office space is crucial in the hybrid work era. "Wednesday looks different to Monday, Wednesday looks different to Friday... I don't think we've pushed ourselves hard enough there," he observes, suggesting that being deliberate about how we use different workdays creates opportunities for both creativity and efficiency.
Perhaps most powerfully, Daisley challenges conventional wisdom about resilience, sharing how the US Army's billion-dollar investment in individual resilience training failed while approaches fostering community and connection showed remarkable results. "Resilience is a collective thing. It's a sense that we're all in it together," he explains, offering two key levers for reducing workplace burnout: giving employees more control over their work and fostering genuine connections.
Don't miss Bruce Daisley's keynote at the Future of Work conference in Brussels on June 5th. Visit LinkedIn or www.future-of-work.eu to secure your tickets for this transformative event.
Welcome to the Pioneers podcast by Lyrico. I'm Mark Curtis. Each edition we're talking to pioneers in their own fields. We're talking to business leaders, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, keynote speakers basically anybody who's got something interesting to say about the workplace and is pioneering the way we think about the future of work. Today I was talking to Bruce Daisley. This is a guy who's had a pretty spectacular career. He was the VP in charge of Twitter for the whole of EMEA. He was previously in charge of YouTube UK and he's now a best-selling author writing exclusively about workplace culture and the future of work. Now Bruce is going to be one of our headline keynotes at the Future of Work conference in Brussels this year on June the 5th. If you'd like to find out how to get tickets for that, just follow the link in the description of this podcast or go on to LinkedIn and just search up Future of Work Brussels and you will find links to the website to find out how you can get a ticket.
Marc Curtis:So, without further ado, let's listen to this really interesting talk. I think it was interesting with Bruce Daisley. I'd like to welcome Bruce Daisley to the Pioneers podcast Now. Bruce is the former VP in charge of EMEA for Twitter. Prior to that, I think I'm right in thinking you were head of YouTube UK as well, but most recently is probably better known as an author of the Sunday Times bestseller Joy of Work. As an author of the Sunday Times bestseller, joy of Work and in 2022, his most recent book, fortitude, which focuses more on the individual rather than organisations. And finally, we're very fortunate not only to be talking to Bruce today, but also to be welcoming Bruce as a keynote speaker at our Future of Work conference in Brussels on the 5th of June. Welcome, bruce, really nice to chat to you.
Bruce Daisley:Thanks, yeah thanks for having me and I'm looking forward to the event.
Marc Curtis:Brilliant, as are. We absolutely Look. I wondered if we could start, because you know your LinkedIn career profile just reads like you know every big and sort of meaningful tech company in Europe from the last 10, 20 years. So I'm wondering if you can start just by talking about your journey really, and what have been those transformational moments in your work life or in your life that have shaped your worldview. Now you know, as an author especially, what are those big events or those big experiences that you've had that have really informed that.
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, I was lucky to work in a exciting, fast-moving tech environment and as a leader, as a boss, I was responsible for trying to ensure that we had a good, productive, engaged culture, and the thing that really struck me through the time that I was trying to deal with that you know, a billion dollar business line reporting into me one of the things that really struck me was that a lot of the people who are leaders and talk about those things haven't either done it themselves or they're in academia.
Bruce Daisley:They've never been involved in business decisions, and so it became a fixation for me to try and understand, firstly, how I could make my own team better, but, secondly, if there was anyone who'd maybe been in my shoes and seen the. I think the challenge is that sometimes you have applying academic insight to the real world of work. You know, the real world of work is messy, it's chaotic. Most organizations feel like organized chaos on the inside, and so that was the key thing for me, and I found myself starting a podcast because I was really I was just consuming so much of this content. I wanted to consume it fresher and fresher from the horse's mouth, and it's effectively, it's become what I do now, you know, for the last five years I've been a consultant, a speaker, someone who thinks about the future of work and how our jobs are evolving from the outside, rather than doing the big job that I used to do.
Marc Curtis:Thinking back to those days as well, I guess we looked to companies like Google and Twitter and so forth. We looked to them for almost that gold standard of what the workplace could be Right, and that seems to be less the case now. Do you think that that's because the job's been done or the conversations moved on, or other companies have kind of caught up?
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, it was something of an illusion, I think, but for a long time. You're exactly right that tech firms were the cultures that we fetishized, we celebrated, we admired, we wanted to pursue. It's really interesting, really interesting. I read the new Talol memoir from a former Facebook exec, meta exec, sarah Wynne-Williams, who left Facebook a few years ago and has just published her story. But she recounts one really interesting episode where Sheryl Sandberg was describing how intentional the culture was to try and make it appealing, they would keep people all there for longer and longer hours.
Bruce Daisley:And I think we used to look at tech firms thinking they had all the answers. I think now we're a bit more realistic because certainly my experience of working in those tech firms was that they didn't necessarily have more of the answers than the rest of us. I think we're a bit more pragmatic now. We look at those firms and we think, yeah, they're good at some things but there's probably downsides in others. So you know from my own experience, when I was working at Google, for example, it definitely wasn't materially different to anywhere else I'd worked, but if you saw the promotion, the PR, the advertising, you'd think it was night and day that their culture was fundamentally different and I guess getting to the heart of that, demystifying that and scratching the surface and having a look at what the real truth is became my curiosity really.
Marc Curtis:Yeah, I remember that time. I remember visiting Google, google's offices in um. It was above mindshare in in um in near tottenham court road in london and it and you walked away from it thinking, ah, ball pits and you know enormous snack rooms and all that kind of stuff. But the reality is, of course, that those things are great when you're showing somebody around an office, but but they don't. They don't necessarily make people want to stay. They, I mean and it's back to what you were saying they wanted to keep people in the building for as long as possible, right?
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, exactly right. You know, normally if you go into an office and it's got a slide, it's to produce a moment which, in many ways, has got benefits to it. It's a marketing device. If you get your phone out and you take a photograph of a slide, well, you've just done a job of telling other people that this is an unorthodox workplace, but most employees don't spend any time whatsoever on the slide, so it's a marketing device. It's a recruitment tool. It's not necessarily about making the workplace more playful, which would be a good goal in its own right but the slide alone doesn't do that, and I think you know understandings once you've understood. Okay, the slide didn't do that, but how could you do that? How could you bring a bit more inventiveness to a workplace? That became something that I was keen to explore. Really, a lot of firms talk about these things, but how many of them actually go through with it and and do create something that's different and unique?
Marc Curtis:yeah, I think that's it. It's fundamentally, isn't it that, that there's a real disconnect between what? And it's the same with almost everything. As you say, it's a marketing thing, isn't it? If you can demonstrate, if you can show visibly that you have an aspiration, but you're not doing anything to back it up, it it's. It's kind of a nonsense. I mean and I guess that's part of the premise of your joy of work book as well, isn't it that that that it has to be more? You know changing workplace culture. You know giving people value and meaning in their jobs is more than just providing them with. You know drinks on a Friday night, right?
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, and look, you know I was the. The stuff I've written there was very focused on trying to give you practical steps, things that anyone could do, because quite often you'll get and you'll get someone who stands up a in front of a conference or they'll talk and they'll say, oh, you need, you need more purpose in your work. And then you go back to work on Monday and you're like, yeah, how do we do that? And it doesn't necessarily feel like that's a to-do point that you can easily action.
Bruce Daisley:And I was interested in yeah, that's right, or you don't know. The next step, what's the baby step that's going to get me along that way? And so I was interested in practical actions that anyone could take, even if they're not the boss. Actually, what can any of us do to make our workplaces better? So I think you know that's one of the challenges at the moment.
Bruce Daisley:The really interesting thing about the moment is that more and more, our jobs are broadly the same as the same job in another company. You know, we do two days from home, so the desk wouldn't be different. The majority of the way that we do our work is messages, whether you use Teams or Slack or email still, but you spend most of the day messaging, and then you probably do in excess of 20 hours a week in meetings. So that's the environment that most of us find ourselves in, and so to differentiate that between companies is actually quite difficult. Yeah, you get a recasting, you get the different people, but the interesting challenge at the moment is okay, so, based on those things being the same, how do we create the rest of the environment? Those things being the same, how do we create the rest of the environment? So it's different?
Bruce Daisley:You know, if any of us believe that creating extra motivation can help us do a better job, or liberating people to have their best ideas can help us have an edge versus other companies, then how do you set about doing that?
Bruce Daisley:And that, I think, is the thrill of the moment. There's a really interesting debate going on at the moment that you know, let's say, whether we're five years or 10 years away from AI, being at the level of sophistication of another employee. But once intelligence is ubiquitous and universal, then what's going to be the differentiator, what's going to be the reason why your firm does better than a competitor firm? It's a really interesting challenge, right, because you've got to get to the heart of well, what will make us better when we've got infinite brains available to do any of our requests? And probably the big differentiator is going to be that creative instinct, or that agency, that sense that you're going to empower people to follow a quick, instinctive decision. And if you're not thinking then about how you engineer your culture to create those moments, then you're potentially going to see some competitor who does that instead of you.
Marc Curtis:Yeah, I'm curious, you know, and I absolutely can absolutely see what you're getting at with that and especially when you're talking about big firms, where you can take these kind of strategic, you know, kind of decisions and almost kind of change the direction or sort of steer your ship in a different way to embrace different ways of working, how does that translate to smaller businesses? And I and I asked that because it was something that struck me the other day you know, cause we're always, we're always talking about these big topics. You know these big kind of. You know the Googles and and you know the, the big companies out there, how they can do these big things. But then I then I think, well, okay, if I'm a business owner and I got 20 or 30 employees, family owned, working, you know, working in the same, in the same building that I've been in for the last 40 years, everything's looking a bit tired and everything Is that relevant. Is that relevant to these companies as well?
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, so what does that look like? I mean, how.
Bruce Daisley:Well, I think the big differentiator is going to be that you know, one of the things that we used to have against us if you're trying to compete with the biggest firms in the world is that you knew the sum total of their intellects was bigger than yours. You know, they just had more money to hire the best people Going forwards. That's not going to be as much of a differentiator. Actually, the thing that might differentiate you is whether you're able to execute quicker. Are you able to take those ideas and hit the road with them quicker? Are you able to bring them to life quicker? And so actually, to some extent, that's advantage to the smaller organizations. But this is the fundamental thing how can you increase your speed of execution? How do you empower people to make decisions? You know, how do you get ideas out of the door quicker, and I think that is a really interesting challenge of the moment we're in, how we're going to see a levelling of the playing field and doing things a different way.
Bruce Daisley:But look, you know, even the way that we configure work is up for discussion, one of the things that a lot of people report. They say look, my firm wants us in the office three days a week. I like doing it, but when I go there I'm just sitting on back to back calls all day. It's like okay. So how do we use the office which we've I think most of us recognize has got a huge value to it? How do we use that as our creative space? How do we turn that into a place where magic happens there that couldn't happen on a team's call on Monday? How do we take the best advantage of that?
Bruce Daisley:And I think at the moment we've not been intentional enough about saying Wednesday looks different to Monday, wednesday looks different to Friday, and that's the challenge at the moment. You know, if you went to a recording studio, you'd find it was set up for a certain sort of work and they did specific things there. And I don't think we've been through the steps of saying, oh yeah, we're doing certain things on Wednesday that we would never do on a Friday, and I don't think, you know, we've pushed ourselves hard enough there and I think, as a result of that, there's going to be a big advantage for small firms to maybe do some of these things in a slightly more imaginative, freely liberated way.
Marc Curtis:Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess, yeah, I mean it's really interesting. So you made me thinking. Now you know it's like, what would that look like in our business? And and immediately I can think of reasons why it wouldn't work. I can think of a million reasons why it would be brilliant and I can imagine you know it would be it would be quite an quite an interesting experiment to say, okay, you do not take team calls on a, on a Wednesday, thursday, for example. You know you have, you know that's workshop days, or it's collaboration days, or it's face to face meeting days or whatever.
Marc Curtis:But then immediately I'm thinking well, you know how does that, how do you scale that to your, to your suppliers and to your customers? How do you, how do you communicate that to the sort of the wider business? What's to stop? And this sort of slight, slight sidetrack. But you know my wife doesn't work on Fridays, for example. Slight sidetrack. But you know my wife, um, doesn't work on Fridays, for example. But invariably people will try and put meetings in on a Friday and on the one hand, she should be empowered to say, no, I'm not working on a Friday, but at the same time you feel you have to do these things, so there's always going to be that slight push and pull. Isn't there where people are trying to drag you to an older way if?
Bruce Daisley:I give. If I could give you a metaphor, I don't think anyone who's ever hired an office, bought an office, built an office, has said oh yeah, just come and plonk your desk wherever you want. You know, first come, first served. We're just going to allocate space based on who got there earliest. I mean, it's like the Glastonbury campsite approach to offices. You know, it just wouldn't work, because even Glastonbury says this we're going to lay out this for a stage and this for entertainment area, and you've got to be intentional. And the strange thing is that we somehow think that when it comes to our most finite asset, time, that we can't lay down rules and restrictions and limitations, we can't use it in a very explicit way. It's really interesting. It's like that helplessness we all have because actually, look, you know, there are examples, there are examples of organizations and there's a lovely case study of about 80 organizations who introduced a meeting-free day. Great way to do it. You say you're doing it as an experiment. You say we're doing it as an experiment for eight weeks, 12 weeks. Here's what we're going to do, here's what we're going to learn, we're going to review and we're going to feedback. What worked? Right, really interesting.
Bruce Daisley:But what happened was the organizations who did it said that it increased productivity. People said it was their favorite day of the week. You combine it with being in the office day. So people said, you know, the great thing is, we just went over to the central tables, we sat together and we had a quick team huddle. Um, we swung by someone's desk and we went for a quick coffee together and we effectively turn it into that thing that we sometimes romanticize, that we get sort of misty eyed about, like the water cooler moments or the good old days, but effectively it's systematized that now anyone could do that. You know, in fact, the way that Shopify did it is Shopify just introduced a little plug-in in their calendars that prevented anyone putting in meetings on a Wednesday. You could do it, you could put in whatever you wanted on your own calendar, but no one else could do it for you. So all these things are possible, and it then begs the question well, if we want our culture to be different, what's stopping us from making those differences and enacting those changes?
Marc Curtis:And I guess I guess that to some extent anyway, comes from the leaders in businesses actually a recognizing there's something to be solved or fixed and be then having the you know, either the bravery or to give the permission to their, to their people, to actually try new things Right.
Marc Curtis:I'm aware of the fact that I'd like to talk a little bit about about your most recent book, fortitude, and I'm still on my reading list. I haven't quite got to it yet, but I sort of read a bit of an overview of it and from what I can gather, it's more written about. The perspective of individual fortitude is quite challenging. You know there's a traditional narrative that you know you have to stiff up a lip kind of attitude. You should just grin and bear it. You know you have this stiff upper lip kind of attitude and you should just grin and bear it, and I think your thesis is that fortitude can come from being part of a community or part of a social group or can be aided by the people around you. Is that a fair description or am I way off?
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, yeah. So I guess the critical thing that I would emphasize is that quite often, when we're told to be a little bit more resilient, none of us know what we're meant to do. So say, if you're feeling burnt down, fragile, anxious, someone says you need to be a bit more resilient. It feels a sort of hard thing to access. You think that's like the last thing I'm able to do, and so I was interested in when we see this invocation to be more resilient so often, what can any of us do? And the really interesting thing about that is that if you look into resilience, there's loads of research and there's loads of initiatives that have been set up to build resilience. The US Army is probably the biggest customer. They've spent about a billion dollars training the entirety of the US Army to be resilient, and people who've come and checked it said it hasn't worked. It hasn't had any effect whatsoever.
Bruce Daisley:So you've spent all this money.
Marc Curtis:Where do we think that this? Why are we suddenly now talking about lack of resilience? Is that a new thing? Do we think that this? Why are we suddenly now talking about lack of resilience? Is that a new thing, do you think?
Bruce Daisley:Well, definitely, I think, through the pandemic and through, I think, there's always a degree of generational blaming. There was, I remember, a time and a place when people used to say that millennials weren't resilient, and now it's Gen Zs who aren't resilient, resilient, and now it's Gen Zs who aren't resilient. You know, we've got a capacity to blame young people for maybe having an absence of what previous generations have, and we're witnessing that now. You know there's no shortage of evidence. If you look around, you'll see that people say mobile phones have atrophied the brains of our young kids, or that you know a suggestion that young people can't handle rejection like they used to, and we do see a lot of that discussion. Definitely, around the end of the pandemic we saw an increase in discourse about that. So there is a suggestion about it.
Bruce Daisley:The critical thing I think that I would emphasise is that when we get to these discussions is that when we get to these discussions, actually what we find is that the mistake we make is thinking that resilience is an individual thing, that some of us have it and some of us don't. Actually, when we see resilience exhibited, it's a collective thing. It's a sense that we're all in it together. It's a sense that resilience is the strength we draw from each other, that we're emboldened by the people around us. And the interesting thing is, once you observe that there's no shortage of evidence of when we see it, when we can measure it, when we can invoke it in others, and I think it's a really critical lesson. Knowing that okay in a world that feels increasingly disconnected and lonely and isolated, that knowing that resilience is a collective strength, is a really important lesson for all of us, I think is that so?
Marc Curtis:I interrupted you just as you're about to tell me about the us army's experience of that. Is that effectively what you were going to go and say? Were they focusing too much on individual resilience rather than trying to?
Bruce Daisley:that's right. So their training says things like you know hard people break like an egg. You know weak people break like an egg. But you bounce back like a tennis ball and they say you need to reframe all the problems that you've got and think about them in more positive ways. All the problems that you've got and think about them in more positive ways. And actually you know, when they forced people to do this course, when they forced a whole army camp to do it, they measured it and resilience went down. Um, you know, it just didn't have the results that they wanted. So it's really interesting people felt like they.
Marc Curtis:It was on them to do it, and if they couldn't do it, then that was even more of a blow yeah, that's right, I'm somehow not resilient anymore.
Bruce Daisley:Yeah, that's right. And, and you know, if someone tells you you need to be resilient, especially if you're in your lowest moment, you often struggle and you think, yeah, I'm just not feeling like that and you go into. You know, the opposite of resilience, I guess, is helplessness. And if you're already feeling helpless, then someone telling you you need to be big and tough right now isn't necessarily a helpful suggestion.
Marc Curtis:It's like being told to calm down, isn't it when you're stressed out? Is this driven by your own personal experience? Have you sort of been through this journey? I mean, you talk about the pandemic. I think we've all got our pandemic stories in a way, but is this something you've had to confront as well? Your own resilience?
Bruce Daisley:Well, I definitely witnessed it at work. You know, we I witnessed. I worked in organizations where we had huge levels of burnout, where people were quitting with no jobs to go to, and it does make you scratch your head where you're? You're asking yourself what we're doing wrong here. What's going wrong?
Marc Curtis:and and I think that was one of the ways that I was keen to explore it- and I think in in you've been a bit critical of wellness and wellness initiatives and and things like that is. That is how we're talking about mental, I mean you you've indicated that it is because that's you know, that's what you've literally just been saying. But how would you, if you're redesigning uh, well, you know, quote wellness initiatives at work, or you're trying to get your people to be, you know, in a working environment more resilient, you know what? What are the? What are some of the steps that businesses should be thinking about? What would you do if you were, if you were back in in twitter now or x now, yeah, you know, looking at reducing burnout, for example?
Bruce Daisley:yeah, I'll give you two simple levers. The first one is control, the second one is connection. And so control is that when we feel like we're not in control of what's happening to us, we feel overwhelmed. So if you open your calendar and you've got back-to-back meetings all day, you've got no time to do your work. If your message app doesn't stop pinging all day, you're almost certainly in a state of breathlessness from the work intensity. And so, you know, the first thing you've got to do is think about how can we gift control back to those people, how can we give them some autonomy to work in a more measured way? The second thing is connection. How can you make people feel like they're not doing this alone, that they've got other people around them who understand them, who share what they're doing, and so for me, you know, really simplistic sense, control and connection are probably the two things I'd reach for.
Marc Curtis:Who's your, who are your heroes in terms of the workplace? Either authors or somebody who's really doing something interesting or has done something really interesting in this space.
Bruce Daisley:I think the most important thing and what I'm going to be talking about is you've got to think about how the world's changed. You know, if you're, if you find yourself saying in my day, dot, dot, dot, then you're never going to do well here. In terms of who I admire, I love any businesses that are trying to innovate and test and experiment. I spent some time in the UK chatting to a hospitality business called Nando's. I loved what they were doing sort of empowering local managers to build culture and I think that's a really important lesson for any of us.
Marc Curtis:Okay, Well, look, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you've got a very busy day today. Really looking forward to seeing you in June for day today. Really looking forward to seeing you in June for the event. Really looking forward to hearing what you're going to be talking about. So, Bruce Daisley, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much. Have a great day. See you later, Bruce. So that was Bruce Daisley, our keynote speaker at the Future of Work conference in Brussels, June the 5th this year. If you want to find out more about how to get tickets, just go onto LinkedIn search Future of Work Brussels and you will find the website. More podcasts to come, so watch this space and have a great week. Outro Music.
