Work Better Steelcase

What’s so funny? Turns out humor at work is for more than just a good laugh. It can help us influence people and be more creative. Authors Naomi Bagdonas and Dr. Jennifer Aaker join the Work Better podcast to share how our brains change when we laugh, why humor isn’t just for extroverts and how more laughter can make a big impact on business.

Naomi Bagdonas is a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an Executive Coach. She helps leaders be more creative, flexible and resilient in the face of change by facilitating interactive sessions for Fortune 100 companies and coaching executives and celebrities for appearances ranging from Saturday Night Live to the Today Show. Formally trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade theatre, Bagdonas performs at comedy venues and teaches improv in San Francisco’s county jail.

Dr. Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a leading expert on how purpose and meaning shape individual choices and how technology can positively impact both human well-being and company growth. Her work has been widely published in leading scientific journals and featured in The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Science.

Together Naomi and Jennifer teach the wildly popular class “Humor: Serious Business,” the inspiration for the bestselling book “Humor, Seriously.”

Work Better podcast is hosted by Chris Congdon. Produced by Rebecca Charbauski. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison and Emily Cowdrey. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios.

Have you ever held back on something because it just wasn’t “age appropriate?” Or evaluated someone based on if they’re a Millennial or Gen Z? Are generational differences preventing people from reaching their full potential in life and at work? And could we be thinking differently about generations in the workplace?

Mauro Guillen is a sociologist and is currently the William H. Wurster Professor and a Vice Dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School and was also a Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything. His latest book is The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society.

Guillén argues that outmoded terms like Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have long been used to pigeonhole us into rigid categories and life stages, artificially preventing people from reaching their full potential. A new post generational workforce known as “perennials” – individuals who are not pitted against each other either by their age or experience – makes it possible to liberate scores of people from the constraints of the sequential model of life and level the playing field so that everyone has a chance at living a rewarding life.

Work Better podcast is hosted by Chris Congdon. Produced by Rebecca Charbauski. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison and Emily Cowdrey. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios.

We all know the workplace has to support a lot of diverse needs and it could probably do a much better job than it does today. But that can be really hard because there’s a gravitational pull toward sameness. It’s just easier to establish a pattern and stick to it. So how can we embrace how different our brains are when we are designing the workplace?

Elena Sabinson (she/they) is a neurodivergent researcher passionate about the role design can play to help all people flourish. She is an assistant professor of environmental design at the University of Colorado Boulder and received her PhD in human behavior and design from Cornell University. Elena was diagnosed later in life with autism and ADHD.

Elena’s personal experience and research on neurodiversity along with their expertise in architecture and design gives us ideas for how the workplace can do more to support all of our different brains.

Additional resources:

Learn more about Elena Sabinson’s work and research https://elenasabinson.com/
Read insights about how to design moments of joy at work www.steelcase.com/WBnew
Get the latest workplace design, insights and research: www.steelcase.com/subscribe

Work Better podcast is hosted by Chris Congdon. Produced by Rebecca Charbauski. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison and Emily Cowdrey. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios.

Why is it some teams at work struggle and others seem to just click? Anita Woolley studies the science of teamwork and she’s sharing what research says about how to create great teams. And it’s not about having a lot of brainy people on your team.

Associate Dean of Research and Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon Anita Woolley holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard and her research on teams has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Her studies explore how teams problem-solve, collaborate and she’s developed an rich understanding of a concept called collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is the idea that when you put some people together, the team is able to do better work just because of the group. In this episode, learn what factors create great teams and why having women on teams appears to be an essential component of success.

Additional resources:
Learn more about Anita Woolley and her work on collective intelligence https://scholars.cmu.edu/418-anita-woolley
Read insights about how to design moments of joy at work www.steelcase.com/WBnew
Get the latest workplace design, insights and research: www.steelcase.com/subscribe

Work Better podcast is hosted by Chris Congdon. Produced by Rebecca Charbauski. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison and Emily Cowdrey. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios.

We’ve all been told at some point in our lives that hard work is the key to success. But author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is out to dispel this myth. He says you can actually get more done and experience more “Aha!” moments if you rest and relax more often.

Alex has spent the past 20 years studying people, the future of technology and its impact on work. He is a former Microsoft research fellow and professional futurist with a PhD in the history of science as well as a visiting scholar at Stanford and Oxford.
He’s the author of four books including; The Distraction Addiction, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Shorter: How Working Less Will Revolutionize the Way Your Company Gets Things Done and, most recently, Work Less Do More: Designing the Four Day Week.

When Alex talks about rest, he isn’t just focusing on sleep. He defines rest more broadly and is championing the idea that we can actually be more productive by doing less. He offers some advice for those of us addicted to the badge of busyness.

Additional resources:
Learn more about Alex and his books including Work Less Do More, Rest, Shorter and The Distraction Addiction https://www.4dayweek.com/alex-pang
Watch Alex’s Ted Talk: How Rest Can Make You Better at Your Job https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_soojung_kim_pang_how_rest_can_make_you_better_at_your_job

Read insights about how to design moments of joy at work www.steelcase.com/WBnew
Get the latest workplace design, insights and research: www.steelcase.com/subscribe

Work Better podcast is hosted by Chris Congdon. Produced by Rebecca Charbauski. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison and Emily Cowdrey. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios.

Spaces communicate a lot about how you are supposed to behave. In a library, everything about the lighting and the furniture tells you to be quiet and contemplative. Or a conference room indicates where to sit and where to look.

Dr. Upali Nanda has done a lot of work around the intersection of architecture and neuroscience. And she’s figuring out how to create workplaces designed to make our brains healthier.
We first caught up with Upali in New York where she presented her team’s work at the United Nations General Assembly's "Brain Capital Alliance" summit hosted in the Steelcase New York City WorkLife. She is Global Practice Director of Research and a Partner at HKS, and executive director of the Center for Advanced Design Research and Evaluation which is a non-profit founded by HKS. She also teaches at the University Michigan in the school of architecture and urban planning.

She has extensive experience leading research projects in design practice, focusing on the impact of design on human health and perception. She was awarded the Women in Architecture Innovator Award and sits on the board of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture.

In this episode, learn about a living lab in Atlanta that’s creating a workplace designed for brain health and helping people learn how to make the most of it to create joy and happiness at work.

Additional resources:
Read Getting to a Brain Healthy Workplace to download the full report Upali Nanda talks about https://www.hksinc.com/how-we-think/reports/getting-to-a-brain-healthy-workplace/
Read insights about how to design moments of joy at work www.steelcase.com/WBnew
Get the latest workplace design, insights and research: www.steelcase.com/subscribe
Work Better podcast is hosted by Chris Congdon. Produced by Rebecca Charbauski. Creative art direction by Erin Ellison and Emily Cowdrey. Technical support by Mark Caswell and Jose Jimenez. Digital publishing by Areli Arellano and Jordan Marks. Editing and sound mixing by SoundPost Studios.