The Fix Welton Media Limited

Aside from sleep, work is where we spend most of our waking hours over our lifetime. How we experience work is how we experience a considerable amount of our lives, which is why managing the meaning we derive from work is essential to our overall life satisfaction. Knowing how your workplace works is how we can begin to make it work for everyone.
Most of us want more meaning at work and badly. A 2018 study by BetterUp surveyed 2285 American professionals and found that 9 out of 10 employees, regardless of their job level, tasks or salary, are willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning at work. Moreover, participants were willing to forego 23% of their total future earnings (almost as much as people spend on housing) to have a job that gave them meaning! 
On this weeks episode I am interviewing my friend and New York Times bestselling author Eve Rodsky on how we can find greater meaning in life and work.   
 
Eve Rodsky
Find Your Unicorn Space
How Work Works
 

The degree to which we feel like we belong at work depends on the nature of our relationship with our workplace. We don’t often think about our job as a relationship, but it is, at least in a sense. Your job is a reciprocal relationship. You exchange your time, energy, and expertise for money, advancement, and fulfilment at a basic level. The exchange can happen only if both parties trust each other, which is why I refer to the relationship between workplaces and employees as a trust exchange.
The challenge we have today is that so many people don’t trust their workplaces, this is why we see the rise of quiet quitting or the lazy girl jobs phenomenon. People want to come into work do the bare minimum and go home, because workplaces are not meeting their needs beyond a paycheck.
The problem is next to sleeping, work is where we spend the most number of hours over our lifetime. We cannot afford to not care about work or ignore our need for meaning and belonging. Our experience of work makes up a huge proportion of our experience of life.
 
Michelle King
How Work Works

The publishing industry is notorious for a lack of diversity. In 2016 The Bookseller examined the lists of the UK’s most established publishing houses and found that there were fewer than 100 books published by authors of colour.  
In 2021, out of a total of 4,017 authors and illustrators featured across 33 catalogues from the UK’s top five publishers and selected independent presses, 2.5% were Black British, when compared to the overall output.  
These numbers speak for themselves. 
In this episode I am interviewing my friend and three times published bestselling author Minda Harts on how to write a book and get it published. We will also be unpacking how to tackle inequality in publishing.  
I really think we all can play a role in either perpetuating or tackling the inequality in publishing through the books we purchase the content we consume. All of our choices either disrupt or contribute to the inequality in publishing. If we truly want to consume the best content, then we need to level the playing field so that all the talented voices can be heard.  
 
Minda Harts
Michelle King - How Work Works
 
 

It's that time of year again; companies are adding new graduates to their ranks and training them, much like they always have. According to a National Association of Colleges and Employers report, despite a slower job market, hiring projections indicate that companies plan to hire 4% more graduates in 2023 than in 2022. While employers continue hiring graduates, many are unaware of the specific skill gaps graduates face and what managers can do to solve these challenges.
Companies often sell the idea that an employee’s potential is determined by the skills they can list on a resume, but this isn’t true. Just take a look at the way companies promote employees within an organization. Every year, managers will meet to discuss which employees have the potential to move to the next level. Leaders will debate people’s different skill sets to try and achieve consensus on the final list of candidates for future leadership positions. What leaders are assessing isn’t the technical or soft skills an employee has; instead, it’s their ability to learn on the job.
In this weeks episode, we share what skills graduates need to thrive in the new world of work but to maximize their potential we need graduates to take ownership of what they learn and how they learn it.
How Work Works
Tool kit for advancing your career
 

Based on my work, I know for sure that at one time or another, most of us have lost our belief in work. We have felt the pain of being excluded from informal networks, the stress of trying to keep up with the pace of change, or burnout after putting in countless hours to get the next promotion, only to be overlooked or disillusioned with cut-throat corporate cultures. We are tired of accepting the myth that individual advancement must come at a cost to ourselves and the people we work with. 
Aside from sleep, work is where we spend most of our waking hours over our lifetime. How we experience work is how we experience a considerable amount of our lives, which is why managing the meaning we derive from work is essential to our overall life satisfaction. Knowing how your workplace works is how we can begin to make it work for everyone.  
Michelle King
How Work Works
 

According to the most recent “Women in the Workplace” report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey, the gap between men and women leaving their jobs is the largest it has been since the report was first published eight years ago.  For every female director who is promoted, two women at the same level of seniority choose to quit. The report states that women are leaving companies that fail to deliver on “the cultural elements of work that are critically important to them.”
Culture is our lived experience of work, and for women today, the lived experience of work isn’t great. For example, the Women at Work report by Deloitte published this year finds that 10% more women are experiencing; harassment, microaggressions and exclusion at work compared to a year ago. Overall, this is an increase from 51% to 59% of women. 
To understand how pervasive toxic cultures are, Charles Sull, cofounder of CultureX and Donald Sull, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of CultureX analyzed the language that 3 million U.S. employees used in Glassdoor reviews to describe their employer between 2016 and 2021.
What they found is a gender gap in men and women’s experiences of toxic workplace cultures. Overall Women spoke more negatively than men about most elements of culture, including work-life balance and collaboration. The largest gap between the genders however, is for toxic culture, which they define as a workplace culture that is disrespectful, no inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive.
On todays episode Charlie Sull joins us on the show to discuss these issues.
Even if employees don’t quit, employees in toxic environments are more likely to disengage from their work, exert less effort, and bad-mouth their employer to others. Sustained exposure to a toxic culture increases the odds that employees will suffer from anxiety, depression, burnout, and serious physical health issues.
Given the impact toxic workplace cultures can have on our mental and emotional wellbeing, it is important we understand how to solve this issue.
Here Charlie shares what we can do.
Action One: Be nicer to people - dilute the toxic culture.
Action Two: Report toxic behaviour to HR, if you witness it or it is happening to you.
Action Three:  Take reliable data to senior leadership and keep talking about it to ensure senior management realize that this is a problem and place the item on the agenda of the CEO.  Don’t lose your voice.
 
CultureX