Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
1. Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny
71 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to the first episode of The Hippo Question, a podcast by Country Navigator!
In this episode, Nikki and Matthew host Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny, co-authors of the No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller book “Workstyle”, and co-founders of Hoxby, a collective of freelance experts.
Tune in to find out more about how Hoxby is making asynchronistic working across the globe work, and about the big shift in mindset that leaders need to make in order to accommodate for the cultural working revolution.
Recommended
Transcript
Cultural Intelligence & Inclusion
00:00:04
Speaker
A podcast all about cultural intelligence and inclusion. We're asking loads of people the important questions to find out what makes them tick and how culture has impacted their lives. We're going to look at their cultural hippo and find out what we can learn from the people who've made a career out of leveraging culture and inclusion.
00:00:27
Speaker
Your work style, a revolution for wellbeing, productivity and society is The Sunday Times' number one business bestseller about having the freedom to choose when and where you work. Co-authored by Alex Hurst and Lizzie Penny, it was conceived before the pandemic, but immediately it became part of the zeitgeist as hybrid working and working from home became the norm across the globe.
Introducing Alex Hurst and Lizzie Penny
00:00:52
Speaker
Alex Hearst and Lizzie Penny also co-founded Hogsbee, a collective of freelance experts in their field who come together to deliver projects on an asynchronistic basis across the globe. Welcome, Alex and Lizzie. Hello, and thanks for having us. I'm Alex. I'm Lizzie Introduces. Hi, I'm Lizzie.
00:01:17
Speaker
And we came up with the concept of work style in a pub, like all good ideas in the UK, apparently.
00:01:28
Speaker
It was a meeting of minds really where we were both discussing our relationship with work and how we both wanted to be judged on our output rather than our input and we came up with the word work style that night on the basis that if we can all make choices around our lifestyle
00:01:49
Speaker
Why not our work style? And so having a work style is being free to choose when and where you work for yourself.
The Work Style Concept: Freedom & Flexibility
00:01:58
Speaker
And this is something that we think is necessary and increasingly important now that the majority of the work people do can be done anywhere and at any time. That creates an opportunity for people to fit work around life,
00:02:16
Speaker
which means more people can access work than are doing so currently. It enables people who are being excluded by the rigidity of the nine to five Monday to Friday system of work to be included, to work on their terms.
Hoxbee: A Freelance Community
00:02:31
Speaker
And we think that's incredibly important in this digital age that we now live in.
00:02:37
Speaker
And we should say that Hocksby and the Hocksby concept is the working prototype for work style. So following that conversation in the pub, Alex and I looked around for an organization that
00:02:48
Speaker
engaged its workforce with the freedom to choose when and where they work. And we found there wasn't one. So this was eight years ago. And so we decided to set up our own working prototype. And now we deliver projects for some of the biggest businesses in the world, Amazon, Unilever, Merck, AIA, B Labs, Divine Chocolate, one of my personal favorites. So straight away, I'm curious, Lizzie and Alex, tell me a little bit more about the hot to be concept in terms of
00:03:14
Speaker
What's the diversity of your freelancers? Can I call them that? How do you do this, really? And how do you offer them that flexibility? So we would call them Hoxbees within the Hoxbee environment, but yes, they are all freelance. They're freelance because we want them to have more autonomy over when and where they work than traditional employment allows.
00:03:38
Speaker
The thing that that enables is for us to operate as a community rather than a traditional company. So we don't think of ourselves as a company with a building and hierarchy and roles. We think of ourselves as a globally distributed community of people who come together to deliver projects, bringing our unique skill to the team in each case, but also
00:04:03
Speaker
in bringing the kind of diversity of thinking to each project as well by having people from all over the world. And they are globally distributed. I think we're across something like 40 countries at the moment. We're around 500 people across the world.
00:04:22
Speaker
that yeah, we bring together to harness that diversity of thinking in order to create ideas, solutions, work that traditional working may not have been able to.
00:04:35
Speaker
we are still flexing around that industrial age system. This is a big change. But this is also a source of competitive advantage. So there is an exciting element to this, which is that because of changes in technology,
Leadership Mindset Shift: From Presenteeism to Accountability
00:04:50
Speaker
demographic changes with our aging society, and a change in attitudes to work, we actually have an opportunity to work in a fundamentally different way that has autonomy and individuality at its heart.
00:05:03
Speaker
And for those early adopters of that way of working, they can create a point of difference versus competition, particularly at a time where there's labour market shortages in countries like the UK in order to attract and bring together the most exceptional talent
00:05:18
Speaker
to deliver great outcomes. So I think we would argue that this is actually a really exciting time for those people who want to embrace work style working, rather than a scary time. But I don't disagree that there are some chief execs that find it scary. Yeah, I think that there is a
00:05:37
Speaker
big mindset shift that needs to happen within leadership of organisations at the moment, which is about relinquishing the need to mandate when and where people work. So we're very accustomed to saying you need to work at this place for this amount of time, whether that's
00:05:59
Speaker
Traditional employment, part-time employment, flexible working, hybrid, remote, four-day week, these systems are still anchored in the need to mandate when and where people work, rather than just saying,
00:06:14
Speaker
I don't care when and where you work. You're free to decide
Building a Trust-Based Culture
00:06:16
Speaker
that for yourself. What I care about is what you deliver. It's the output that we need to be talking about, not the input. And that's the big shift that we think leaders need to make, requires a new understanding of what it means to be accountable for your work, for your output, not your presence. But as a result, therefore, presenteeism,
00:06:40
Speaker
shouldn't be a thing actually what should be a thing is am I delivering what what I'm supposed to be delivering is that delivering value and moving us towards our shared goal yes or no and start to have those conversations which is a difficult shift to make
00:06:55
Speaker
But fundamentally, we believe the right shift to bacon, it's how we've been working in Hoxby and we've experienced the benefits firsthand, that that autonomy then creates. We know from existing research that autonomy benefits work-life balance, job satisfaction, engagement and productivity. We know it reduces stress, tough turnover and exhaustion.
00:07:20
Speaker
So the evidence is all there, but we need leadership to let go of the need to mandate if we're to start to reap those benefits. I mean, that's fascinating, Alex, because obviously there's so many positives for the employee themselves, right? Like having someone being able to have that balance and being able to have flexible working be anywhere where they want. But I'm thinking it from, you know, what it comes down to the crux of it for me is trust.
00:07:47
Speaker
because the the mandation is a lack of trust and trust is something so cultural and we look at cultural intelligence we look at trust so closely. How are you combating some of that lack of trust that perhaps organizations are coming out with and how are you doing it at Hogsbee?
00:08:05
Speaker
I think that's incredibly observant, Nicky, and it's often something that we talk about. We talk about Hoxby as an experimental playground. We have made many mistakes. We continue to make many mistakes, and we learn from them. But we very quickly learned three lessons working this way. So the first thing was be digital first, not physical first, which for those of us who've worked in traditional
00:08:29
Speaker
businesses is a complete mindset shift. So as Alex said earlier, Hoxby doesn't have an office. Slack is our virtual office. Google Meet is our meeting room. The water cooler is a digital channel full of cats and dogs and babies and gifts. So that's the first thing. The second thing is work asynchronously. So working when it suits us as an individual rather than at the same time as everyone else.
00:08:52
Speaker
And that is such an inclusive way to work, but it's also productive and can be fun and highly collaborative. But you need to set the right parameters, you need to have a carefully chosen combination of technology from the start, and you need to establish the right ways of working. So there's a cultural element to that as well.
00:09:10
Speaker
but then the third thing that we always talk about is a trust-based culture and we normally actually say invest in a trust-based culture because work style autonomous working only works if it's underpinned by trust.
00:09:27
Speaker
But trust-based cultures don't just come by themselves. That's something that we have experimented with. We were privileged to start an organization with the specific vision to test work style autonomous working because that meant that from the get-go we were looking at how to build a trust-based organization.
00:09:46
Speaker
And we found that it really needs to be role modeled by leaders, it really needs to be recognized, it needs to be rewarded, but also it needs to be kind of structurally built into all your projects, that we all trust each other, that we all work together and that we're all working towards the same vision from the start. So I think for us, trust has been something we've
00:10:07
Speaker
experimented with how to build and engender that trust. But we completely agree that it utterly underpins work style and you just can't have autonomous working without it.
Diversity and Inclusion at Hoxbee
00:10:18
Speaker
Nicky mentioned cultural intelligence. Obviously for us, cultural intelligence is really, really important. And we have this principle that cultural intelligence without inclusion is chaos. And I think you talk about something called collective intelligence. Could you sort of expand a little bit on what you mean by collective intelligence?
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I would think of high collective intelligence as the opposite of groupthink.
00:10:43
Speaker
So where you organize a lot of people who look, think, talk, act, and sound the same into a group, you'll get a lot of agreement. Where you get a lot of people who don't, you get potentially disagreement. But through that disagreement, potentially reach more interesting and informed solutions. So that's to say then that the more diverse the group,
00:11:09
Speaker
then potentially the higher the collective intelligence of the group but you need that group to work together well to unlock that collective intelligence benefit and that's where inclusion comes in this is about having creating the conditions for diverse minds particularly cognitively diverse minds to collaborate
00:11:31
Speaker
And that's what we think is actually one of the really exciting benefits of work style as a shift, not only in literally where we work, in the manner in which it gets done, but also attitudinally that we stop grouping people into
00:11:52
Speaker
of one-size shorthand groups, let's call them stereotypes, and start to see the individual in each case. It's something that we've noticed happen within Hoxby where, because everybody has their own individual work style,
00:12:07
Speaker
Everybody talks about it, and we start to get to understand the people behind the people we're working with, and we start to understand a greater depth of who they are, what's going on in their life, and that enables us to view one another as individuals, irrespective of anything else, and to understand what each individual is bringing to the group and to our ability to be collectively intelligent.
00:12:32
Speaker
So we break down a lot of stereotypes by individualizing work, and we think that's really important to being able to unlock collective intelligence.
00:12:43
Speaker
And the thing that I would add to that is that each of us have our own personal stories. So whilst we might have things in common, you know, I'm a woman, Nikki, you're a woman. We also have a lot that is different and each of us is unique in our combination of the aspects of our life, but also we found within Hoxby,
00:13:04
Speaker
the things that drive us to need work styles. So for me, I co-founded Hoxby and co-created the word work style in the pub because I had my first child. And it was when I had Finn that that really opened my eyes to enduring inequalities at work. And it made me want to work differently so that I could be the kind of parent that I wanted to be.
00:13:26
Speaker
But since then, I had serious pregnancy complications in my second pregnancy that meant I had to have surgery and be on bed rest. Then I moved across the country to Bristol from London, which I could do with no disruption to my career. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer out of the blue and went through four months of grueling treatment. And since then,
00:13:46
Speaker
my husband's unfortunately been diagnosed with cancer. And so now I support him through his treatment, manage the side effects of my medication, and look after three small children. And so we are each unique in the different elements that make up our lives. And everyone has challenges in their lives. We say that everyone's got their own story, every life is unique. And so you need to be able to fit work around life.
00:14:15
Speaker
And each of us has our personal individual needs in terms of work, but it doesn't make us any less dedicated to our careers. So I think one of the big things for us, we each have personal burning platforms for wanting to work this way. But it also means you bring together this rich cognitive diversity. There's no doubt that my perspective on the world has changed over the last 10 years with the things that have happened to me.
00:14:40
Speaker
but that also makes me a valuable member of a team who, in a traditional way of working, may well have been excluded from working. Lizzie, I'm in complete awe of you right now. It's just incredible. It makes my personal problems seem so tiny, so minuscule almost. But Licky, that's not true. Everyone has their own problems and everyone's problems are tough for them.
00:15:06
Speaker
I completely agree, but it also brought to me the question to the forefront of my mind is, are you seeing more women then apply to be part of Hoxby? Yeah, Hoxby is 74% female.
00:15:17
Speaker
So it's disproportionately women who are coming to Hoxby for work style. That's really reflective of society at the moment. There's a lot of women, there's also a lot of people who are in traditionally freelance jobs as a result. So a lot of the work that we've done over the years has been in the creative space doing
00:15:39
Speaker
marketing campaigns, communications campaigns, branding projects for well-known brands and the reason for that it was because when we started the vast majority of people who could work freelance could work in that space and things have changed enormously over the years even as recently as we've been doing this in terms of how much work can now be done freelance and how much of
00:16:06
Speaker
of the workforce, as Lizzie was saying, is becoming freelance as a result of technology unlocking portfolio careers.
00:16:16
Speaker
I think the other thing that I would add is that actually, for me, this is about intersectionality. This isn't just about women versus men. This is about women who are also carers or a man who has a physical disability and a mental health challenge and is also neurodivergent. We resist the urge to stereotype whenever we can.
00:16:39
Speaker
As part of the book, we look at seven groups who are structurally excluded from traditional work. So older workers, carers, those who have a chronic illness, people living with a physical disability, people with a mental health challenge, parents of children under 18, and those who are neurodivergent. And what we looked at was within each of those seven groups, the difference between people who want to work and people who do,
00:17:07
Speaker
So for example, 77% of people with autism want to work, but only 26% do. So that's a staggering 51% gap. And there are similar shocking statistics for each of those seven groups. And so we've been working a bit with the government on their labor market shortages inquiry, and they asked us to quantify how many people are impacted by this.
00:17:32
Speaker
24 million people sit across those groups. Well, that's the majority of the working UK population. So that's pretty bonkers.
Impact of Covid on Work Inclusivity
00:17:40
Speaker
But I think that serves to prove the intersectionality that we're talking about. These aren't discrete groups. These are groups where there are huge amounts of overlap. And for anyone in those groups who is having to work in a traditional way, they are having to make compromises in order to survive and thrive in that world of work. And in turn, what that means is that we aren't getting the cognitive diversity
00:18:01
Speaker
that we should and therefore we aren't as collectively intelligent as we should be. I think one of the very, very sad facts about humanity is we don't need new ways to exclude people. But I do feel that obviously Covid, which was a great benefit I suspect to your business, it had seen us exclude people in new ways. I think for us it's about
00:18:24
Speaker
starting to reconsider shared spaces as places to work. So libraries, you know, other community spaces where we can bring people together and make work accessible for people who otherwise it wouldn't be accessible. Offices becoming collaboration spaces to connect with people rather than places we go to to do work.
00:18:47
Speaker
So there are definitely elements of that in order to make sure that we are truly leveling the playing field and everyone can be involved. We have seen in the pandemic, the single group that saw the kind of most negative impact was female parents, was mothers, basically, because they were the primary carers, homeschoolers running the home, and that was a problem.
00:19:14
Speaker
But equally, we did see progress made on an inclusion level from people who previously had felt like a minority group and therefore excluded. And suddenly there was this great leveler of everyone having to work remotely and in the pandemic work from home. So it's never a simple answer, is it? But I think
00:19:34
Speaker
the complexities for us are around not just gender equality, but the other groups who are being discriminated against by insisting on fixed hours, office space working, who could otherwise be included. Just as a build on that and on the subject of the pandemic, I think as time goes on and it becomes more of a memory, we lose sight of the fact that the pandemic was
00:20:02
Speaker
a pandemic during which time people were really ill and their family members were ill and mostly people were confined to their homes. So that is not the same as a remote work or work style work test environment. That is a major disaster of a global scale. So imagine how we would have managed without being able to have the ability to work from home.
00:20:34
Speaker
I just don't know what would have happened. But it's important to remember then, therefore, that a lot of the way in which companies are working now in the kind of immediate fallout post-pandemic is an evolution on that kind of reactive crisis plan that was put in place during that time and not necessarily part of a proactive strategy to increase diversity and inclusion within the organization.
00:21:04
Speaker
Now is the time to transition from what was a reactive strategy, take all the great stuff from that and apply it to what is now a proactive strategy of working in the digital age in such a way as to include people in the way that work gets done. That's what's exciting.
00:21:22
Speaker
That's fascinating. And again, it brings me back, Alex, too. There are certain roles in which this is completely and easily possible, right? In industries where people needed to be on the shop floor or they were in production. And so are we being unfair to those roles? What's some of the
The Future of Autonomous Work
00:21:40
Speaker
advice to corporates that are trying to achieve this on the basis of inclusion and changing policy, et cetera? How can they make sure that it's inclusion for everyone, not just for a few roles?
00:21:52
Speaker
I'm sure Lizzie will have a view on this as well but I'll start by just saying I think what we're talking about here is at Hoxby we've been pioneering the idea of work style for the last eight years but we recognise that it is in many ways a perfect test environment because the work we're doing is work that can be done anywhere and at any time but what we're trying to do is prove
00:22:18
Speaker
that it is a possible future state for the majority of work. And the majority of work can be done anywhere at any time. We're talking about now being a service economy. We're talking about that most people's jobs are done at a computer or at a desk between the hours of nine and five minutes a Friday. What we're saying is that can change and we can create an autonomous future of work
00:22:48
Speaker
with that as the starting point. And we are now the early adopters, if you like, of this way of working. So it's not going to happen overnight that the principles of autonomous work permeate all forms of work. That is a journey, a period of time. We'll need to pass for that to happen. But you've got to start somewhere. So we're starting where it can be done right now today in this space. And we're on a mission to change that.
00:23:18
Speaker
starting here and also starting with the people who are in the position to influence the future of work for everyone else. People who are in executive roles, people who are making decisions about how people on the shop floor work. Well, we need to change the way they think about the way they work before they're going to start changing the lives of the people on the shop floor or on the front line.
00:23:42
Speaker
So we're starting here, but this is a process of change with autonomy and autonomous work as being the thing we should all be aiming for. So there are 2.5 million businesses in the UK knowledge economy, just to give a sense of scale of how many people's lives this could impact. And globally, I think there are estimated to be more than a billion knowledge workers.
00:24:05
Speaker
So even if all we do is impact people who are working in the knowledge economy, that could be really significant. But I think for us, we feel that work style is not just a structure of work, it's an attitude to work. It's about considering people as an individual and how work could best suit them as an individual. And in the book, there's actually a case study on a company called Burtzel that looks at how autonomous working can be applied to community nurses.
00:24:35
Speaker
And there's no question some of our most important workers are place-based workers. But also we have record high vacancies in the NHS. We've got a crisis in staffing in services like midwifery.
00:24:51
Speaker
it just might be that those crises are the things that perpetuate thinking differently, are the things that are the catalyst for organizations, perhaps the NHS, we can but dream, to start thinking that maybe we should do this differently in order to bring people into work who otherwise would be excluded. And that doesn't have to be complete autonomy to work when and where you choose.
00:25:16
Speaker
But it might be about setting your own shifts, not having specific shift lengths. You know, technology allows us to do these things now.
Technology's Role in Work Autonomy
00:25:24
Speaker
This is touched on something there, which I'm really passionate about as well, which is about the role of technology in all of this, which is that the shape and nature of the work we do is evolving really quickly with technology. Technology is enabling a lot of
00:25:41
Speaker
work that used to be manual to be automated and work is evolving alongside that and let's not forget we as humans are determining what we create the technology to be able to do in order to make our lives better and to further human progress. So what we're saying I think is that in the evolution of technology as well
00:26:06
Speaker
we should be working towards enabling people to have choice, whether that's in the development of technology that supports, I don't know, the way nursing gets done, for example, then let's look at how that can be innovative and creative, but let's all work towards a destination that we believe in. And that difference brings me to the favourite part of our podcast, the hip-hop question.
00:26:32
Speaker
For those people who haven't come across the hippo, the hippo question before, the hippo is a large animal, they love wallowing in the mud, but you only see about 10% of their body because that's all that's above the surface. But the dangerous bit, the bit that causes the problems is underneath the surface of the water.
00:26:53
Speaker
So the hippo question first to Alex and then to Lizzie, what's your hippo challenge? What's the hidden thing in you that's caused a challenge or maybe even a success? What's that hidden thing that you can share with us? I think for me, and I hope I'm interpreting your question correctly, is that I, having worked with Lizzie,
00:27:22
Speaker
and having had a daughter who's now six. I've become a feminist, but I am a white middle-aged bloke and I'm not your archetypal feminist in that sense. So for me,
00:27:42
Speaker
I come up against stereotypes all the time that mean that I'm hard to be taken seriously in that space. People don't necessarily think I'm going to be that, but I have to try twice as hard to make it known.
00:28:01
Speaker
and to bring that to the conversation and to help other people to think the same. And increasingly, I come up against a lot of pushback on that front, but also where people are
00:28:16
Speaker
I guess sympathetic to the narrative, it's also a real point of strength and an opportunity then to help bring about change, which I'm really passionate about for the sake of my daughter's future, but also the future of women in work. Fantastic, thank you. What about you, Lizzie? What's your hippo challenge or your hippo?
00:28:39
Speaker
I was actually going to say something similar that I think people look at me and they see a working mum and they think therefore that I'm campaigning for autonomy because I'm a working mum. And I think the thing I want to do if it's not taking the analogy too far is get the hippo out of the water because I think what's really important is for us to openly share our personal stories about what's going on in our lives so that people understand how important it is.
00:29:09
Speaker
that our work fits around them.
00:29:12
Speaker
I have so many more facets to my life over and above just being a mum. And I think I'm not just campaigning for autonomy, I'm campaigning for trust-based working and the accountability of each of us as individuals that comes with that. And so I think that actually that's a really important thing that Alex and I should always be talking about the accountability that goes hand in hand with that autonomy.
00:29:41
Speaker
whilst also encouraging others to share their work style stories as openly as possible so that everyone is clear that you know Alex might look like a white man and I might look like a working mum but it's never as simple as that. Fantastic, thank you. And in the interest of getting the hippo out of the water, what
00:30:04
Speaker
How can people
Hoxbee's Vision for Work Culture Change
00:30:05
Speaker
get hold of it? It's called WorkStyle, a revolution for wellbeing, productivity and society. And you can get it in waterstones, foils, any good bookshop or on Amazon.
00:30:15
Speaker
Fantastic, thank you very much indeed. Can I add one more thing that is that we are currently looking for 10 work style pioneers by which we mean 10 organizations with whom we can test work style in practice. Nikki, this goes back to your question about different types of organizations and how work style can be applied. We spent eight years testing this ourselves and we wrote the book following the pandemic because everyone was interested in it, but we're now looking for 10 work style pioneer partners.
00:30:44
Speaker
So if anyone is interested in testing work style in their organisation, we'd love for them to get in touch. That's fantastic news for organisations because I think there's a huge drive on, you know, mental wellbeing, on making sure there's balance between work and life, you know. And so I think it's fascinating and I'd be surprised if people don't take up the opportunity. So I'm hoping our listeners will be on that phone straight to you to get in touch.
00:31:10
Speaker
Alex Hurst, Lizzie Penny, thank you so much for being here today. In the journey of life, there are a few people that you come across that you kind of go real human, making a difference because they really believe that the difference needs to be made. And I think I've met two of those people today, so I'm really pleased. It's been an insightful talk having a chat with you. So thank you very much again and have a lovely rest of the week. Take care. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us.
00:31:40
Speaker
The Hippo Question with Country Navigator, the number one platform for cultural intelligence and inclusion training. Tune in for more interviews with global business leaders and find us at countrynavigator.com.