Our personalities are changing, will it ruin work?

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1:09This is Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Last month, the Financial Times published an article by John Byrne Murdoch, a data journalist. A lot of people might have seen John's stuff during the pandemic. He did some really outstanding data analysis on what was going on with the pandemic, with vaccines, and just really sort of demonstrated the power of data journalism. He's led his piece with an analysis of personality data, specifically looking at what are often styled the big five personality factors, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

1:47Now, typically, these five factors are regarded as a statistically reliable way to measure personality, Unlike approaches like Myers-Briggs, these factors prove consistent over time. And psychologists have taken a view that much of the variance of human personality can be understood by looking at these factors. Interestingly, they also prove predictive for other outcomes. Conscientiousness, for example, predicts academic success and job performance. Neuroticism can predict mental health issues. John Byrne Murdoch took a paper that was published in 2022 and extrapolated the methodology. The paper specifically was about personality change taking place during the pandemic.

2:28John Byrne Murdoch took that methodology and extended it to more recent times. So what the paper does is it takes 7 ,000 people on a panel aged between the ages of 18 and 109 and tracks them over time. And the really critical thing there is that because it's a panel measuring the same people, you can track whether people are developing and changing. So each year they're subjected to the big five analyses. And what that paper discovered, it showed some pretty remarkable declines. Conscientiousness fell amongst all age groups, but really notably, it fell most strongly from about the high 40s percentage score down to the high 20s.

3:13So from about 48 to about 29. and that fall was amongst 16 to 39-year-olds. So broadly a group that extends from Gen Z to millennials. Other groups saw a decline but not as much. Other factors also declined. Agreeableness declined amongst most groups. Extroversion declined amongst most groups. And his conclusion was it was a change in personality that hadn't typically been observed before. When I posted it on LinkedIn, one of the people who commented was Nick McClelland. Nick is the CEO of Burn Dean. And he commented, having completed some research about the relationship between attitude to finances and the big five back in 2018, if you said to me that we'd see this type of shift by 2024, 2025, I would have asked what the hell has happened in the world.

4:05I contacted Nick and Nick's going to join me today for a discussion. So Nick, thank you for joining. Do you want to introduce yourself properly, what do Berndine do? What do you do? Thanks, Bruce. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So, Chief Executive Berndine, we are workplace behavior and dynamics experts. So, a lot of our people are ex-employment lawyers who've seen the rough end of workplace conflicts and workplace culture going wrong. And Berndine was set up 21 years ago, 22 years ago this year, to address these issues further down the timeline in a preventative measure. So, we tried to create kinder, fairer workplaces, great workplace cultures, and work with a lot of organizations, especially in London, in the city, and globally to achieve that.

4:48I've been there about a year and a half, and it's a fantastic business that I'm enjoying being part of. And you mentioned you did some research back in 2018, so that must have been a previous place. It was, yeah. But what was that analysis? What was that big five analysis that you did there? Yeah, it was an interesting paper that we did. I was working for a company called JLT at the time that became part of Marsh McLennan. And we did a sort of co-paper with Robertson Cooper on the sort of psychology of finance. And really what we were looking at was the big five for the first time really in that context against people's savings behaviors, whether people were financially well.

5:26And we did find some strong correlation, well, the strongest correlation really was conscientiousness and neuroticism around how people think about money and finances. But of course, at the time, I was thinking about the wider implications of this in the workplace as well. And so whenever I saw the LinkedIn post, it sort of jumped out at me immediately because given the sort of fall and decline in that period, and 2018 was when we did this research, it just shocked me that we've seen such a decline, albeit when you start thinking about it and digging deeper into the why, it might be obvious as well.

5:59So yeah, that was the background. And it was quite an interesting paper where we focused on happy savers and worried savers and all kinds of things based on those two big five traits. Help those of us who maybe are less familiar with the big five. Typically, we wouldn't see changes like this to people's personality anywhere near as quickly. Is that right? No, I think it's malleable. I think out of all the sort of different psychology and personality assessments, when it comes to the big five, it can shift over time, but it's more of a conscientious change that people tend to make. So through behaviors and habits and change in that sense.

6:37And of course, there's an element of that can come with age, because as people go through life and go through different walks of life, things can shift. Or a big event can shift your perception around neuroticism, as an example. You can become more worried if something seismic happens to you. But generally, you wouldn't see a big shift like this happen. The personality traits are not set in stone, but they tend to be quite core to how you work, as I understand it. And I'm not a psychologist, but obviously I've spent a bit of time thinking about this in the workplace context. Some of the criticism that came to the data, the vast majority of coverage of this report was supportive of it and said it was helpful.

7:17Some of the people who commented suggested that the effect size was actually pretty small in terms of the overall impact of it.

7:27Ben Murdoch had changed his scale slightly to try and emphasize it. There was some criticism on that. Do you have a perspective on that? I think that what probably is more worrying for me is if this is the start of a trend. It is a short period of time. So, of course, we're looking at the last five or so years, well, probably three years in that data sense. if that is the beginning of a trend and we're going to see that change, and especially if you consider the sort of lower scores on conscientiousness and inverse, the sort of higher neuroticism amongst the young population, given that's the next generation of workers coming into the workplace, then that trend could be worrying.

8:08So I'm not so worried about the sort of the timeframe here. It's more, is this the start of a trend and a change that ultimately is going to impact the future of work for the next 10 years, 20 years. It's really interesting. When he did an interview with Derek Thompson, and he was asked to sort of explain what he saw the causes of this were. And he said that he felt it was the fact that the world has got much more distraction now. Our smartphones are effectively proving so enticing for us that we are becoming less conscientious. we're becoming less extroverted because we're staying in more, and all of these things were having an effect.

8:51I was really taken, though, with something additional. So Professor Alex Haslam, who is a professor of psychology and really sort of focuses on social psychology, he went a little bit further. He delved into the questions that elicit those responses about conscientiousness. And you're asked to respond to things like, I work hard to accomplish my goals. I am dependable and can be relied upon. I'm willing to put in the effort to complete a task, even if it's difficult. I'm able to resist temptation that would derail my progress. I believe rules should be followed whenever possible. And his point was, to some extent, it's not just worth thinking about the individual who's answering that in terms of have they evolved, but also the nature of work that they're actually doing.

9:41And so, you know, I believe that rules should be followed whenever possible. I work hard to accomplish my goals. If we've created a version of work which is unrewarding, bureaucratic, dull, it should be no surprise to us that when people are asked whether they could answer yes or no or margin to those things, that they just don't feel as compelled by the work they're doing. And I was really taken with that it's it's not just a question that we're distracted by the things around us but the jobs that we're doing are actually just way less satisfying than they used to be i think there's there's there's so much to unpick with the why so i think you know i've no doubt in my mind that distraction plays a big role in this i think the nature of work um is a really interesting topic to pick into especially if you start to think about how work will change with ai hitting the workplace and i know you've done a lot of uh deep digging into that subject I think there might be something here as well about other effects on the pandemic, of the pandemic to the ways that we work.

10:46So if you look at people's attitude during something so seismic that it affects everybody in the world to what's important in life, and I think that's sort of doubling down on the family life, on friendships, on what's really important, then perhaps work just means a bit less than it did because we're focusing on the things that really matter. and maybe that's a good thing at times. From a work perspective, it's probably a bad thing. And then you kind of get into what's happening in the world right now and if you look at geopolitics, if you look at AI coming into the workplace, maybe there's a switch here that people are kind of protecting themselves a little bit.

11:23If I care a bit less or switch off a bit less from that, it won't happen. It's their self-preservation distraction technique that might be just kicking in as well here. So you combine all of those things together and you have, I think, some big challenges ahead from a work perspective and from an organizational perspective to get the most out of things. I'm really taken with the easily distracted and careless nature of some of the research that went into it, that people are less tenacious. If you think about the productivity conversation, UK alone has a productivity issue today, certainly compared to other big G7 countries as an example.

12:00So this will affect productivity if it continues on down that line. It will affect how we look at risk management if we continue down that line. So these are all big challenges ahead that I think if the data does come through into the workplaces we're seeing, I'm intrigued as to how that's going to shift working relationships moving forward. That's right, because maybe you can give me a perspective on this. But albeit that, I don't think we always draw a straight line between these factors and workplace culture. But there's no doubt whatsoever that, you know, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, they all play a part in terms of how we turn up for work, how we contribute, how we play a role in a team.

12:39And if all of those factors are declining and very strongly declining in the under 40s, that's going to have an impact on what it feels like to be part of a team, whether we actually find work to be rewarding. And even though those factors that you mentioned might see us reorientating our life towards our home life rather than our work, not necessarily a bad thing. But if we're turning up at work and we don't feel part of something, we don't feel like we have any sort of bond and rapport with the people we work with, work becomes more transactional. And to my mind, that's not just at the expense of business.

13:22It's at the expense of all of us. If you're spending 40 hours a week in this slightly transactional, detached relationship with people around you, that makes the whole of our lives poorer. We've talked ad nauseum for 20 years about purpose and work and how important that is. And that actually, from a well-being perspective, it's important to have a positive relationship with work and feel like you're striving and achieving and doing so with potentially a bigger cause at mind. And workplaces have done a lot of effort to think about purpose, to create that strapline to using Simon Sinek, start with why, you know, why are we doing what we're doing?

14:04If you're turning up to the workplace and you don't care about the why, you've got less emotional buy-in to the why, then it's going to be detrimental for both the business, of course, but actually for the individual as well from a wellbeing perspective because that's when we start to see people get less engaged and start to shift off into doing something else. And maybe that's where the negative side of what's happened over the past five years or so is really kicking in and where we might see some struggles in the future. In your professional capacity, do you witness some of these things in organizations?

14:41And what are you seeing from the work that you're doing with clients? There's some concerning stuff happening at the moment. We would sort of classify ourselves as experts in workplace conflict. And conflict can have quite a wide definition. But if you look at how we treat each other in the workplace, it's not getting better. In fact, it's deteriorating. And actually, there's research that shows we're seeing more employee relations cases coming through the workplace, particularly in relation to discrimination and harassment, as an example. Bullying is on the rise as well. And these are just the things that are reported.

15:13One of the biggest issues in the workplace is that a lot of it goes unreported as well. So there's a lot more drive happening from the legislation, from the regulators to come in to try and stamp this out. But on a global scale, conflict in the workplace is increasing. And that's ultimately, I think, down to relationships. You've got a lot going on for people right now. And geopolitics plays a big role in that. I'll give you an example of some work we've been doing. and we've worked with a technology company on a global scale where they have seen a significant increase in the number of people having Slack-based arguments.

15:50So this is almost like Twitter-like wars happening, but in the workplace. Again, if you go back five, six years ago and say that the kind of anonymous conversations that might be taking place in social media were then coming into the workplace and difficulties were happening inside these channels, again, it would have surprised me at that moment in time Because the workplace is sort of somewhere you want to go to feel psychologically safe and you want to be, of course, yourself. But the topics tend to be driven by these big geopolitical issues. So Israel-Gaza and war in Ukraine and others. So conflicts on the rise.

16:26And again, could that relate here in that if you care less, if you are less diligent, conscientious in your work, care less about your relationship with the workplace, are you more likely to be less filtered, as an example, when it comes to your relationships with colleagues. So I think that's a very real-world problem that we're going to see, again, affect how we have a relationship with work. Tell me this. Does that mean that a lot of organizations are debating trying to make it a politics-free zone or trying to prevent people discussing these issues? Can you even prevent those things happening?

17:01It's a really interesting topic. A lot of that has been discussed the last 12 months because I think you tend to find two extremes at the moment, which is either we don't want you to talk about politics, which we would say is the wrong thing to do because politics is part of life today. You can't get away from it. The news cycle that we live within, the debate and important topics that are there are too important to just pretend they don't exist once you step over the threshold of work. And then you've got the other extreme, which is can you bring too much into the workplace? Can you bring your personal views into the workplace?

17:35But those personal views are at odds with another person at the extreme of the conversation. So the truth is it's always somewhere in the middle probably in that it is important that we don't ignore it, that we are able to talk about these difficult things inside the workplace, but importantly, it's done with respect. And it's kind of that core of respect that I think is really important in the conversation. So it's a big debate. The answer is never going to be one of the extremes that it's don't talk about or talk about it too much. the truth is always somewhere in the middle. It needs to be discussed, it needs to be dealt with, but respectfully.

18:09As you're sitting there, you say your organization specializes in understanding these things and helping to deal with them. What do you think are the solutions to try to reduce conflict, to try to reduce this sort of detachment? Are there any things that you're advising the best firms to try and do? I could say this is the answer to a couple of different workplace challenges at the moment, but particularly this one. But also I would look at things like the well-being conversation, which has been so prevalent for the last five or six years and probably my real area of background in many ways. You know, we have under-invested and over-promoted the management layers within most organizations.

18:52If you take the vast majority of large organizations in particular and the hierarchy that it's created, we create a system where to progress your career and I'm interested in the link to conscientiousness here because does higher conscientiousness, which does link to higher career growth, is that good for the individual or good for the business? And a lot of people have crept up that ladder in the management positions without getting the proper training and support to be a great manager or a great leader. And it comes naturally to some, of course it does. But that training is under-invested and it is a hard thing to do.

19:26And if you look at the ability for somebody to have a difficult conversation about performance or a difficult conversation about behavior in the workplace and the manager's capability of handling that. Or if you look at the root cause analysis of why well-being is on the decline rather than the increase, given all the investment that's gone into well-being in the last five years, again, root cause is relationship with manager. So if you're looking for solutions that allow us to navigate this new world of work and all of these different things that are coming in, including where AI has a role to play moving forward.

19:59I think we're entering into an era where that investment in management needs to catch up. I'm going to be positive and say I hope that this is the trigger or some of these things that we're talking about are the trigger for real investment in management because it's needed. And again, you can link that back to productivity and risk management like we were earlier. And we're maybe in an era of coaching. The coaching really kind of starts to kick off inside the workplace in a way that's more meaningful than And just sort of a spattering of it happening occasionally to a group of leaders at an offsite once a year or whatever it might be.

20:31How do you embed that mentality to coach and support managers and employees in the new world of work? And that's a fascinating topic in the sense that we've always thought of that as human-led for so long. But of course, with the rise of agentic AI, there's opportunities for coaching to be real-time, using the large language models and capability that some of the technology is bringing in as well. So I think there are going to be solutions. I think there's ways to navigate this, but the investment in that kind of human element, the managers, the people that lead and take charge of people every day, that's got to be part of the solution.

21:11I can really buy into that. You mentioned the challenges of disembodied communication through the likes of Slack. And I just wondered if you saw anything in the data that suggested that some degree of face-to-face communication just helped us connect with each other on a more human level. Is there anything in that? Or actually, should we sort of remove ourselves from that as being a distraction? That in itself could be a distraction of a conversation because the way technology has evolved and the way that we now need to communicate, given the ways of working hybrid and globalization in itself, which was already happening prior to the pandemic period where we were all forced to work at home.

21:52Slack teams, the technologies that allow us to communicate instantly via text message or voice message or whatever it might be, they're here to stay. I don't think they're going anywhere. I think they will improve because I think AI is the opportunity to improve that experience significantly. But I think we're in an interesting period where we've had this sort of rise of social media and what that's meant and all the negative and positive connotations of that. And then this sort of blending period we're probably still in with workplace social media and our assumption that people would use it in such a way that is work appropriate, shall we say.

22:29I think when we started to see these tools come in place, that was true. People consider that work environment to be right. What I think we're seeing, and maybe this is where everything we've been through for the past few years, is this sudden carelessness within the use of these tools. I don't see any adjustment required on the technology itself, but I'd come back to kind of human behaviors and human conversations. If we can build that approach with respect and build that sort of education required around that, especially with new generations coming into the workplace for the first time, having only maybe experienced these tools in a social context outside of work or in their school, university, period of life, whatever that might be, helping people adjust to that is probably something we need to focus on given some of the cases we're seeing come through.

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24:00Thank you so much to Nick for joining me. If you are interested in this or any of the commentary on it, you'll find a whole load of links in the show notes. In the show notes, you're going to find the original article by John Byrne Murdoch. you're going to find a link to the interview he did with Derek Thompson. In addition, you're going to find a couple of bits of commentary. I mentioned there was a little bit of criticism. It's worth saying that the vast majority of coverage of this was positive, but there were a couple of people who questioned the effect size. And I've included not only one of those pieces, but a response to it.

24:31Former guest on the podcast, Jay Van Bavell, who's a psychology professor, challenged the people who criticised the effect size. He says probably the biggest personality change that has been observed until now is called the Flynn effect. And that's the idea that IQ has increased by about 13, 14 points in the course of the last 50 years. And that the Flynn effect is significantly smaller than what's being observed here. This is about an order of magnitude, about three times bigger than the Flynn effect. So it's worth saying that this is not remotely insubstantial. And I just wanted to give you the opportunity to see all of that coverage and see all of that commentary.

25:11So if you are interested, you could check all of that out in the show notes. You'll also find a link to Berndine and to Nick, his own LinkedIn. So thank you. I'm very grateful to Nick for joining me today. If you're interested in any of this, anything about how personality is changing, work's changing, the impact on workplace culture, best place to see any of that is in the newsletter and you can sign up there also in the show notes. I've been Bruce Daisley. Thank you so much for I'll see you next time.

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