Pullman Voices: Julia Hobsbawm

0:02In this day and age, there's little question that digital engagement is a crucial part of our working creative and personal lives. Yet, in the absence of a global framework for exactly how we go about consuming and sharing information online, how can we establish an approach that respects the need to be decent to ourselves and to others? This is Pullman Voices, the podcast by Monocle Radio that offers fresh perspectives from cultural pioneers, business leaders, and creative minds, challenging how we see and engage with the world. I'm your host, Tom Edwards. Today, we're talking about digital decency, and my guest is Julia Hobsbawm.

0:44I think that we've got to just think differently, both about the world, how the world works, and to understand that we are all connected in it, and we're connected fundamentally by economy, technology and culture. A leading voice and author on the world of work, Julia is the CEO of Workathon, a research network which analyses global trends in our working lives. This March, they published The United State of Work, a comprehensive report on how the pandemic has shifted our attitudes and approach to work. Julia's books, including Fully Connected and The Nowhere Office, have continually sought to address the impact on the way we connect with one another.

1:28On today's episode, Julia talks us through how we can manage our increasingly digital lives while protecting our personal and professional well-being and helps us devise our very own Digital Decency Manifesto.

1:51Julia, wonderful to have you with us. Thanks for coming to see us here at Monocle. Pleasure. Lovely to be here. Here's the opening gambit. What does behaving decently in the digital realm look like, feel like to you? Well, it's such an interesting question and it's a particularly interesting generational question. So I'm 60, which means that I think I have an idea of decency that was pre-internet when everything has become more and more overshared. So for me, decency is partly about holding back, regardless of whether it's classed as offensive, but it's just sort of decent boundaries. So what I mean by that is that, you know, I grew up in the age of the letter that you actually wrote something by hand and you stuck it on an envelope.

2:41And those times have gone. There are younger people here who don't really understand what writing a letter means. But in a contemporary way, I think what you mean about digital decency and actually what I mean is nastiness, divisiveness, rudeness, excess of violence, degradation circulating. And I think there's a lot of that. But I also think that people haven't fundamentally changed and people want to have experiences and they want to be accessible to digital services. I think people want access to digital services, but they really place a premium on human experiences in physical spaces. Let's zoom out a bit.

3:30I think if people are familiar with lots of your work, your writings before, they know that a sort of theme you've addressed is this idea of social health more broadly. What do you mean when you use that phrase? Define it for us. And also, how does that then speak to some of these themes about the rise of digital and how we should be using it for social betterment more broadly? Yeah, I mean, I did coin the term social health in 2017 when I wrote a book called Fully Connected about the age of overload. So that was the kind of period of time when we were all just beginning to realise that technology, certainly in the developed world, was engulfing us and running away with us.

4:11And I was doing things like digital detox and Friday night techno Shabbat and those sorts of things. And I coined the phrase because I actually got physically ill. And as I recovered, I looked up the history of the World Health Organization and I realised that when it was formed after the Second World War, it didn't describe anything to do with technology and how we connect with each other for good or ill. It was really about class or it was about diet and nutrition. You know, lots of people didn't have enough vitamin C after the Second World War and had rickets and illnesses. But in the 20th century, as it aged in the early 21st century, health means are you lonely?

4:55Are you connected? Are you being swamped with the wrong images? Can you purposefully and meaningfully connect with people? You know, is email good or is email not good in your life? And all of those questions I've basically lumped together as social health. And it did strike a bit of a chord. I haven't yet succeeded in getting the World Health Organization to redefine health as to include digital. But I think we know what's needed. We know what digital health is. What are some of the ways that, whether it's individuals or us as a collective culture, depending on which prism you're looking through, can better manage this digital shift?

5:37in the absence potentially of regulatory, adequate regulatory frameworks, how much is incumbent on the individual to sort of do the right thing? And how much culturally are we able to formulate collective fixes that can protect the kinds of values that we began by talking about and, I don't know, deflect or resist some of these attendant challenges that come from without? Well, it kind of comes back to this label social health because I do think in the end it's about functional well-being. I think it is about mental health and physical health. You know, if you don't get enough sleep, we absolutely know that health of both mental and physical kinds suffer.

6:15We actually know that digital overload can contribute to that. That could be that you're just binge watching endlessly or it could be that you're scrolling. Doom scrolling is a very interesting phrase. And so there is also a tension between individual responsibility, but I would call it individual literacy. it's about emotional and psychological awareness it's not really about labeling people as having mental health problems or labeling people as victims of somebody else's bad policy it's about knowing oh well this upsets me i need to remove myself can i remove myself how do i remove myself But we do have to take stock of our consumption of information that's of any kind, but particularly digital, like we know how to count calories and carbs.

7:08I love that phrase functional well-being. With some of the conversations you have right now, and it's interesting because I know in your various capacities, you will talk to individuals, corporates, supranationals itself. You have a really interesting perspective. In the pursuit of that functional well-being, what are the key things people are saying? Is it still about overload? Is it about lacking, I don't know, diagnostics or metrics by which to try and measure and make sense of these things? Is it about the state of the discourse around it? What are people mainly talking to you about? Well, people are definitely talking about feeling out of control.

7:40The world does not feel in control at the moment. And so I think that the trends post-pandemic are actually for escapism, for a break, for a rest. That's why you've seen an uptick in travel. You've seen an uptick in luxury hotel markets. That's why you've actually seen offices being redesigned as if they are sort of luxury hotel spaces, funnily enough. policymakers, government, corporate leaders, of course, they see things from a height. And that is a different perspective because they see things at scale and they inevitably unconsciously depersonalise. You know, they see different demographic groups.

8:19Whereas what's very interesting is if you try and put yourself in the position of whatever group it is you want to help, and you actually ethnographically understand what they're experiencing, then you see things differently. And one of the things that's very popular in corporates is moving from wellbeing, which was pretty beanbaggy before COVID, you know, it was all sleep pods and play and fun and slides and that sort of sensibility, or just kind of meditation and cutting off. It's actually becoming much more now about conscious engagement with your work or your workplace or wherever you find yourself.

9:05I think what we're understanding is that wellbeing isn't quite so aspirational and fun. And it isn't just about a right. It's about, does it work in your life? There's no point saying, don't take the mobile phone to the bedroom if you've got a teenager and you need them to call, because that's not going to make you feel well or unstressed. Do you see what I mean? So I think what people are also recognising is that there is no one size fits all. There's no norm anymore. In these areas of tension, and there's a few, we talk about the push for experiential, is it in opposition with then the digital presentation of oneself, or even these regulatory environments, or in policy terms, top-down meets bottom-up need, tension in the middle.

9:51Do we tend to lean into this idea that, oh, tension, so there's conflict and that's bad? It's such an interesting point. And I do think these sort of philosophical edged discussions are vital at the moment. There's a couple of things. One is people are naturally conflict averse. And I think a bit of a narrative has arisen which doesn't really bear scrutiny, which is if we're not all getting along, then everything's falling apart. A company like NVIDIA, which up until the arrival of DeepSeek was, you know, the most successful chipmaker, actually not completely the most successful chipmaker, but, you know, was soaring ahead.

10:28They had something called the NVIDIA Way. And the NVIDIA Way fundamentally is a management structure that has worked for years and years and years, which says no hierarchy and let's talk it out. Don't incubate. Don't bitch behind somebody's back. Just talk it out. Now, I love that. I love that. I'm sure it doesn't always work like that. But, you know, the politics of office or workplace life where you don't confront, I think is bad. I wrote a book called The Nowhere Office about really predicting hybrid work. Didn't make me brilliantly popular. I wasn't saying I was advocating it. I was just kind of reporting, if you like, what I'd noticed and what I saw.

11:09But what I said was, if you do want people to convene all the time or some of the time in a workplace, let's call it an office, you really have to make it fit for doing three things other than any work that can be done digitally, right? And one of them is to sort of be social and to break bread and to eat and convene and gossip around the water cooler. The other is to learn. Learn at a mentorship level, especially young people. Possibly learn actually, you know, experientially, back to that word experience. But the third thing I said is it's really important to come face to face to argue. Don't argue by email.

11:48Don't argue by email. Fatal. And in fact, there was a very good book that was written over the last couple of years about the terrible miscommunication of how different generations use emojis and how all sorts of conflict arises. However, there's one other thing I might want to add into the pot in the discussion about conflict. We've just done some research about cultural conflict at work, at workathon. And our research has shown that there is a big uptick in conflict around geopolitics, which side are you on, what issue and hot button topics like gender. You know, there's a polarisation that is probably not great conflict.

12:34And then when you add in that quite a lot of CEOs are giving their own view on matters of conflict, that becomes really difficult to handle. And what that actually means is there's a whole new era of work, place or environmental diplomacy being required that I'm seeing a trend in. How do you resolve conflicts between different generations, between, you know, hybrid haves and hybrid have-nots or whatever? Well, Julie, is one of the first things do you think that we need to think about if we talk about digital decency or broad brush social health or the pursuit of functional well-being? Should we separate our personal lives and our work lives?

13:14They are ever more intertwined, the complexities we all understand. And as you said, we spend most of our time doing work. Is that the first stage? Is it to keep them apart or actually is maybe the answer to zoom further out and look more holistically at the whole picture, society wide, individual wide, how you are part of this big, constantly evolving and coalescing thing? Does it not matter where we draw those boundaries? I think boundaries do matter. Let's talk a bit about decency as etiquette. OK, there is etiquette. An out of office that says, forgive me if I'm replying slow because all these are my working days, I think if you like is functional.

13:54So the etiquette is about what works well for everybody. But, you know, when on a phone call, it used to be very customary to say, am I disturbing you? You know what I mean? So I think that does matter, especially when certain aspects of social media are spiraling out of control. And there's, you know, you have political leaders or people with great authority sort of behaving like they've got no etiquette themselves. I do think that's a problem. To your point about boundaries, I just think there's no one size fits all. it's why you take something like the four-day week which is supposed to help people have boundaries who's going to pay for it does that work in everybody's life or is it better to have a sprint mentality where you work like absolute you know thunderbolts for six weeks at a time and then you have time off I think what we want is a much more responsive self-aware by self-aware Where I mean your family or your workplace or your relationship or your friendship group as well as these systems.

15:08And that's where I think we're not quite focusing on management and organisation. Boring stuff to do with the big ideas. That's what I'm interested in. Well, because I was going to ask you next about this idea of, you know, connection and disconnection. And how does one observe the correct etiquette? how does one recognise the potential for other people's shifting boundaries on some of these themes? If there is not a standard and we can't be too prescriptive and it is constantly evolving, how do we ensure that we, if we really want to recognise the possibility that your boundaries are different from mine, how do we do that?

15:43Is it about learning a new etiquette? What does the process look like? I think it's about what they call test and learn. You know, it's about saying in your life and then widening that out to your family or whatever's going on for you in your life. You know, some people live a life of one and only do one thing and others do many with many. It's about taking stock and saying, let's just talk about connectivity. Am I overconnected? Am I always on? Am I always reachable? What would I do about that? So personally, I am always on to a degree. So for instance, what I don't have is I don't have the pings of alerts on WhatsApp.

16:26I have that little boundary that works for me. I also put a lot of attention into time management and time management and have a very large collection of Smythes and notebooks, which I regard as essential in my life because I think that working offline and on paper as well is important as a boundary ultimately i think it's important to communicate your intention now if you've got colleagues and you say i don't work fridays is that functional in terms of the job that's got to be done because if it's not then you're just putting pressure onto somebody else so we have to as i say customize and coming back to health that's the literacy that we've got with our bodies and our minds.

17:11You know, we know what we need. One person's allergy is another person's tolerance, you know. So we just need a greater awareness and literacy. And as you say, that healthy conflict. To what degree, Julia, does the world of work, as you're now looking at it, discussing it, thrashing out with colleagues, not look at these simple, I guess, more sort of binary choices, life work balance, some of these older ideas. And actually, it is something that's more holistic, whether that's on a corporate level, policy level, individual level. Is the journey constantly outward to look at these things more in the round?

17:52Because that's the only way we're going to find the good fixes that will have an enduring benefit for society. Well, I think it's both. The phrase I use is that we need to be both grandiose and granular. We need the big ideas, and we need them in a global context. We need to understand what's going on around the world because, for instance, workers come in from all over the world. There's 66 countries at the moment that have so-called digital nomad visas, which is, I think it's a quadrupling of flexible working visas that different countries from the UAE and Dubai to Estonia via Spain and Malawi have introduced to attract people into their economies, for instance.

18:38And I think that we've got to just think differently, both about the world, how the world works, and to understand that we are all connected in it and we're connected fundamentally by economy, technology and culture. In other words, we all feel something. You only have to look at popular culture. You know, Beyonce's Break My Soul went straight to number one on Billboard. And that really was the anthem of the great resignation. The Office, more minutes of The Office were watched by Americans on Netflix than any other show in the pandemic. 157 billion minutes as it happens. So there are lots of trends that we need to take note of in a global context.

19:23But the granular is your point. what do I need to do in my workplace? You know, if I'm looking at people and culture and leadership, what's the thing that's the problem right now? And that's where we need to get very detailed. But also to have some broad principles, some bigger discussions. And I do think that digital technology, AI, actually whatever you want to call it, is absolutely at the heart of it, like the weather system, like climate, like geopolitics. Well, Julia, listen, it pays, I think from our conversation, it pays not to be too prescriptive about this. So much of what you talked about is about flex and adaptability and understanding that there is not a one-size-fits-all.

20:09And yet, in spite of that, I'd like to ask you about the idea of a manifesto, if you like, for better living online, for digital decency more broadly. If you were granted the power to instigate such a thing, What sorts of things might be part of that manifesto? Well, I think I'd want to rename it and repurpose it as the balance between humans and machines, basically. How do we as individuals and as collective groups of individuals cope with technology that we want because it connects us or enlightens us or simplifies our lives or transports us? and that which actually diminishes our ability to be in control or to trust or to feel productive.

20:57And I think these are really big questions of the day. So that would, I suppose, be my first thing. The second is that I do think that manners and decency in the old-fashioned sense matter. There is never a reason to be unkind online to someone or about someone in a way that is going to inflict harm on them. So that would be something in a reworked manifesto. And I finally think that you really do need to have a consensus about regulation and where responsibility lies. Does it lie in the manufacturers of technology? Does it lie in the regulators of what that technology is used for? We need to understand that a bit more precisely everywhere.

21:54Our thanks to Julia Hobsbawm for her refreshing perspective on digital decency. This is Pullman Voices, a Monocle Radio production for Pullman Hotels. This episode was produced by Holly Fisher and Paige Reynolds. I'm Tom Edwards. Next time, we speak to the organisational psychologist, Professor John Amache, about what it means to be visionary. I mean, I suppose there's a point where you realise that nothing remarkable comes without conflict. Nothing truly worthwhile happens without discomfort. Nothing that really moves the needle on the world around us happens without friction. For more on Pullman Voices, head to Pullman's Instagram page at Pullman Hotels, and for more information and hotel bookings, you can visit pullman.accor.com.

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