"Welcome to the Workstyle Revolution!": Reimagining work for the reality of modern motherhood with Lizzie Penny

24:55And it just gave me somewhere to take my brain that was a stable, intellectually stimulating, non-cancer related world. So I kind of can't quantify to you how valuable that was to me at that time. And since then, almost unbelievably, my husband has been diagnosed with cancer. So now I actually fit my work around looking after him through his treatment, staying healthy myself and trying to manage the side effects of my medication. I talked earlier about going to the gym in the mornings. I have a lot of intense nausea in the mornings and going to the gym and for a swim helps with that. And also looking after three extremely energetic children and everything that comes with parenting and motherhood so for me work style is not a privilege it's a necessity it's the way that I work I am able to work and I think I have a lot to give to the working world and without it I wouldn't be here having this conversation with you

25:56Lizzie Penny:so um yeah firstly thank you for sharing your story because yeah wow I mean how many um how many bricks can you throw at someone that's really quite I don't but it's not the moment really to do you know what though Danny like shit happens to everyone is my like you know I I'm not special yeah a lot of shit happened to you though I'm not I did feel like we had a bit of a run of it and there were a few other things going on at the same time but yeah to say the least but I do think that when you dig beneath the surface and I talk about my story a lot and what's really interesting and you've talked on the podcast before about vulnerability and how if you're vulnerable other people are vulnerable back and I think what's really interesting is that actually when you scratch beneath the surface everyone has something really everyone has something going on and that means that work style is of benefit to everyone if they can adopt it so I think to any naysayers who are like, oh, well, that sounds great.

26:58Lizzie Penny:But like, what about business? You know, what about businesses if you've got a whole workforce that's only working three hours a day or whatever it might be, fragmented hours? I would just urge them to look at the monumental, despite if you could have stopped working right after Finn was born and the things that you have achieved in the 11 years since then, is it 11 years? That's right. Yeah. 11 years since then, the fact that you are effectively driving social change. So you're not just like influencing business outcomes, you're driving a rethink about how we should live. You've done all of that in those pockets of time when you were most productive, when you were most able to bring your best intellectual self.

27:38Lizzie Penny:So work style works, because if you are, as you called it before, you know, a case of one, I would hedge my bets on it being an effective model. Because if all of that had have been lost, because you were shut out of being able to work at all, then what a waste. Yeah, and what a powerful concept it could be to unlock potential the world over. If you can multiply that, you not only support people to be at their personal productive best, you help them to continue to be financially independent, socially connected, live with purpose. You bring them into a happier community. Also, you're creating organizations organizations where individuals are more productive, whereas at an organizational level, there is better collective intelligence because you have better diversity of thought and better integration of those diverse people.

28:27There are essentially all the theory. And we found this when writing the book. The book was enlightening in this. We talked about this for a long time, and then we wrote the book. And the book is not boring, hopefully, you'll agree, Danny, but it has got 600 references. So it is all substantiated by data. And what we found is actually, this is a thing, like everything you look at substantiates this. So one of the things I'm really curious about is why, if all the rational explanation is there for us to work in a work style way, why aren't we changing? Or why aren't we changing fast enough? Why are there really embracing work, still working and running with it.

29:10Lizzie Penny:And what's your take on that? Why aren't we? I think there are two big reasons as we understand it. One is that this is not just about a new structure of work. This is about a new cultural approach to work and a new attitude to work. And that actually changing culture takes purposeful effort and takes time. yeah and i think the second thing is that there are so many people in the world for whom they have a burning platform to want to change to this way of working but actually the people who have risen in the previous world of work to leadership positions now tend not to be those people because those people have not been able to rise to positions of leadership yeah that's a mass generalization there are some amazing leaders who are working with us to create change but i think on a wholesale level, the reason that, because you could argue that if this worked, markets would have adopted it.

30:08But actually, that hasn't happened because I think of the cultural side and of the leadership and the role models that we are lacking in senior positions in organizations to say, no, we need to work differently to include everyone.

30:24Lizzie Penny:It takes a very special leader to stick their head above the parapet and be like, I'm going to do something different here. And for leaders to do that en masse requires a coordinated attention. It's just, like you say, it takes time. If I think about the cycle of politics, for example, you can't do anything within a four-year window of time, really. And if it's like you're constantly swinging from one belief system to the next, then you're just stuck, like never doing anything in any direction, really. I think I've had to rebase a little bit over the last 11 years. Like in that conversation in the pub with Alex, I think I thought we'd have changed the world by now.

30:59Like I really, particularly with the pandemic and then with the book becoming a number one Sunday Times bestseller, there have been a number of times where I've thought, this is it. It's just going to run by itself. And I think maybe we are getting to that point, but it's amazing how many late nights or not late nights, I mustn't use a time reference, but it's amazing how much graft it takes, how many individual conversations to create change of this magnitude and change in terms of attitude like this.

31:31Lizzie Penny:Yeah. Because I would say, you know, the people who have, as you alluded to, people who are in leadership positions were able to work within the parameters of a system that you're basically saying doesn't work. So they've got no incentive really to make it easier or better for excluded parts of the workforce to thrive. And so when you have that, as you call that lack of diversity of thought and that lack of diversity of perspectives, then businesses would be better and would thrive more if they opened up the workforce to totally underrepresented groups of people. But they're not doing that because they're not seeing it.

32:09Lizzie Penny:And they're not seeing it because they're one very specific type of worker that fits one very specific type of work. So it just goes to show it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? I think that's right. And also, you know, one of my favorite references from the book is that mothers of two children are the most productive members of the workforce. You, essentially, Dani. Yeah, I can attest to that. And mothers of three children are second. So, me. I think it's really interesting that actually, mothers, for example, have the best personal productivity of anyone because we have to, because we don't have a choice.

32:50So what if you could apply that to all sorts of other groups and how much difference would that make?

32:55Lizzie Penny:So talk to me a bit about some of the businesses or organizations that you've worked with. What are some of the ways that you're helping businesses to kind of unlock the potential of work style? So essentially we have two organizations. So Hoxby is a ways of working consultancy and WorkStyle Revolution is a not-for-profit. it. So Workstyle Evolution looks at creating social change, maximizing the impact that workstyle working can have. And through there, we have Workstyle Academy, which is a very low-cost entry point to learn about working in a workstyle way. And we also have the Workstyle Pioneers Program, which is partly grant-funded, which looks at helping organizations and individuals to pioneer this way of working in practice.

33:41So essentially that's creating pilots. We also seek to inspire and showcase organizations and leaders who are doing this really well, for instance, through our WorkStyle Awards, which we've got coming up in October. So for us, that's really about leading the conversation. We also work to try and support the UK government with understanding how they can be more progressive in their thinking. Yeah. And in various other ways through just basically making a noise and being a bit disruptive, which we do enjoy from time to time. Through Hoxby, what we do is we've really codified the approach any organization needs to have in order to adopt work style working for the benefit of the organization.

34:26And so we look at what are the organizational enablers that you need to have. For instance, a digital first mentality, output-based measurement. Then we look at inclusive leadership. And we don't mean inclusive just in terms of excluding specific groups. We really mean individualized leadership. So leading a workforce with mass individualization as a mindset. And then we train in the skills that we think are required for personal productivity. And that includes self-understanding, self-motivation, self-confidence. So a whole half of that part of the model is based on responsibility to yourself, knowing yourself.

35:06And I've heard you talk on the podcast before about feeling confident to ask for what you need. But there's almost a step before that, which is having the headspace to work out what you need. Yes. And then with the Huxby model, we ladder all of that up to performance. So how does that actually help the organization to achieve its goals? And there have been some organizations that we've seen that already are absolutely leading the way in doing this. The charity Scope are amazing in terms of ways of working. The same with Zappy, Evenbreak, who are a disability recruitment charity. Lots of organizations are doing this.

35:46And so I think a lot of what we do is help support those who are on that journey, but also help showcase them so we can help inspire other organizations to work this way.

35:56Lizzie Penny:When you're starting to have conversations with businesses, what's the biggest resistance or the biggest things that people are resistant to when they start imagining a future of work style within their organization? I think one of the mindsets that we're working to really shift is that people think this is the future of work. Alex and I are speakers as well, and we are almost always booked for speaking events to talk about the future of work. And this is not the future of work. This is now. You know, for those organizations who adopt this, they get first mover advantage because you can implement this right now.

36:35And so I think where there's senior leadership thinking about ways of working, too often that is handed to an HR team as an HR question rather than recognized as being central to an organization's performance and competitive advantage. and I think partly the pandemic is to blame for that because during the pandemic lots of organizations moved to this way of working and did it overnight so they took a lot of the culture and a lot of the behaviors straight from an office environment into a digital environment when actually what work style working requires is to rethink what does leadership look like in a remote world what does culture building and team building and how do you move everyone towards a shared purpose so they feel a true sense of belonging in achieving that.

37:27So I think for us, a lot of the elements are not the structural change, but are the cultural change. That said, I think one of the biggest barriers is that people think this is too scary. We used to talk about the freedom to choose when and where you work. If you read the book, that's how we define work style in the book. And I think that level of freedom is really scary to organizations to move from the control that you talked about at the start and that parent to child relationship between an employer and an employee to move to an adult to adult relationship feels like a huge step. So through Hoxby, a lot of our consulting work is about freedom within a framework.

38:07It's about understanding what is the framework that works for that organization and then how can you facilitate everyone thriving and being at their personal best within it by training in the right skills to empower those people to deliver their work at their personally productive best.

38:24Lizzie Penny:And that culture piece is just so important because, again, it's not about adopting 200-year-old models to sort of somehow make them fit the way that we live today. It's about fundamentally rethinking what work is and how we work and designing around that and designing really from the ground up because it does require a totally new way of teamwork, a new way of collaborating, of sharing knowledge, of being together as one unit that is working towards a shared goal, but on our own terms, in our own way. I think as well, there is something around, we talked about this outside of this call, but we're hurtling towards a future of work that will be like inherently asynchronous because when AI is really driving the vast majority of the decisions we make and is actually making decisions on our behalf and is doing stuff in the background and we're kind of coordinating or orchestrating intelligence, our role, it makes no sense for that to be time-bound when the technology that's driving the way that we work will be totally timeless.

39:31Lizzie Penny:So we're hurtling it towards a reality where we're going to need to adapt. And it just makes sense that that happens now before we're at the cliff edge and we've fallen over the edge and we find ourselves in another pandemic type situation when we're suddenly at home with no framework to thrive and we've just suddenly transported what we did in office into a home environment without anything else changing like it's going to fail so the time really is now I think that's true I also think there's a social burning platform which is those people who are structurally excluded. So in the book, we talk about seven groups who are structurally excluded and there are many more who are discriminated against.

40:15But those are disabled people, people with a mental health challenge, carers, those who are neurodivergent, people who have a chronic illness, people who are aging and parents. And actually, when you look at parents and particularly mothers, they transcend all those groups disproportionately. So there is a conversation here, which is, yeah, those seven groups are structurally excluded. But also, what is the gender disparity that disproportionately affects women across those groups? You know, women are the majority of unpaid carers. There is a motherhood penalty through not having widespread adoption of work style working but also for women there's mental health there are more diagnoses for mothers as a stigma there's a lack of workplace support and even for neurodiversity you know there's an under diagnosis there's more masking and there are lack of accommodations for women so I think there's a complicated conversation here but it's really important if we're to maintain and encourage diversity within the workforce and if we're to ensure economic activity at its most fundamental level that we are keeping people in work.

41:28We need to change how we work so that we are starting to close those gaps and recognize that we now have a way. It's been really hard having to make workplace adjustments previously, but now the workplace is anywhere. So it's not about adjustments. It's about just personalizing it for everyone in the first place.

41:45Lizzie Penny:This is really a kind of nice entry point into this idea of intersectionality and how so much of that drives what you do because you can't really think of a person as being you know one category of things it's you know we're many things all the time and it's depending on which category of things combination of category of things you fall into you may be disproportionately disadvantaged than others how have you seen or can you give any more nuance to that like why is it so important that we consider the you know the whole the all of the different ways that we appear and exist in the world in driving more equitable outcomes within the workforce?

42:23One thing that we found really interesting is last year at the Houses of Parliament, we hosted a roundtable event with the CEOs of our seven partner charities. So I talked through the seven excluded groups and we partner with a charity for each of those, Scope, Autistica, Astrid, Mind, Carers UK, Working Families, Age UK. And we brought the CEOs of those charities together to host this roundtable to talk about intersectional inclusion. And the thing that struck me above all else was that it was the first time those seven people had got in one room to talk about this, even though they all campaigned for closing employment gaps for their specific group.

43:04And when we had that conversation, there was so much recognition of overlap between, you know is complex to map and we have looked at that but I think it starts with just an understanding that you know I for a start transcend more than half of the groups so do so many people and therefore supporting people who have chronic illness into work may well overlap with supporting people who have mental health challenges into work so we see every day through the work style community which is a free and open community for anyone who's just interested in work style working or wants to support what we're doing we see and hear from people who have a number of reasons why they shouldn't be able to work but have found a way through personalizing their work so again there's this big kind of anecdotal experience of people for whom yeah they don't want to categorize themselves and you know i feel uncomfortable calling myself a carer like my husband's not completely incapable of doing things but technically I am a carer yeah technically I have a chronic illness at the moment because of the medication that I'm on and the side affairs and none of us like to like label ourselves in that way but that's partly because I'm so much more than that I am a complex individual and I don't want to have that reductive label.

44:33So yeah, I think that again, Alex and I like to play with language and invent words like work style, but I think we need a whole new language around intersectionality to allow people to say who they are in ways that aren't stigmatized and don't attract discrimination.

44:52Lizzie Penny:Yeah. And you put your finger on it there and they aren't reductive, like we are complex and that requires complex problem solving to actually do something about the problems that are you know inherently that have inherently existed in the way we live our lives like you say if flexible working has been around for 70 years and if it was going to help those excluded groups it would have done by now but if we try and implement small or very narrow solutions to fix you know a problem people who are challenged in the workforce because they may be affected by caregiving responsibilities, to take one example.

45:30Lizzie Penny:We completely lose sight of all of the other things that are going to create that complex soup that we're swimming in, which is life. It is life. And that's the joy of it. That's the beauty of it. But it's also the challenge of it. So it does require nuanced thinking. And we shouldn't apologize for that. No, exactly. I think that's our unique personal value. I think part of the reason why I'm always keen to share my story is not only to connect with people and hear their stories, but also because I think it makes me who I am. You know, yeah, I'm messy. But because I'm messy, I care more. I'm more connected to my work.

46:05I'm more determined to make change. So I don't think it's as simple as apologizing because, you know, you have to go to the school play. We should be able to proudly say that we want to go to the school play. And when I'm back at work this evening, after my kids are in bed and I frankly don't go out anymore, then, you know, I'm going to do some brilliant work. So I think there's a whole element of our sense of identity and the way we view ourselves and permission to break out of that parent-child relationship with work and with employers and be able to proudly say, all of these things make me better at my job, not worse.

46:43Lizzie Penny:Love that so much. okay well i'd like to just wrap up just kind of tying back to i think most of the people listening to this will be working mums and they might be listening to this thinking i'm really inspired this sounds amazing but what do i do like what practical steps can i take right now to start either pushing for work style or at least shifting their own mindset i think the first thing is just try using the word work style in a conversation. Early on, Alex and I found this remarkable thing that we'd made up a word and we started using it. People would use it back to you in the same conversation.

47:22And we thought, that is amazing. That shows you that there's a missing word here. And I think because it's based around you have a lifestyle, why shouldn't you have a work style? People understand it. So the one thing I would say to do is just try using the word work style. the second thing I would suggest to people is that they sit down and they actually think what is my ideal work style right now and you know my work style changes every three months because something else happens and I have to change it but it's very much a living thing but the way to start is to sit down and think what do I need to be my personally most productive and I don't just mean productive at work I mean to thrive in all aspects of my life and then I think you can start to take baby steps in advocating for yourself having the conversations you need to even just sharing it with a friend so that they can help hold you to account for yeah articulating your needs yeah so I think those are the most important first steps

48:20Lizzie Penny:and I would say that's especially that kind of personal awareness and really having a strong belief in your worth, your value, your needs, your desires right now is so important because we live in a really troubled economy where I think it's an employer's market, if you like. Loads of people are scrambling for jobs and employers are basically finding themselves in the unfortunate position of being able to be a bit more demanding of their workforce and giving less movement in terms of what they will and won't allow. And so I think it needs to be a bottom up. I think that the work you do is so important at driving that change at a very structural level.

49:01Lizzie Penny:But also, I think there has to be a kind of grassroots element to this where you have a workforce that is demanding work style. That pressure also needs to exist. I would also add that if there is anyone listening to this podcast who is a leader and who is in support of what we're doing, perhaps already working in a work style way, just not calling it that or you are calling it that. we are a not-for-profit at Workstyle Revolution and the more support we can get the more change we can create so if there are leaders or organizations or brands that want to align with what we're doing and be a part of what we're creating then that is the other way that we can create great change is by partnerships with organizations that are seeking to create the same change in the world or perhaps just individuals for whom they care about this passionately and are happy to lend their voice to what we're trying to do.

49:54Lizzie Penny:Yeah, which is a good sort of entry point into, I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to find out more about you and get involved with Workstyle Revolution. Where can they go to find out more? So firstly, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Lizzie Penny and I'm only on LinkedIn. I came off other social media when I was diagnosed with cancer and I've actually found, I haven't gone back onto it. So LinkedIn is where I'm at. WorkStyleRevolution.com. You can see our manifesto. You can join our free Slack community. And of course, the book WorkStyle, A Revolution for Wellbeing, Productivity and Society is available from all the bookshops and also from Amazon if anyone wants to buy from there.

50:34The other thing I would say is I'm always interested to hear from people, whether they agree with us, whether they strongly disagree. Some of my favorite conversations have been with people who don't believe in this. I will take anyone on and persuade them to my perspective. So yeah, I just love to hear from people with their viewpoint on everything we've talked about today.

50:55Lizzie Penny:So please do get in touch. And just one last thing, if you could reduce everything that we've talked about today to one message, what would you love everyone who's listened to this to take away from this conversation? I'm better at writing 80 ,000 word books and I am reducing everything down into one sentence. But I think the key thing for me is that we need change and flexible working is not the answer. It's not enough. We should be campaigning for more fundamental change through which we can really personalise work so that each individual can thrive in the way that suits them best. Lizzie, you've been absolutely amazing.

51:35Lizzie Penny:Thank Thank you so much for your time today. This is the third time we've spoken now. And I feel like every time I just feel more inspired and so kind of confident in what you're doing and really just feel very, well, inspired is the word. I'm glad that you have so much confidence in me, Dani. When I'm lacking in confidence myself, I'll think of that. Well, there's confidence of plenty here, I promise you that. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you as always. Of course, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

52:40ρόachsen