Hormones, brains & time - the secret formula to better teamwork
ALSO: one in six say 'no amount of money' could make them go back to 5 day working
Quick newsletter today by means of tooting the horn for the new episode of the podcast.
I had a wonderful discussion with Robin Dunbar and his co-author Tracey Camilleri about the invisible ingredients of human relationships. Specifically the role that hormones, brain-size and time play in the connections we build. It invites us to question whether we could use those forces to make work better?
Hormones are triggered by emotional interactions with other humans. Uniquely they only tend to work face-to-face. Hormones can help us build affinity with others in a powerful way that is often overlooked.
Brain-size impacts the connections we have with those people. At the core of human experience is our closest one (or two) relationships. There’s a small circle of 4 or 5 people who sit at the heart of our lives, and up to 15 who make up the majority of our time.
And that time is critical for the strength of those connections. We spend 40% of our time with our 5 closest relationships, and 60% with the top 15. By spending time we can become close friends with people in our lives.
The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, Robin Dunbar
The Four Day Week trials concluded. And none of the firms are going back: “one in six employees in the study said no amount of money would convince them to return to five days a week”
(We covered a lot on the Four-Day Week trials here)
A quarter of London based firms are reducing their office size
(It's not a simple trend, there's also firms increasing their footprint)
After months of people saying it was happening, finally some data that shows that younger workers are indeed heading to the office more than colleagues (chart is just fully remote employees):
Colleagues who refuse ‘to do Slack’, or opt out of work technology like email are causing misery for bosses (‘my team just come to me with IT issues’). One employee who refuses to use a calendar just left me baffled in this article, I didn’t know that was an option…