Understanding mattering is the key to engaged culture

ALSO: Hear how an empowered culture turned around a much loved brand

There’s two pieces of data that I come back to time and time again, both from the Gallup Workplace Report. The first is that the biggest predictor of workplace engagement is whether we have a best friend at work.

I often use a bit of poetry if I present that. The poet David Whyte was on a podcast I was listening to and he said about friendship: friendship is the ‘privilege of having been seen by someone & the equal privilege of having been granted the sight of the essence of another’. And for me that explains why having a friend has such an impact. It’s about feeling seen. It’s about knowing that you matter.

Then there’s a second piece of data about our bosses. If we have received direct feedback from our managers this week we are 4 times more likely to be engaged in our jobs.

This is of course immediately relatable. The reason why you loved working for your old boss is because she seemed to really value the work you did. Perhaps you could even handle criticism from her because you knew it came from a good place. You felt like your performance and development mattered.

I’ve really believed this sense of feeling seen to be a vital part of workplace culture for a while, and so when Zach Mercurio’s new book, The Power of Mattering, arrived on my desk I devoured it. It’s the most essential book about workplace culture that I’ve read in a couple of years.

None of this is new, in the 1980s psychologists Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough studied a sample of 6500 adolescent teens. They found that a big predictor of wellbeing was whether the young people felt significant to their parents. When they felt that they mattered they had higher self-esteem, less anxiety and less depression.

Feeling valued has an impact at work too. In a study of 1700 working adults, 93% of those who felt valued said they were motivated to do their best. 88% were engaged at work. When we feel valued by our boss we do a better job, it’s hard to imagine a healthy culture where this isn’t the case.

In 2022 the US Surgeon General issued a note in response to rising levels of mental health issues (and as chat of 'quiet quitting' was taking hold).

Amongst the essentials for better working was 'mattering' to others.

I talked to Zach this week on Eat Sleep Work Repeat and I left convinced that this is where good culture needs to start in 2025. The website includes a full transcript of the conversation and key stats from the book.

Listen: Apple / Spotify / website

• The second episode of BBC Radio 4’s Payslip Britain is about the lack of wage growth in the last twenty years (especially in the context of CEO pay growth)

• On that same theme, graduates used to earn twice the minimum wage, now it’s just 40% more. Does it justify £70,000 in student loans?

• Why don’t Millennials and Gen Z care about work? So asks this TikTokker Mike Manusi. The answer ‘because they can’t afford anything, ANYTHING. Worth watching - because the numbers are way worse in the UK than what he says for the US

• Using AI effectively is ‘now a fundamental expectation of everyone’ at Shopify, according to their CEO Tobi Lütke. He said AI usage questions will also be added to performance & peer reviews. The CEO also told his team that they should be trying to use AI before asking for new headcount

• Big sign of the immediate future, Harvard ran a study asking people to manage virtual team members (in ChatGPT). How they performed strongly correlated with their real world management skill assessments. The best bosses asked questions, took turns in conversations and have good social intelligence. This will be a training product in 2 years

• I’m a long term listener to Colin Ellis and Cath Bishop’s Inside Out Culture podcast and I was delighted to go on as their guest

• I loved this podcast interview with James Daunt who is leading a turnaround at Barnes & Noble. His passion for being a bookseller shines through, but more than anything the turnaround is a built around culture and the trust of employees. By moving decisions of which books to sell to the stores Daunt has massively reduced the cost of returning unsold copies to publishers. He empowers local teams to make the call of how to run their part of the business. The end result is that B&N is opened 57 new stores last year and will open 60 more in 2025.

  Brilliant listen from Frances Frei and Anne Morriss.

• Here’s more on the Barnes & Noble turnaround, from The Economist. It really reminded me of the story of Nucor, a steel manufacturer which proved to be way more efficient by allowing each steel mill to run it’s own business (including HR, procurement, marketing). The increase in individual agency more than covered nominal economies of scale

• I can’t believe it. It can’t be real. You know Foxtons. yeah? Apparently it’s full of the worst people in the world

• First and foremost, more than anything, I’m a pop music fan. I just love (brand new) 3 minute songs and their ability to change your emotions. Based on that I really enjoyed tearing through There’s Nothing Like This, a business book based on Taylor Swift’s career. Don’t worry there’s no 2x2 matrices but the business decisions she’s made along the way are examined, alongside plenty of the lore. Fun holiday read

This week I’ve created a brand new resource to help you explore workplace culture - and how to build it. Eat Sleep Work Repeat has been running for eight years. In that time I’ve interviewed some of the biggest brains in culture. Today I’ve grouped all of the best podcasts into subjects.

Either dive into a topic - and choose a single episode - or click play on a playlist. You’ll find pages on

The Essentials of Culture - how to start thinking about improving workplace culture.

Sport - Sport is often one of our most vivid examples of culture. We can see when it's working, and when it's failing. From Barcelona to the All Blacks we have lots of examples to explore. Includes an Ange Postecoglou episode that I refuse to delete.

Case studies - over the course of 8 years I’ve gone deep on different organisations, from Amazon to Uber, from Microsoft to the NHS.

Psychology - going deep with multiple discussions with Robin Dunbar, reflections on the role that touch plays in the brain, explorations of collective intelligence and much more.

Happiness - my original obsession when I started the podcast was ‘can we be happier at work?’ I’ve explored what fun is, whether happiness is an objective or an outcome of work and what makes laughter such a bonding part of human behaviour?

Inspiration - sometimes sparks of inspiration come from looking afresh at the problem we're facing. Each of these episodes invite you to rethink the way you're looking at work.

And I’ve also made a whole playlist for today’s episode on Mattering that you can listen along to. It includes sessions on Storytelling courses, story nights and more.