Bree Groff is the author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously) and a workplace culture and transformation advisor focused on making work more human and more enjoyable. She is a senior advisor at SYPartners and has partnered with leaders at companies including Microsoft, Pfizer, Google, Hilton, Stripe, Atlassian, Calvin Klein, Alphabet, and Target. Previously, she served as CEO of NOBL Collective, and she writes and speaks widely on change, employee experience, and the future of work.
1) In your book, Today Was Fun, you share a Friends episode where Chandler insists everyone hates their job, only to discover that most of his friends actually like theirs. It does seem socially normative to believe we shouldn’t enjoy work. How do you think about reframing that belief, especially without losing sight of the very real reasons people feel cynical about work in the first place?
I’ve always identified with the curmudgeons of the world because I think curmudgeons are really optimists of the people. Still, they feel all the bumps of the working world, including capitalism and performance reviews. When people say, “We’re not supposed to like our work. We just work to get a paycheck,” I actually empathize with the desire not to be over-extracted by our work or taken advantage of. I think that is the reaction when people say, “Who likes their job? We just work to get paid.” To some degree, that’s healthy because it prompts change in the workplace.
It prompts a grassroots movement to make work better in some ways, and could lead to better working conditions, all rooted in that curmudgeonliness. Still, if we’re going to be curmudgeonly our whole lives and say, “Who likes their work?” it’s really us that loses in the end, because then we’ve experienced week after week of not enjoying the way we’re spending a majority of our time. Obviously, the book is about this, but I think it’s important not to let dissatisfaction or a desire for change get in the way of enjoying today, because once today goes, it doesn’t come back again.
Some of the reframing I’ve tried to do centers on the idea that we don’t get paid because work is painful and people wouldn’t do it otherwise. We get paid because we create value, and the pain is entirely optional. I think a lot of people would say no, the reason you get paid is because otherwise people wouldn’t do it. The pay is the carrot. But there are a billion counterexamples where you see people actually enjoying their work. If you are creating value for a customer, client, or company, the company doesn’t care whether you’re having a good time or not. In fact, they’d probably prefer you have a good time so you stick around.
I think it’s really just up to us to say, “Do I want to have a good day?” I think that’s possible, no matter what the work is. Not every day will be fun, but I do think we need a lot less in terms of context and circumstances than is popularly believed. A lot of people think you need a meaningful job, upward mobility, and growth opportunities, and all those things are good. But I also looked to a show like The Office where there was no meaning. They’re selling paper. They’re not saving the world. There’s not a lot of upward mobility, but still, they made it fun because of the relationships, because they wanted to, because they were sort of like, “Well, if I have to be stuck in this Scranton paper sales company, yeah, I’m going to put someone’s stapler in Jell-O. I’m going to make it fun myself.”
That’s what I try to advocate for. It’s really us who are the recipients of whether we have a good day or not. It’s actually kind of a radical act to prioritize our happiness in a world where maybe we’re just considered human resources.
2) You put a spotlight on how our obsession with scale in the U.S. can undermine and devalue the one-on-one impact that many human-centered professions provide. In a culture that tends to reward growth, scale, and efficiency above all else, how do you think about protecting and valuing human-scale work, and what gets lost when we don’t?
My honest answer is, I don’t have any good societal solves for this because I don’t feel staunchly anti-capitalist. You sell something, people want it, and then they want more. It’s generally a good system.
In a world where we’re set up to primarily want money, a really effective way to do that is through scale. The incentives are a little wrong, which is why I think things like B Corp certification are a really good rebuttal to just making money. I forget all their criteria, but the goal is that you must have a purpose and exist to make an impact beyond profits. That’s a structural answer to scale because otherwise, yes, scale answers a lot of problems. It’s one of the only ways to make massive amounts of money because you just need to multiply your profit by so many customers or users.
If there are maybe not great ways to fix this at a societal level, my rebuttal is, let’s fix it at a human level. One of the things that I see in organizations where there’s low engagement, and there’s good research on this, too, is that sometimes it stems from not having a line of sight to your impact. This happens in companies with scale. You think of the middle-level marketing manager who’s never met a customer in their life, is writing some marketing copy, and shipping it off to some global counterpart. You just never get to see the impact. Say, for instance, you make cookies. That marketing manager is likely never looking at someone eating a cookie and experiencing the joy that they’ve helped provide. That’s part of the problem with scale: you don’t have line of sight to your impact.
Part of the benefit of being in some of those more one-on-one human professions, like teaching or nursing, is that you help someone. You teach a child, and then they light up, and you get to experience that. As a nurse, you help someone in the hospital and see them get better. If anything, I think it’s celebrating how good that feels to be able to deliver human joy, human safety, human healing on a one-on-one level, because that’s what the companies that operate at scale often don’t have. It’s one of the mental gymnastic mind tricks that CEOs try to do when they talk about purpose. “Oh, you’re part of something bigger than yourself.” They try to make you feel good about it, and you’re like, “I don’t know, I’m just writing stupid copy for jeans labels. Am I really part of something bigger than myself?” If anything, I think it’s worth talking about, celebrating, and making more visible the benefits of some of those one-on-one professions.
Separately, there’s so much to say there. I don’t know if you know Joe O’Connor. He’s a friend whose book, Do More in Four, just came out with HBR. He ran the world’s largest four-day workweek pilot. There’s a lot to be said there about how, when individuals become more efficient in their work, who benefits? Is the answer that companies just assign more work, or can employees themselves share some of those efficiency gains? I would say the latter is preferable, though that’s hard to do. Research shows efficiency has skyrocketed over the last several decades, while inflation-adjusted pay hasn’t. Employees have been delivering more, but they’re still working the same amount and being paid the same amount.
The Substack I’m working on for this week is called The Fine Art of Not Growing. I’ve been thinking so much about this because right now I have extra capacity. I’m doing some speaking, some consulting, some podcasts, and I try to keep extra capacity because I have my dad with Alzheimer’s and all these elderly pets. It’s helpful to have the slack because then if something goes wrong, or if my dad’s caregiver needs me for the day, I can do that.
I try to tell myself the slack is important, but it feels very uncomfortable. It feels like, even having written about this, I should be maximizing more. I was telling somebody about this, and they were like, “Just enjoy the equanimity of being calm.” I was like, “This feels incorrect.” Society has not groomed me this way.
I got into atelic activities for this reason. Toward the end of the book, I talk about atelic activities, activities done for their own sake. I always have a new jigsaw puzzle, and it just feels so revolutionary to do a jigsaw puzzle. It’s the opposite of any economic activity. Somebody cut up that puzzle, and I’m putting it back together. We’re literally doing and undoing work. That’s the whole thing of it. I don’t know, I feel so radical. I really enjoy it.
3) Social norms are a strong force and often make us feel like conformity is the only way to succeed at the office. You have some interesting ideas around lowering the stakes in this regard. How can we model non-conformity in a way that actually increases influence and psychological safety rather than putting our jobs at risk?
It’s definitely not an even playing field for everybody. For some people, it’s much easier to be authentic, and for marginalized communities, or even for me as a woman, sometimes I feel like I have to do hair and makeup and all that to be taken seriously. It’s not equally easy for everyone, but I do think it’s important, especially for leaders with a degree of power and privilege, to push the boundaries toward inclusion and authenticity, being welcome, even if only 10%.
I’m never trying to get anyone fired. Obviously, the chapter title is about stretchy pants, showing up in your sweatpants, your yoga pants. I would not do that in front of a client in the same way that if I’m going to a wedding, I’m not going to show up in a tracksuit. But I do try to push the boundaries a bit. What I’ve realized, sort of through exposure therapy, is that nothing bad happens. A lot of times, I do show up to meetings with wet hair, especially Zoom meetings, because I exercise in the morning, come home, shower, and jump on a meeting, and I just can’t be bothered. In the meeting, I’m just as smart. I’m coming with my brain. That’s what I’m here for. It works whether my hair is wet or dry. It could be seen as unprofessional. I’ve done it on lots of podcasts, and to date, no one has said anything.
That’s not to say that no one ever gets called out, especially if you’re closer to normative business culture. I understand, then it’s scarier. You feel like you have to fit in. Still, I think it’s important for everybody just to try a little bit. Some days I show up in a hoodie, and it’s fine. I swear in the book, and sometimes I swear in meetings, and that’s also fine. I think there’s a lot that we self-impose, this feeling of needing to be buttoned up in order to be accepted, when in fact what’s powerful for me is to think about whether I can model, or be the spark in a meeting or in a relationship, that says, “Oh, we can just be casual here.”
I wrote a piece on this called “Give-No-Shits Role Models.” I think everyone has maybe a person or two in their life who is 20% more themselves than everyone else. They just show up as themselves, and you get the sense that who they are there is just who they are. That’s just how they show up. There’s such freedom in that, and I think it’s magnetic and compelling. I try to be that whenever I can, especially if I’m in a leadership position and have a degree of power. I think it’s important to eat during meetings so others know they can, too. These little things just welcome humanity into the room, so that if we can take off our business masks, everything becomes easier. Psychological safety increases, camaraderie increases, sharing of good ideas increases, and so does the enjoyment of your day because you’re not diverting your mental energy toward being palatable. It’s a drain on business and a drain on our mental health, I think.
4) I love how you describe the “Muse” as a deity that hates 30-minute meetings and “grumpy, tired people”. How do you suggest we go about wooing our Muse when our own performance is judged by the very metrics that drive her away?
I think in any quality organization, the metrics shouldn’t drive her away. Over the course of a year’s performance review, ideally what a manager or leader is looking for is solid impact, which comes from brave ideas, brave execution, and all of the things that the Muse is good at, which is being inventive, generative, and creating that sort of sense of possibility.
Where she comes into conflict is with those near-term questions: Did I get to inbox zero? Am I just going to all my back-to-back meetings during a day? Am I floundering around trying to find this thing to send to this person? I think it’s usually us that feels like we want that dopamine hit of checking off the to-do list, getting through the day, getting through the inbox, at the detriment of our Muse and actually at the detriment of our performance in the end.
There are maybe some roles, like project manager, where you’re heavily incentivized to be on top of every single email response time within an hour. Maybe there’s not a lot of time there. You really have to block the time for creativity. But I think, in most roles, if you’re a knowledge worker, you’re being paid for your knowledge, your insight, your brilliance, your creativity, etc. I feel many times, we stand in our own way. It feels risky sometimes to block off hours or a day to think expansively or creatively, when in fact it’s actually what’s required. It’s the same reason we get our best ideas in the shower, because there’s no distraction. There are no Slack messages pinging. Our brains are free to explore.
That’s why it really baffles me, honestly, especially when an executive leadership team gets together, and their off-sites are scheduled down to the minute. There are maybe three hours over the course of a day and a half off-site to talk about company strategy. It’s like, wait, you’re the people. You have to woo the Muse into the room, and she’s just not going to want to join you when there’s 30 minutes of insight presentation, 30 minutes of discussion, 45 minutes of picking a direction, and then you’re on to operational concerns.
I think it’s related to what we were talking about before. If we have slack in our days, it feels wrong. There’s actually something that really serves us about being busy and overscheduled, and even if we’re in a meeting we don’t need to be in, there’s still something gratifying about saying, “I filled my day.” Paradoxically, that actually works against us.
5) You expose “above and beyond” effort as often being free labor in disguise, taken from time meant for renewal and being with loved ones. In my work with physicians, they literally call this “pajama time,” because they feel both the opportunity cost and the toll. What strategies have you found most helpful for setting healthier boundaries around work, especially for people who genuinely enjoy their work or feel called to keep giving more?
It always comes from somewhere, the extra time spent working. A lot of times, I hear the rebuttal, “But I love to work, and work is fun for me, so why shouldn’t I work more if that’s what I want to do?”
Part of me is like, yeah, who am I to say don’t? Yet that time and energy come from somewhere. Even when I was in my twenties and single and childless and could devote all my time to work, I still needed, and probably should have devoted more time to, friendships or hobbies or health or any of those kinds of things.
What I have found to be helpful, first, is the insight that work is like an invasive species. It will just overwhelm your calendar if you let it, because work is a bottomless pit. Organizations are designed to always serve up more of it and take more from you if you are willing to give it. Personally, my best trick is to use my calendar as a weapon of defense. The way I do that is by getting to my calendar first. I know it’s very hard for me psychologically, as somewhat of a people pleaser, to say yes to a meeting and then later say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t make it anymore because of X.” It’s very hard to claw time back after you’ve given it away.
A better way that I have found is to solidify the rocks in my calendar such that my work can be the water that flows around them. You have to put the rocks there first. It’s very hard to place the rocks once the deluge is coming down the river.
It’s just so much easier to say, “Oh, I can’t make that meeting. I have a pre-existing commitment.” People are like, “Sure.” People have pre-existing commitments all the time. It’s very easy to do. You don’t have to say my pre-existing commitment is cooking dinner because I want to, or whatever it is.
The things I tend to put in my calendar, I put my exercise in my calendar for the week or weeks ahead. Anything that I know I want to be at with my daughter, I block. During my more hectic times of life, I would literally put calendar blocks in the evening when I was working at a consultancy, so that other people could see my calendar and it would just show up as not available. You really shouldn’t have to do that. Your evening should be your time. But if our calendars are our overlords, then fine. I want that overlord to work for me, not for the business first.
