Nir Eyal: evaluation

Transcript context

…A lot of folks that I've worked with in the past have said, "Look, I can become indistractable. I follow these four steps, fantastic. I'm indistractable. But what if my company's not indistractable? How do I help other people become indistractable? Or what if my boss is not indistractable and they're constantly asking me and pinging and dinging me for stuff and I'm not able to do my best work? So, what do I do about that?" So, there's a whole section in the book on how to build an indistractable workplace. And what I discovered was in the research in writing this book is that indistractable companies have three traits. And so, the first trait is that Indistractable companies provide employees with what's called psychological safety. This comes out of the research from Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School. And what she discovered was truly that companies have to provide employees with psychological safety. Meaning, if you can't talk about a problem, if you can't raise your hand and say, "Hey, you know what? I'm just not able to do my best work when I'm constantly expected to reply to every email, to every notification, every 30 seconds. I can't do my best work." If you can't talk about this problem, that is the problem. As I like to say, distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. And when it comes to the workplace, if you don't give employees that psychological safety to say, "Hey, how do we deal with this problem just like any other problem?" That in fact is a problem. It's not the technology, it's the fact that you can't get together and talk about this problem without fear of somebody thinking, "Oh, you're lazy," or, "You don't want to be on call," or, "You're expecting other people to work for you." No, that's not the issue at all. It's simply that we need to formulate how to fix this problem just like any other business challenge. The second trait is employees need a forum to talk about this problem. So, in researching this book, I ask people, what's the most distracting technology? What technology in the workplace do you find to be most distracting? The number two was some kind of group messaging service, and Slack was mentioned the most number of times. By the way, number one was email. Number two was some kind of group messaging platform, and Slack was mentioned the most often. And so, I went to visit Slack headquarters. I went to go see my friend Amir, who used to work there at the time, and I knocked on the door and I expected to see a company that was incredibly distracted because if it was the technology that was the source of the problem, nobody uses Slack more than Slack. They should be the most distracted company on earth. But that's not what I found at all because Slack, in fact, embodied these three attributes. They gave people psychological safety. They gave people a forum to talk about these problems. How did they do that? They actually created Slack channels at Slack. act, embodied these three attributes. They gave people psychological safety. They gave people a forum to talk about these problems. How did they do that? They actually created Slack channels at Slack. They had one Slack channel called Beef Tweets, and Beef Tweets was a channel where people could talk about their beef with a company. And it wasn't that necessarily management had to fix every problem. That's not the point. It's that they had to acknowledge that employee's voices were being heard. And how did they do that? Surprisingly enough, they did it with emoji. So, when a problem that an employee mentioned was fixed, they sent the green check mark emoji, but if it was a problem that maybe couldn't be fixed, but what they wanted to acknowledge that management had seen it, they would send the eyes emoji. And so, the important thing here is to give employees some kind of forum. It could be a Slack channel, it could be another case study in the book is the Boston Consulting Group, which I used to work at. They've gone from one of the most distractable companies to today. They're ranked as one of the best places to work in America. They have these meetings where they talk about PTO, predictable time off. And so, they completely changed that organizational culture by following these steps, as well. The last, the third attribute, which is the most important of the three, is that management must exemplify what it means to be indistractable because culture is like water. It flows downhill. And so, people will look to management to see how they behave, and they will act in accordance with those expectations. So, at Slack Company headquarters, in the company canteen, it says in bright pink letters, it says, "Work hard and go home." Work hard and go home. That is not something you would expect to see at a hard charging Silicon Valley startup, but that's what you see there because everybody in the company, this was before the acquisition. I don't know what it's like now, but when I wrote the book, this was certainly the case that everybody from Stewart Butterfield on down, the CEO on down, believed that to do people's best work, they had to work without distraction. So, if you use Slack on nights and weekends, you were told, "That's not what we do here." You were reprimanded because that was not part of the company culture. So, it's really those three traits, psychological safety, a form to talk about these problems, and management has to exemplify what it means to be indistractable. I want to move to a different topic, but before we do, is there one thing or maybe two things that a listener can do, say today or tomorrow or this week, that would make it significant dent on their ability to focus and avoid distraction?…

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