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Standing room only at the Evening Standard SME-XPO yesterday where our co-founder Jeannette Pearce MBE kicked off the day with a reading from our best-selling book, Better Off Working Wild.  JP then invited Dragon’s Den Investor Deborah Meaden to join her for a discussion on planet positive business. They then compared ideas, stories and encouragement from Deborah’s vast career and portfolio as sustainable business leader. 

Meanwhile our co-founder Sara Turnbull was across the hall moderating a session on Inflation Mania that gave an insight on how smart SMEs are getting forensic on costs and productivity to give them flexibility to be able to support staff through the affordability crisis. That built on the raucous and high energy panel on Diversity and Inclusion Sara led on day one where the audience took the mic to share real life experience and guidance on building inclusive cultures that attract and retain high quality teams.

Finally JP & Sara were invited by Google to join their fireside chat on green computing and all things sustainable for future business. They spoke about the potential for rapidly decarbonising small businesses and shared the #airplanemode tool from the book to help business leaders get into deep focus.

The agenda for both days was ram-packed full of good business topics and huge thanks to the Evening Standard team for inviting our authors and coaches Sara & JP back to speak next year. 

We all need to work – not just to meet our economic needs or to look after ourselves, but to contribute to and engage with society. Thing is that the work we all need to do isn’t just the paid kind.  

There are plenty of things most of us aren’t paid to do that still really need to be done, whether that’s food shopping, housework, raising children, caring for parents or the sick or doing voluntary work. Unfortunately, little of this is recognised as work because there’s no financial value assigned to it. It’s what we do when we’re not making money. It’s what we’re driven or expected to do and, although everyone kicks off when it’s not done, we’re expected to do it quietly, without payment and without any reward beyond the sense of a job well done.

We certainly aren’t against unpaid work and nor do we find it boring. In fact we find lots of joy in washing-up, tending to plants and caring for children. Work in and of itself can bring great delight and pleasure. The thing is that the maths just doesn’t stack-up in the 21st century. 

The richer that you are the more likely you are to be working too many hours to earn money to keep up a busy lifestyle and the poorer you are the more likely to be underemployed and overworking to keep up. None of us are average and not all of us fit into a gender binary but bear with us as we do the maths using data on the average man and average woman.

By our maths the average man in the UK is doing 73 hours a week of work (82 if he is parenting) and the average woman 83 hours a week (101 if she is parenting). When you allow 8 hours sleep a night that leaves the average person with just 3 hours free time a day (4 if he is a man and 2 if she is a woman). That is including the weekends. 

If you were trying to fit all of the work into the so-called work week it just wouldn’t fit!

No wonder that finding time to rest, to mess about to exercise or even think straight feels impossible. You aren’t failing to be organised – you’ve just been served a very difficult task by the way that work is structured at present. You aren’t failing to do anything well – you are just working almost three full-time jobs on average.

No wonder we feel like we are left only with the scraps of our time.

Things could and should have changed some 50 years ago when women entered the job market en masse, transforming the heteronormative culture in which the man worked outside the home to earn money while the woman worked inside the house to raise a family in a happy home. 

Here was an opportunity to change not just where we worked but the way in which we worked (paid versus unpaid work, how work is valued), with positive implications not just for gender and equality but also for workers’ rights. With the advent of automation, followed by the invention of labour-saving white goods, computers and now AI has so far proved to be another false dawn.

While any or all of these should have reduced the amount of paid and unpaid work any of us has to do, it seems that most of us (especially women and particularly those from BAME and/or working-class backgrounds) are now working more, not less. Even those lucky enough to work a four-day week, work and life admin often spill over and there still doesn’t seem to be enough time for the ‘good life’. We are all trying to do too much.

For all of us the very first habitat we had was a womb – we were inside and part of someone else. Then we were outside and apart and dependent on those around us and our new habitat for food, shelter, warmth, companionship. This first outside habitat of the home then expanded to include school, parks, cafes and then the workplace. And then in early 2020 for so many of us it all collapsed back into the home. 

Hunched over on makeshift desks, in our beds, or even stood up at the ironing board work slowly colonised the home. With colleagues, children and pets sharing screens, affection, time and space. Few of us were left with the delineation that kept things apart and ourselves together. 

With the shock of many changed holiday plans and a re-tightening of the covid controls, 2021 starts with many of us feeling frayed, questioning the way that work works and hankering for connection, solitude and sacred space and time. 

Quite simply, we need to be alone and with ourselves. By creating a work habitat that allows us time to be still, quiet and think we can allow ourselves to connect deeply with all aspects of ourselves and bring our concentrated effort to our work. Whether we do this first at home, in the prayer room or on a long mountain trek, rewilding the self is about reconnecting to the wild in you. 

For many of us, that may mean using nature and time outdoors to refresh ourselves with a change of scenery. Most of us need to get outdoors in the elements – and in our element – to truly feel ourselves. (For us it’s water, mountains and forests.) It is here that things are stripped back to the essentials so we can hear our true selves; not our panicked, stressed or striving selves. It is here that we can meet the wild within. We can connect again to our true selves by reconnecting to the natural world and our place in it. 

What impact has Covid had on your habitat? Can you make changes to your work-from-home habitat and take time outdoors to reconnect and recharge you to be really present with yourself, your loved ones and of course your work?

‘Work puts food on the table  

Work puts a roof over your head

Work can change the world

But work can also change you’

For many people work just wasn’t (and shhh spoiler alert – still isn’t) working!

When we wrote this in our debut book, Better off Working Wild, how changing the way we work can make us all better off , there had been no pandemic and life looked very different – but the signs were none the less all there. 

People were feeling underpaid or overworked, undervalued or bored, purposeless, fractious and in some cases exploited – some were feeling a combination of many of these symptoms at once.

For so many, work just wasn’t working.

So how’s it been working for you?

To help with this question – Take a look at our List of common work disorders and give yourself a self diagnostic check up – ask yourself – Why do you work? And How do you do your best work? What do you love about your working life and which parts simply aren’t working for you? 

Although your answers to these questions can, of course, be deeply personal, we can guarantee you will recognise yourself in at least one entry (if not more). And, if that is the case,  it might be comforting to know you wouldn’t be alone. It’s been insightful to hear in many of our recent discussions, insight interviews and workshops how people are struggling to find the conditions on the list of work disorders that ‘don’t’ relate to them, rather than the ones that ‘do’.

So it’s clear, we are no longer the only ones who believe work is broken. It might be equally comforting to hear we’ve always believed that it can be fixed. Work is broken and we offer Working Wild as the antidote.

Working Wild is for everyone who has finished a day exhausted, frustrated and feeling poorer for it. It’s for anyone with an inkling that working life just doesn’t have to be this way. And for anyone that doesn’t want work to estrange themselves from their better selves, from others and from nature.

After all – It’s one thing diagnosing the problem, it’s another thing being prepared to be your own medicine.