Latest / Spacious Success / EP036 | Rest Isn’t the Enemy of Revenue, with Marilla Akkermans: Building Flexibility Into the DNA

Transcript

EP036 | Rest Isn’t the Enemy of Revenue, with Marilla Akkermans: Building Flexibility Into the DNA · Spacious Success

• 0:05
  Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro performance scientist, speaker and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost.
• 0:16
  After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
• 0:27
  On Spacious Success, I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
• 0:41
  I first came across Marilla when Women's Agenda shared an article with a headline that stopped me mid-scroll.
• 0:48
  It said, My business grew to $17 million when I stopped asking women to prove that they deserved flexibility.
• 0:57
  I'm going to read that bit again.
• 0:58
  When I stopped asking women to prove that they deserve flexibility, I immediately wanted to know more.
• 1:04
  So I sent Marilla a DM and she graciously replied.
• 1:07
  And we are here today recording this.
• 1:09
  I think there's a lot of virtue signaling around flexibility in the workplace.
• 1:13
  And today I want to dive into what does that look like at a pragmatic level?
• 1:17
  And why would a business bake flexibility into its DNA from the outset?
• 1:21
  Marilla Ackermans is the founder and managing director of Equality Media and Marketing.
• 1:26
  an independent agency that she launched in 2018 with a deliberate and at the time radical premise.
• 1:33
  I hope it's okay to say it was radical.
• 1:36
  That people first businesses are not just possible, but they're commercially powerful.
• 1:41
  And the numbers back up.
• 1:43
  In 2025, under her leadership, Equality recorded a 447%
• 1:48
  There was a 400 at the front of that, 447% year-on-year profit growth.
• 1:51
  They expanded their team by 65% and they achieved an 85% growth.
• 1:59
  staff retention.
• 2:01
  They are very impressive statistics that I think many of us would love to emulate, all while operating on a four-day work week at full pay.
• 2:12
  But what I really appreciate about Marilla is that she does not dress this up as just altruism and virtue signalling.
• 2:18
  She is very clear that this is commercial logic.
• 2:22
  In her own words, exhaustion does not equal commitment.
• 2:25
  And if your business model only works when your people are running on adrenaline and caffeine, then the people are not the problem.
• 2:32
  Your business model is.
• 2:34
  The workplace model that she has built is anchored by what she calls the equality time and equality care.
• 2:39
  And it goes well beyond just having flexible hours.
• 2:43
  It includes 19 additional days of inclusive leave, covering circumstances that most traditional workplaces simply don't acknowledge.
• 2:53
  miscarriage, gender affirmation, and caregiving, among others.
• 2:57
  That model has made Equality a three-time AFR, boss, best places to work winner, taking out gold for the best place to work in media and marketing, and the best small business organisation in Australia.
• 3:11
  And her leadership extends beyond the business.
• 3:13
  Through a longstanding partnership with Women's Property Initiatives,
• 3:18
  Marilla donates 10% of the company profits and provides pro bono marketing support and has helped raise over $705,000 in 24 hours to fund homes for women and children experiencing homelessness.
• 3:31
  As a speaker, a writer and advocate,
• 3:33
  Marilla has become one of the most compelling voices in Australia on culture-first leadership, women in the media, and values-based entrepreneurship.
• 3:42
  She combines pragmatism with purpose in a way that, through my LinkedIn stalking and Google stalking, I find genuinely rare but mighty impressive.
• 3:54
  Welcome to Spacious Success, Marilla.
• 3:56
  Marilla.
• 3:57
  Thank you, Christy.
• 3:57
  I feel like I might just like you following me around all the time and giving me.
• 4:01
  That's like quite a pep talk.
• 4:03
  Thank you.
• 4:03
  Pleasure.
• 4:04
  I enjoy hearing that.
• 4:05
  It's nice, isn't it?
• 4:06
  And how often do we often reflect?
• 4:08
  I think we're often moving on from one project or accomplishment to the next, and it's often only when something's mirrored back to us.
• 4:14
  So I think you should soak that up.
• 4:16
  Thank you.
• 4:16
  No, I am.
• 4:17
  I never stop to reflect.
• 4:18
  It's just moving forward.
• 4:20
  Don't we?
• 4:21
  Yes.
• 4:21
  Capability curse, I call it.
• 4:24
  So you built a quality media from the ground up.
• 4:26
  And as I said in that intro, flexibility is baked into the DNA of your business from day one.
• 4:32
  What was your personal experience or observation that made you decide that this had to be more than just a policy on a piece of paper?
• 4:41
  I mean, thank you.
• 4:42
  And what you said in the intro is kind of true.
• 4:43
  Like in 2018, when I started Equality, it wasn't as common conversation as it is now about this word culture and what it actually means to have a strong culture.
• 4:54
  And I hadn't seen it.
• 4:55
  you know, in my 15 years in the workforce up until that time, actually being something that people work on within businesses.
• 5:02
  And it's only in the last couple of years that I kind of have realized that, that it does take hard work to grow and hold and maintain a culture.
• 5:11
  So in 2018, when I started Equality, I started Equality because I was returning from maternity leave, having had my first child, Leo.
• 5:20
  Um, and I could see the only thing that was going to be part-time about my role was my wage.
• 5:26
  Um, part-time in 2018 was four days a week.
• 5:30
  Um, and I was kind of like, I haven't had a baby to spend no time with him.
• 5:35
  you know, like I'm going to spend more time traveling to work four days a week because there wasn't flexibility back in those days either around, you know, days from home.
• 5:44
  And on top of that, the career progression that was open to me before I had Leo was very tightly shut post having had him.
• 5:53
  And too often had I seen
• 5:57
  absolutely wonderfully talented women leave really powerful positions within our industry only to come back from maternity leave and be like a back of house resource.
• 6:06
  And so I didn't want that for myself.
• 6:10
  And I thought, well, I've seen it.
• 6:12
  I don't want it for me.
• 6:15
  I've always kind of been entrepreneurial without knowing what that meant.
• 6:20
  But that's why I was like, I don't really have hobbies.
• 6:22
  I like my work.
• 6:23
  That's how I'm going to try and make money when I quit this job.
• 6:25
  So let's give it a go and see what happens.
• 6:28
  Amazing.
• 6:29
  And I really agree with what you said.
• 6:31
  I think we've got a mass exodus even today of really accomplished, talented women who, for whatever reason, sometimes choose, sometimes are forced to leave the workforce.
• 6:41
  And that's a huge loss in our pipeline of really, you know, impressive female leaders.
• 6:47
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:48
  I've just done a talk this week at Mumbrella 360, and so I've got a lot of stats on the...
• 6:53
  Yes, please share.
• 6:55
  But within the media and advertising space, 70% of parents are considering leaving the industry altogether.
• 7:03
  Only 30% of parents say that advertising is a good industry that they would recommend parents work in.
• 7:09
  And more broadly, according to Women in Media and their annual reports, 37% of women are thinking about leaving media, which includes, you know, journalism and creative agencies and that broader kind of category altogether.
• 7:23
  So, yes, you're right.
• 7:25
  There is mass exodus happening.
• 7:27
  always going on and I just think what a shame and what a waste for those women and for us as an industry that we're just hemorrhaging.
• 7:37
  Yeah.
• 7:37
  You know, brilliant talent unnecessarily because businesses won't think about what could I do to humanize how.
• 7:45
  I run this place.
• 7:46
  And I'm impressed that you acknowledge both this is a parenting issue, that this is something that isn't just facing women.
• 7:52
  I think it's most certainly amplified for women because women still in 2026 tend to absorb most of the domestic and varying responsibilities.
• 8:00
  That's what the data tells us.
• 8:02
  Yeah.
• 8:02
  Yeah.
• 8:04
  I think we need to, when we talk about flexibility, and you signalled this in something you said earlier, I think there's a lot of discussion about like work from home or work from the office or RTO mandates.
• 8:15
  So, yes, location flexibility.
• 8:17
  But one thing, and I acknowledge this is a privilege often afforded to knowledge workers, not necessarily to frontline workers, but there's also a lot more, and this is, I think, one of the silver linings of the pandemic, is that we've now got a lot more flexibility around schedule flexibility.
• 8:32
  Yeah.
• 8:32
  And so I think this notion of flexibility needs to be dissected more than just using it as a big umbrella term.
• 8:38
  Absolutely.
• 8:40
  And I think as well from a flexibility, yeah, flexibility for sure can mean different things to different people.
• 8:46
  And we've talked about like what does core hours of working look like?
• 8:50
  So that if you're a morning person, you can start a bit earlier and finish a bit later.
• 8:54
  But when do we all need to be together to collaborate?
• 8:57
  And I think, you know, I love lots of different sayings, but at the moment one of them is like choose your heart and work
• 9:05
  Because undoubtedly you will come up against hard decisions and hard events in your life.
• 9:11
  What are the things that if you put some effort in early, you can kind of control the hard?
• 9:16
  And so, you know, it's hard to create workplace reform or think about how do I really want to try and create a workplace?
• 9:22
  That's not easy to do.
• 9:25
  But it means retention.
• 9:28
  And now retention is actually has been higher than 85% in the last couple of years.
• 9:32
  Last year, it was 100%.
• 9:33
  The year before that, it was like 93%.
• 9:37
  I don't have to think about rehiring somebody because a quarter of my workforce are leaving me every year because I don't care about them.
• 9:45
  Yeah, choose your heart.
• 9:46
  That's brilliant.
• 9:47
  Yeah, well done.
• 9:48
  And they, again, really impressive statistics.
• 9:51
  Now, the Women's Agenda headline that nudged me to reach out to you was that your business grew to $17 million when you stopped asking women to prove that they deserve flexibility.
• 10:02
  And that word prove is doing a lot of the work, isn't it?
• 10:05
  Because what I observe with the women that I coach and in the businesses where I speak is that women are often given flexibility
• 10:13
  But they often feel, whether it's their own assumptions or implied assumptions, that it is conditional.
• 10:20
  So they end up overperforming.
• 10:22
  I often call it productivity theatre.
• 10:25
  Or I see it, I sometimes describe it as digital presenteeism.
• 10:28
  So we want to be seen to be responsive and on because we feel like we've needed to earn that flexibility.
• 10:34
  I think we see it in teams in late night emails.
• 10:37
  I think it's the green dot on Slack.
• 10:40
  So you're seen to be working.
• 10:43
  when we really don't have to or those meetings that should have been an email.
• 10:47
  I think it's working twice as hard to look like you're not taking advantage of something that should be what I think is a default.
• 10:56
  What were you seeing happening to women specifically with flexibility that was being treated as something that they had to earn as opposed to something that was how work was designed?
• 11:08
  Right.
• 11:09
  I think that so many organisations still say, to your point, like they say they have all of these policies, but then when it's actually put into practice, oh, yeah, we're flexible.
• 11:20
  But what we're going to give you is six days worth of work and you have the choice to be flexible on when you're going to fit that in around the 60% of unpaid labour that you've got to do as well.
• 11:31
  And there's not really the structures aren't put in place for flexibility to truly be on offer to people.
• 11:38
  you know, only yesterday I was sitting with people who, you know, I'd hope are progressive leaders talking about the more often you're in the workplace, the better chance you have of getting promoted because you're visible.
• 11:51
  And I thought, why are we here still?
• 11:53
  Why are we still talking about that as the virtue signaling or the, you know, the
• 11:59
  performative, what was it?
• 12:00
  Activities theater.
• 12:02
  Yeah, I liked that.
• 12:05
  That's lazy leading.
• 12:06
  If you're only thinking that because somebody is in front of you that they're working, like, you know, won't drop the F-bomb so early in this podcast, but it's just like look at the output, look at what these people are doing, how are they performing, what are their clients saying, what is their output, and judge people's performance on that and think
• 12:28
  women who overwhelmingly women who need flexibility are parents as well they're in charge of keeping other humans alive like I don't need you to be on slack at 11 o'clock at night to prove to me that you're getting your job done you we we're both adults and that's what I say to my team like you're an adult I'm going to treat you that way and I'm giving you my trust like it's not yours to earn it's yours to break basically um and um
• 12:56
  we're entering into this agreement.
• 12:58
  My agreement is that I'm not going to give you more work than I think is humanly possible for you to achieve in a period of time.
• 13:05
  And you're going to agree that you're going to do that work to the very best standard that you can.
• 13:10
  If at some point one of us isn't achieving that contract, then we need to have a discussion about that.
• 13:16
  And,
• 13:17
  you know, trying to give people the right amount of guardrails that they need to succeed in their role is kind of what I'm really about.
• 13:23
  And then giving them that opportunity to like fill the blanks in or like color in some spaces.
• 13:28
  And I think that that's part of workplace design as well is kind of like getting to 70% and being able to look at trends and data and then giving people that last 30% to really make their role work for them.
• 13:41
  Oh, and there's so much neuroscience and research around, again, a privilege for knowledge workers.
• 13:49
  But if you design, if you strategically design the contours and the cadence of your day to obviously meet client needs and deadlines.
• 13:56
  Yeah.
• 13:57
  But to be aligned with what we call your chronotype, which is biologically when you are most naturally alert and productive.
• 14:03
  Mackenzie and Co research tells us that if we do our most, Cal Newport talks about deep work, so that most taxing, challenging, mentally robust work that we're designed to do, if we do that during our peak performance window, we are 55% more productive.
• 14:19
  And so it's not about working harder.
• 14:21
  It's about working smarter.
• 14:23
  So there's, you know, a solid amount of research that tells us that if we can strategically plan our days, we will be getting the best out of our people.
• 14:33
  Our people will be working.
• 14:34
  I call our brain our human operating system.
• 14:36
  So people will be working with rather than against their HOS, which is exactly what we want.
• 14:42
  I think the other thing, which I'm saying this only, um,
• 14:48
  not as a, like an excuse for myself or a disclaimer, I'm saying it so other people have permission.
• 14:55
  I don't get this right 100% of the time, Christy.
• 14:58
  And our team are taking a quality time every week.
• 15:02
  But the fact that it is there on offer is appreciated.
• 15:05
  And we know that life and work ebbs and flows.
• 15:08
  And so there's gonna be times that things are happening in your personal life where work is taking a back burner.
• 15:15
  you know, we'll give you an allowance for that.
• 15:19
  And it's only after, you know, a certain point in time where you go, the work's suffering now.
• 15:23
  We really need to have a different discussion about what's happening for you in your private life.
• 15:27
  And then there'll be times where work is really busy.
• 15:30
  And, you know, again, that's the time where we go, well, we've had this contract in place.
• 15:34
  I need to rely on you now to be maybe in the office five days this week because of something that's going on.
• 15:41
  And people are happy to commit to that.
• 15:42
  And so I think that's really important to know that, like, don't not give something a go that's new or uncharted territory because you're like, well, I've got to get it right 100% of the time.
• 15:54
  You don't.
• 15:55
  Oh, such a powerful thing to share because I hear a lot of people who either invest in a four-day workweek trial and it doesn't get the gains that they wanted initially.
• 16:05
  They don't get the out-of-the-gate success that they were hoping for because, as you said before, you've got to choose your heart.
• 16:11
  So, yeah, I really like that.
• 16:12
  And I like that notion of sometimes work, you know, bends more towards our, sorry, our work demands require more of us and then other times personal or family demands.
• 16:21
  And I love that workweek.
• 16:23
  we have the flexibility to honour both of those needs.
• 16:26
  That's right.
• 16:27
  And there is what flexibility is.
• 16:29
  Yes.
• 16:31
  So well said.
• 16:31
  Instead of us having what I think is a redundant conversation about work-life balance.
• 16:37
  It doesn't exist.
• 16:38
  Thank you.
• 16:38
  Well done.
• 16:39
  You just articulated that perfectly.
• 16:42
  I'm not sure if you're familiar with Amantha Imber's work and her podcast.
• 16:45
  I love Amantha.
• 16:46
  I love Amantha.
• 16:46
  How I work.
• 16:47
  Well, I know she talks about at Inventium, I don't know if they still have this, but when they had the four-day workweek, they talked about the gift of the fifth.
• 16:55
  So, yes, not always will we have the scope because we've got a big client project or some unexpected deadlines that, you know, crept up on us.
• 17:05
  So not always are we adhering to that strict four-day workweek, but that is there when we need it and when we need to flex that muscle to take it.
• 17:13
  Yeah, I love Amanda.
• 17:15
  And I mean, we've used a lot of her resources in the four-day work week and
• 17:20
  again, working really hard in setting it up so that we knew that it was going to be there for success.
• 17:26
  And we take the gift of the fifth, like we call it a gift, not a given.
• 17:29
  So I've kind of stolen that term from there as well.
• 17:33
  It's brilliant.
• 17:34
  Just a reminder, because I think sometimes too, you can, like, if you get that bad egg or somebody who thinks it's an attachment rather than something that's earned,
• 17:44
  Like you've got to be able to have those conversations.
• 17:46
  Yeah, that's brilliant.
• 17:47
  Now, you just alluded to this a moment ago, but I want to pick up on a thread.
• 17:51
  And I saw you share something on LinkedIn recently where you said you were going to, I can't remember where, if I wrote it down, but I do remember you saying that you would die on the hybrid hill.
• 18:01
  Yes.
• 18:03
  So I'm sure you've seen the rounds on social media recently of Emma Greed.
• 18:07
  I don't know if you follow her.
• 18:09
  Yeah, she's had a lot of airtime because her new book and I'm a huge advocate.
• 18:12
  I love Emma's podcast and I really appreciated her book Start With Yourself.
• 18:18
  And I think some of her things, as we know, social media can take little soundbites and misconstrue them and misrepresent them.
• 18:24
  definitely been explicit about saying that we need workplace flexibility.
• 18:28
  But in one podcast, and I'm going to snip in if you're watching the video, we'll put in a snippet so you can actually hear from a podcast where she said, work from home culture is a career killer for women.
• 18:41
  Careers require proximity and visibility.
• 18:45
  You want a pay rise, you want a promotion, you need to be there.
• 18:49
  Please challenge that.
• 18:50
  Please.
• 18:51
  Refuge that.
• 18:53
  I think the biggest thing that she's missing out of that is it's where to begin.
• 19:01
  The biggest part that's missing there is the lack of acknowledgement that the workplace systems weren't built for women.
• 19:07
  And so, yes, women probably over index in needing flexibility in their workplace, which means working from different locations.
• 19:16
  Isn't it about time that we have to, like, why do we have to continue to take the load of that kind of rhetoric and lazy workplace planning?
• 19:25
  Why aren't men taking as much flexibility as women so that everything can be equal, so that our unpaid work...
• 19:33
  responsibilities are equal.
• 19:34
  If men took more flexibility so that they could pick their children up from school as many days a week as their partner does or take the kids to their appointments or look after their ageing parents or be home for the tradie, then women wouldn't need as much flexibility.
• 19:51
  Please say that louder.
• 19:52
  That's the thing that is just so frustrating about these sorts of conversations.
• 19:58
  Did you see, again, on social media, the ABC pub had an article, shared a story on Instagram and they were asking working women for their hacks on social media.
• 20:08
  on how do you balance it all?
• 20:10
  And it blew up in not the way that they were expecting.
• 20:13
  When people called out exactly what you just said there, when we keep shifting the onus of responsibility back to women and that's the vernacular around how do you juggle it all?
• 20:23
  How do you find work-life balance?
• 20:26
  We perpetuate a problem where we have workplaces and ways of working that were built around patriarchal systems and we're not going to do that.
• 20:33
  where there was usually one income earner and there was usually a stay-at-home parent or caregiver who was able to absorb the caring and domestic roles.
• 20:43
  This was part of my talk, Christy.
• 20:45
  And that's what I said.
• 20:46
  The modern day workplace was built for a household in 1926.
• 20:50
  Wasn't it?
• 20:52
  And yet I often say we're asking women to parent like they're still back in 1956, probably.
• 20:57
  And I would challenge that.
• 20:58
  I think parenting has become intensified and performative in recent years for a whole host of reasons.
• 21:04
  If you're interested, I shared an episode with Maggie Dent that I did on this very topic.
• 21:09
  Modern parenting has become intensified and performative, but we are expected to work like it's 2026.
• 21:19
  And there's this complete incongruency between how you do that.
• 21:23
  And again, a lot of that responsibility is sitting on the shoulders.
• 21:26
  And that's why women say, I have a second shift.
• 21:29
  You know, I work and then revert to caring tasks.
• 21:33
  Yeah.
• 21:33
  And the thing that I think, you know, women and people don't say,
• 21:38
  is it's easier to go to work.
• 21:41
  It's like, so of course, they're not going to be like putting their hands up, which I have to, you know, acknowledge my husband.
• 21:48
  He's the one that's working part time so that there's a parent around.
• 21:52
  Um, but like.
• 21:55
  I know that he's like, I can't not work.
• 21:57
  Like I need to, he could be a full-time stay at home dad, but he's like, no, I need, I need a couple of days to go and take it easy.
• 22:05
  Because I think that's the thing that is like really hard and nobody kind of acknowledges is like parenting is hard.
• 22:12
  Looking after and caring for people is really difficult.
• 22:16
  And...
• 22:17
  It is easier to go to work and have a structure in your day that is built all around you and, you know, your knowledge and getting a few things ticked off a list.
• 22:26
  But going out for barn meeting down Bridge Road and, you know, being able to have two hours of yourself on your commute on the way to and from work.
• 22:35
  Oh, bliss.
• 22:35
  Yeah.
• 22:36
  I think that's the other thing that a lot of leaders and maybe Emma, I don't know exactly, but I love research and data.
• 22:44
  Roy Morgan Research tells us that 90, like it's in the 90% of CEOs live within five kilometres of their workplace.
• 22:54
  Oh, fascinating.
• 22:55
  The average worker lives 30 kilometres plus away from where they work.
• 23:01
  So again, affluence and socioeconomic groups start to come into play where people,
• 23:06
  If you're a CEO who has been living less than five kilometers from work, what's the problem?
• 23:12
  You know, I get distracted at home.
• 23:13
  So it's better for me to come and sit in my office and work away.
• 23:20
  The person that's commuting 30 kilometres or more, spending an hour each way getting to work, then sitting on a busy floor that's noisy because we don't pay for offices anymore.
• 23:33
  Yeah.
• 23:33
  Yeah, offices that aren't acoustically treated and people lamenting the fact they come into the office to sit on Teams or Zoom meetings.
• 23:40
  Yeah.
• 23:40
  Yeah, but their leaders aren't often experiencing the same volume.
• 23:44
  No, no.
• 23:45
  Yeah.
• 23:46
  So these are all the reasons.
• 23:47
  Yeah.
• 23:47
  That's really fascinating.
• 23:49
  I've not ever thought about physical proximity, how that could skew your view on, you know, RTO mandates and hybrid work.
• 24:00
  Something you alluded to before about, you know, when we...
• 24:03
  the role and having work as to fulfill our identity.
• 24:08
  I shared something recently, I think it was on Instagram about how often working women that I coach, you know, very accomplished women often say they get home and they've managed to hold it all together, you know, to do really incredible work throughout the day to lead people, to lead with power and authority.
• 24:24
  And they come home and their children work.
• 24:26
  won't sit down and eat their dinner.
• 24:28
  They emotionally implode because one of their kids is having a tantrum and they're just about to as well.
• 24:34
  And I talked about this concept of identity whiplash and how we go, you know, oscillating between very different roles and parenting.
• 24:41
  As you said, parenting is really hard.
• 24:44
  Like it is emotionally, cognitively, physically demanding, depending on the age of your children.
• 24:50
  So yeah, I think it's important to acknowledge that.
• 24:53
  I'd like to just know a little bit more because I think there's still a lot of people and a lot of speculation about the viability of a four-day workweek.
• 25:00
  Yeah.
• 25:02
  You've written that when time is constrained, our focus sharpens, and I love that.
• 25:06
  And we all know Parkinson's law tells us that work expands to fill the time that we have available for its completion.
• 25:14
  When we reward efficiency with time back, people stop asking how long they need to be there and they start asking how well they can do the work.
• 25:24
  Neuroscience completely supports this because we know our prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain, I say it's a CEO.
• 25:32
  it only has a four to six battery life per day.
• 25:34
  Now, I'm not suggesting we should have a four to six hour workday.
• 25:38
  Please don't misconstrue that.
• 25:40
  But for us to do the mentally taxing, challenging work, we have at best around a four to six hour window per day.
• 25:46
  What did you observe in your business when you made the shift to a four day workweek?
• 25:51
  Was there anything that surprised you, delighted you?
• 25:56
  For three months before we did our trial of the four-day work week, we tried to do as much research about our day as we could.
• 26:04
  So we did like time tracking as an example.
• 26:07
  What we saw was 50% of our time was spent on admin or internal work.
• 26:11
  tasks.
• 26:13
  And so we were like, what can we do to make sure that we don't have scope creep within that?
• 26:18
  So turning notifications off on our emails, not having, you know, teams or Slack channels popping up all the time.
• 26:25
  Every time you get an email, you know, we know that they have been, these tools have been specifically built to be addictive for us to keep returning to.
• 26:33
  So what can we do to try and make sure that our focus is on the right work and
• 26:39
  Interesting about your stats around that four to six hour battery life, because what we know, again, is fact within the workplaces of the 7.6 hours that people work, there's only about four hours of proper work getting done.
• 26:51
  So the theory around the four day work week is if you can improve people's efficiency by an extra hour a day in that work, you know, 7.6 hours from four to five hours, then you effectively get that fifth day of work done.
• 27:07
  done and back.
• 27:08
  And so what we did to start with to make the four-day workweek possible and we, you know, have to keep refreshing and retraining all the time because, again, it's not an easy thing to keep up with.
• 27:19
  We all want to divert to what we know is we're going
• 27:24
  we dropped like 70% of our internal meetings left.
• 27:28
  Wow.
• 27:28
  Yeah, we don't have a meeting without an agenda and we don't have a meeting without follow-up notes.
• 27:35
  We need to, if you are running a meeting, you need to come to it as prepared as you possibly can so that it's a conducive meeting to an output, not just a conversation for an hour.
• 27:44
  And I think that's that.
• 27:46
  So yeah.
• 27:47
  There's some of the things we did.
• 27:48
  We turned meetings from an hour to 45 minutes.
• 27:52
  And of course, it doesn't always like stay there and doesn't stay like in your best intentions.
• 27:59
  But again, if you give yourself that opportunity to have some scope creep every now and then, then you also have that ability to be able to pull it back.
• 28:07
  So really, it was about how we were working internally where the biggest opportunities were.
• 28:13
  And I love that you, as a data lover myself, it sounds like you are too, that you started with analysing where is our time going?
• 28:21
  You know, doing a time audit, let's be honest, is onerous.
• 28:24
  It's excruciating.
• 28:25
  But my goodness, it is revealing.
• 28:27
  I often say our three most important human currencies are our tea, our time, our energy and our attention.
• 28:34
  And they're the biggest leaks in our business.
• 28:37
  That does not surprise me.
• 28:40
  A lot of the clients I work with when we're creating their digital guardrails is meeting bloat.
• 28:45
  That just preponderance of meetings.
• 28:47
  Active track bloat.
• 28:50
  published a workplace study this year, and they found that since the AI adoption, what they're describing as widespread AI adoption, we haven't had the productivity gains that we'd hoped.
• 29:00
  We've in fact seen a 145% increase in meetings.
• 29:05
  Of course, we have 105% increase in emails.
• 29:09
  Collaboration time has skyrocketed.
• 29:11
  So again, if we're not using these tools, and as you said, you know, the constant ping of Teams or Slack notifications, we know that it takes the average adult around 23 minutes to get back into a focused state after they've been distracted.
• 29:25
  It's the resumption lag.
• 29:26
  So all of these things are not connected.
• 29:29
  making it sufficient.
• 29:29
  And I think until your time is compressed, as is often the case when you have to ruthlessly prioritise what you're doing, you don't often realise how much time is being, I don't want to use the word wasted, but used superfluously.
• 29:42
  Dwindled.
• 29:44
  Dwindled, oh, nice word.
• 29:46
  Yeah, no.
• 29:49
  You wrote something, as you said, I said at the outset, I have stalked you on LinkedIn.
• 29:52
  I love it because I'm quite an online stalker myself.
• 29:55
  So the fact that someone stalked me.
• 29:56
  I'm reading it.
• 29:58
  You said, and this is my love language, you said, rest isn't the enemy of revenue.
• 30:04
  Oh, my goodness.
• 30:04
  I could have read that again and again.
• 30:06
  It's the fuel for it.
• 30:08
  If your business only works when your people are running on adrenaline and caffeine, your people aren't the problem, the model is.
• 30:14
  Yes.
• 30:14
  Can we take a moment to let that sink in?
• 30:16
  In my keynotes, I often say to people that rest is a peak performance pit stop.
• 30:21
  It's not a reward.
• 30:22
  It's actually a right and a responsibility.
• 30:26
  Recovery is a performance lever.
• 30:29
  It's not a reward at all.
• 30:30
  And I think we need to shift this dialogue.
• 30:33
  You've actually measured it.
• 30:34
  What does the ROI of rest look like in real numbers at a quality media and marketing?
• 30:39
  And what would you say to a leader who reads that or hears that
• 30:43
  and thinks that's lovely but doesn't believe that it applies to their business.
• 30:51
  Like you've got to give this stuff a go to see what it looks like.
• 30:54
  And I think you know in your own lived experience.
• 30:57
  Like I, again, full admission, the last two weeks I've burnt the candle at all ends and then also matched to the middle of it.
• 31:06
  And so I am sitting here today with you like feeling pretty
• 31:11
  like drained so I know myself right I'm sitting I've got hundreds of emails like there's lots of things that I need to be getting to um but I know that I'm not going to be able to give it my best because you know my daughter wanted a shower at 3 a.m today and wouldn't go back to sleep until she got it my son waited until I got home from the airport last night at 11 p.m and so and then the dog you know is crying as well because I'm home and he wants to be with me too um
• 31:40
  but like you know your own lived experience when you have been worked too hard or you have pushed things too far you go i can't actually do this i can feel my brain working so i can feel that my best thoughts aren't here why do you think that it's going to be any different for anybody else yeah um and for the people who just
• 32:02
  Like, don't believe it.
• 32:03
  Why do you care so little about humanity is really what I would say, because that's what it ends up coming down to.
• 32:09
  And that's the conversation that I hate that nobody is having about AI right now is it's all about how do we make a number on a spreadsheet more profitable for the shareholders, which, again, socioeconomically are less than the top 1% of the population.
• 32:25
  How do we absolutely wring everybody dry to get as many efficiencies out of an organization to make these people richer, to not do anything with that money, rather than saying, like, what do we need to look at?
• 32:39
  And, you know, I love Amanda, and I think the number that they were giving was you need to do 80 hours of training on AI before you start to see those productivity gains.
• 32:50
  nobody is training their teams properly.
• 32:52
  Well, minimal companies are training their teams on AI right now.
• 32:58
  Properly spending the time doing it, giving the people the space that they need to actually put that amount of training in.
• 33:04
  Like we were trying to work out, okay, how do we get those 80 hours in?
• 33:07
  That's either two weeks of full-time, like where we're gone.
• 33:11
  The office is closed for two weeks.
• 33:14
  Or if we do it over a year, it's two hours every week.
• 33:16
  Now, we,
• 33:17
  that's still a lot of time for people to be finding two hours to do that training.
• 33:22
  And we've got to say, and in a year's time, we'll start to see that benefit.
• 33:27
  Um,
• 33:28
  nothing good happens over time and nothing good happens easily.
• 33:31
  So for the people that, you know, nay say it, like the whole world, there's a whole health economy and wellness economy that is built around rest and peptides and vitamins and saunas and ice baths.
• 33:45
  And like why are we getting into an effing ice bath to try and pep us up to give us more energy, just like give everybody a bit more time to rest and to regenerate themselves?
• 33:55
  Yeah.
• 33:55
  And I think you described it before, you know, today you could keep pushing on, but you know, the quality of your output would not be what it normally is.
• 34:01
  And there's that law of diminishing returns.
• 34:03
  So many of us just keep pushing on.
• 34:07
  Because I think we've bought into the narrative that we have to hustle and grind and like almost earn our rest.
• 34:14
  There's a great Gartner piece of research that tells us that proactive recovery makes us 26% more productive.
• 34:22
  And I share that because a lot of the high performers that I work with think that constant output is a measure of success.
• 34:30
  The capacity to rest means that you can sustain that performance over time.
• 34:35
  You know, so many people I work with achieve great results, but then they collapse days one to three of their annual leave.
• 34:42
  Or, you know, they stick on the weekends or don't feel like they can be the best parent when they get home because they've given everything.
• 34:49
  to work during the day.
• 34:50
  Yeah, totally agree.
• 34:52
  Really true.
• 34:53
  Now, the model that you designed was specifically done in a way to include women, mothers returning from parental leave, but also minority groups, women navigating perimenopause or menstruation issues, carers, women in industries that have historically been built around a life that most women do not actually live.
• 35:15
  What do you see happen when these women, when the model genuinely fits them rather than asking them to fit the model?
• 35:22
  Yeah.
• 35:23
  This is the catch 22 and where somebody that like could hate me could try and pull me unstuck.
• 35:29
  You give these women what they need.
• 35:31
  They give you more in return.
• 35:33
  Yeah.
• 35:35
  Oh, yeah.
• 35:35
  Like it's quite a simple equation.
• 35:39
  I give to you openly and honestly and you give that back to me.
• 35:42
  And, like, it's a genuine exchange, but that's what happens.
• 35:46
  It's a law of reciprocity.
• 35:48
  Yeah.
• 35:48
  Yeah.
• 35:50
  Yeah.
• 35:51
  So well articulated.
• 35:53
  For all my pragmatism, I, you know, am a glass half full person.
• 35:57
  Like I want the world to be good and I, you know, have had a lot of trouble I think with stepping into the word power, but I want to use power for good and power for genuine connection.
• 36:08
  And so like that is what I feel like I get when I give these women what they need.
• 36:14
  Yeah.
• 36:14
  Yeah.
• 36:15
  Brilliant.
• 36:16
  So if an organisation was considering genuinely embedding flexibility rather than just token gestures or policy statements that allude to the fact they offer flexibility, and they were wanting to build it into their day to day, what is the single biggest mistake that you see organisations making when they try to introduce any type of flexible work arrangements without actually structurally changing anything at all?
• 36:42
  I can't answer you in one because I think there's kind of three things.
• 36:45
  I need to start by consulting with the people that are wanting to put that flexibility in place.
• 36:49
  What does it really look like?
• 36:51
  What is the things that people say that they need support around?
• 36:55
  to be able to have flexibility and to make that possible.
• 36:58
  Then you need to be able to say, okay, is there anything that we need to do from a workplace perspective to make that flexibility possible?
• 37:04
  So is the workload still relevant?
• 37:08
  Have we had scope creep on giving people more work than we should have been from a profitability perspective?
• 37:14
  Are we expecting too much of the output?
• 37:16
  Do they have
• 37:18
  all of the tools and technology that they need to make that flexibility possible.
• 37:22
  And then the third thing, and this is the most important part, well, they're all really important, but is the training and the support to be able to actually properly execute it.
• 37:32
  So you can't just say to somebody, even if you do those two things, which great, you're on the right track, but asking someone, giving them all the tools and the technology and then saying, just go.
• 37:42
  Yeah.
• 37:44
  We know habitual change is difficult to do.
• 37:47
  If we're not supporting people to make the best of the opportunity, they're not going to be able to just have enough motivation to make the habit change because they need that thing because we know that that's not how humans work.
• 38:01
  So putting the money into training.
• 38:04
  In Australia, out of there was 67 countries, Australia ranked 40th on the list of countries within the free world to invest in workplace training.
• 38:16
  So we're not training our people.
• 38:19
  We're not investing in their training, but expecting to have these massive outputs just because we dangle a carrot and then, you know, follow them around with the stick.
• 38:29
  We need to be able to kind of work with them on every stage.
• 38:32
  And I think it goes back to that choose your heart.
• 38:35
  Like you can't just say we're going to do it.
• 38:39
  We're going to do the four-day work week.
• 38:40
  We're not going to do anything to prepare for it.
• 38:42
  And look at that, it failed.
• 38:43
  Yeah.
• 38:44
  Yeah.
• 38:45
  I love that you said that you need to start by asking people what they want.
• 38:49
  Like start by, that's often defining what success looks like.
• 38:52
  I've worked with a company recently who had the best of intentions.
• 38:57
  I will say that at the outset.
• 38:58
  So they started a wellbeing initiative and part of this wellbeing initiative was on their rooftop.
• 39:04
  to install saunas and ice baths.
• 39:06
  But lo and behold, the adoption rate was very, very low.
• 39:09
  Funny that people didn't want to jump in the sauna partially naked with their work colleagues or in the ice bath with a work colleague.
• 39:17
  And so they went back retrospectively and asked people why this wasn't being used because all of the research suggested that those things were beneficial from a wellbeing perspective.
• 39:25
  They realised people would have much rather that roof space to be used for just conversation, sitting down and having a chat.
• 39:33
  So they took out the saunas and the ice baths.
• 39:35
  They put lounges and beanbags.
• 39:37
  And guess what?
• 39:38
  The take up rate was huge.
• 39:40
  People used it and it grew and evolved exponentially because they listened to what people really wanted.
• 39:47
  Yeah.
• 39:48
  And like, how much money did you spend on that?
• 39:50
  Oh, I don't want to ask.
• 39:51
  You know, ask, like, because you didn't ask the question in the first place.
• 39:54
  Yeah.
• 39:55
  Yeah.
• 39:55
  And it's like, there's some fascinating research out from Singapore that talks about investing in lead.
• 40:00
  And again, this goes back to your point about, you know, we've got to invest in training.
• 40:04
  Often Deloitte talks about how we need to invest in our human capital.
• 40:09
  And the research tells us that investing in your leader's wellbeing is,
• 40:14
  is 50, I think I want to get this statistic right, I think it's 56 times more effective than an EAP or a stress or a resilience program in terms of your people's wellbeing, but also it drives organisational performance.
• 40:29
  Yeah, we've got an EAP and I would agree with that.
• 40:34
  Like there's times when people will use it.
• 40:37
  It's never used to its full advantage.
• 40:39
  Again, because it's something that's in the background.
• 40:41
  But last year we introduced a health and wellness budget.
• 40:45
  So people can use health and wellness can be,
• 40:49
  it's open to interpretation.
• 40:50
  So for some people it's buying that bougie candle that you've never been able to buy while you're working from home.
• 40:56
  For others it's their Pilates classes, but it's used.
• 41:01
  People are submitting their receipts.
• 41:04
  Everybody like screamed when we announced it last year, like that.
• 41:09
  that is way better than, yeah.
• 41:13
  Spray and pray approach.
• 41:14
  Correct.
• 41:15
  Yeah.
• 41:16
  Well done.
• 41:17
  Love that initiative.
• 41:19
  I'm very grateful for your time.
• 41:20
  I would just like to know as we close up this conversation, I think we could have talked for much longer and I really do appreciate what you've shared from your personal and professional experience.
• 41:30
  I'm going to just get more towards your personal now and,
• 41:34
  how, you know, this podcast is called Spacious Success.
• 41:38
  What is something really, I know you're a pragmatist, but what is something you do at a really practical, pragmatic level to ensure that you can experience sustained peak performance?
• 41:48
  So how do you experience spacious success?
• 41:52
  Two things sounds like one's kind of,
• 41:55
  Stupid, but I actually love my car time and I bought myself an expensive car because I live 60 kilometers away from where we work.
• 42:05
  And so an hour run on the Monash freeway for the Melburnians listening is like a good run for me.
• 42:12
  I love my car.
• 42:14
  I love my car so much.
• 42:17
  I love being able to get in my car at the end of the day, plug my phone in, either make phone calls or have a podcast on and just enjoy the space and...
• 42:27
  like what success has afforded me you know and being able to kind of own that I love it I just love being able to get into my car um and then the other part is like not feeling bad about um watching some trashy TV what's a favorite I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours
• 42:46
  Oh, Outlander.
• 42:47
  I think I would have to say Outlander for life.
• 42:50
  Okay.
• 42:50
  It was like a long one.
• 42:51
  That's respectable.
• 42:52
  Mine is Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
• 42:55
  So, you know, not professional, the ultimate trashy TV.
• 42:59
  I love it.
• 42:59
  But you just lose your brain.
• 43:01
  Don't you?
• 43:01
  I know that there's some research around saying like what a waste of time, but no, because I completely disconnect from my brain and all the thoughts that run through it.
• 43:11
  Yeah, a good friend of mine and brilliant speaker, Dr. Adam Fraser has written a great book called The Third Space, and he talks about how we intentionally have to carve out
• 43:20
  those lines of demarcation between like work mode and home mode.
• 43:23
  So we don't have that identity whiplash that I talked about before.
• 43:28
  The car is fascinating.
• 43:29
  I love that.
• 43:30
  And gosh, I hope that's a business deduction.
• 43:32
  This is not tax advice, but we'll leave that one there.
• 43:36
  That is brilliant.
• 43:36
  And I've never heard anyone talk about that, but that is for a parent.
• 43:40
  That's the ultimate spaciousness.
• 43:43
  I wonder, and I have to add my neuroscience lens here,
• 43:46
  I hear a lot of people say to me, because I often ask in my keynotes, where were you when you came up with your last genius idea, when you solved a complex problem that you'd spent months agonising over?
• 43:56
  And universally, most people say in the shower, when I'm walking, when I'm driving, or when I'm in the train, the tram, travelling.
• 44:04
  And what we know is that when we move, it creates optic flow and optic flows when things move past our eyes and it quietens down part of our brain called the amygdala.
• 44:14
  And that's the emotional hub of the brain.
• 44:15
  So this is why ideas often percolate in those times.
• 44:18
  So I think there would be merit in you having that spaciousness for you to land.
• 44:24
  Obviously, you're in a role that requires some level of creativity and ideation.
• 44:28
  I bet a lot of that time is where those ideas finally germinate.
• 44:33
  Yeah, shower and car, absolutely.
• 44:35
  Yeah, aren't they?
• 44:36
  Oh, Marilla, this has been such a great conversation.
• 44:39
  Can I wholeheartedly say thank you for your time?
• 44:42
  I'm hoping you get some downtime today to recover from what sounds like a very busy period.
• 44:47
  It's been a good busy period.
• 44:49
  It's just been busy nonetheless.
• 44:51
  And thank you, Christy.
• 44:52
  Thank you so much for having me.
• 44:53
  I've really enjoyed this conversation.
• 44:54
  Me too.
• 44:55
  I've really enjoyed it.
• 44:56
  So thank you very much.
• 44:57
  Thank you.