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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IDEA Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Today I'm talking with

Gareth Jones co-author with Rob Gaffey of the new book, Why Should Anyone Work Here

Garet thank you so much for talking with us today.

My pleasure.

So I wanted to start talking a little bit about employee engagement and organizational culture,

which is not really what the book is about, but a lot of people have been talking about those two topics lately.

And I thought since you've written a book that addresses some of the same issues,

but isn't really about engagement or strictly speaking organizational culture.

As such, I thought we could just start with what do you think is sort of wrong or limited with

the way that we're talking about those topics now currently?

Well, I have slightly different we're talking about those topics now currently.

Well, I have slightly different views on each of those topics, by the way.

If we take engagement first, engagement has been the kind of buzzword of HR departments for the last at least the last 10 years.

Guess what? Engagement levels have remained stubbornly low, viewed in a global perspective.

Most people are deeply unengaged with their work.

That's a kind of quite depressing thought,

given that whether you like it or not, you'll spend the bulk of your adult waking life at work.

...