Issue 016: Highlights, The Best of Work Life Reporter Live

We started The Work Life Reporter Live with a simple idea. Sit down with people who run people, ask them the questions a newsletter doesn't have room for, and let them answer properly.

We've been lucky with the guests. Katherine Berman on why culture beats the bigger offer. Venessa Okonkwo on feedback as a habit. Helen Dighton and Rob Baker on hiring for jobs that don't exist yet. Sally Jameson, Jeremy Reeves and more besides. Every one of them gave their time to a show that's still finding its feet.

If you caught them live, you know. If you didn't, this is the easy way in. On Thursday we're premiering a highlight reel of the best moments, short enough to watch between meetings, and the details are at the bottom of this issue. The live show is on a short pause and returns with new guests soon.

Welcome to the sixteenth issue of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

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Katherine Berman, Head of People Experience at Snyk, came on in Episode 05 with the argument behind "The Human Moat": culture is slower and harder to build than a bigger offer, and a lot more durable. In AI, where companies compete hard on pay, that's an uncomfortable thing to hear and a useful one.

She also took on a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it. What does trust look like on the people side of a company whose product is trust in AI?

Venessa Okonkwo, Head of People and Culture at Dock & Bay, opened her HR Technologies UK keynote with a line she then spent the episode backing up: "Culture isn't a nice to have, it's a commercial driver." Her episode, "The Culture Gap," was about the distance between the culture leaders say they have and the one their people actually live inside.

At Dock & Bay that means values built into 360 feedback, performance reviews and the competency framework, and feedback treated as a habit and not an annual event. Her team's engagement score sits at 86%.

There's no job board for what Paragraf needs. The company is scaling graphene electronics from lab to mass production on the back of a $55 million Series C, and the people it needs to hire largely don't exist yet. Helen Dighton, HR Director, and Rob Baker, Talent Development Lead, joined Episode 11, "The Talent Pipeline That Doesn't Exist Yet," to walk through building a people function and a talent pipeline from scratch.

It was our first double guest episode, and more than 116 people watched live.

Sally Jameson, Head of People at L3 Group, set up the whole conversation with a line from her own LinkedIn: "Mental health is about so much more than time off work." Episode 10, "Beyond the Duvet Day," looked at what real support looks like across a workforce spread over multiple sites, shifts and a lot of physical work.

Her sharpest point was about managers. Support for employees only goes so far if the person managing them doesn't know what to do when someone's struggling.

Jeremy Reeves is Chief Creative and Culture Officer at Creative Consortium and Co-Founder of GHOST Signal. Episode 12, "The Interior Job," asked what leading culture change demands of the leader, and his answer was: "The central responsibility of a leader is to be a non-anxious presence in an anxious system."

He was just as direct about the cost: "I've done a lot of apologizing in front of my team." It's a conversation about leadership as convening, not commanding, and why a quiet room doesn't always mean agreement.

And many more. Dr Gurnak Singh Dosanjh, Alisa Latty-Alleyne, Marisha Drayton, Jeya Sivans, Stephanie Hills, Isobel Elton and Dr Charlotte Aldred have all been on the show too, and more guests are on the way.

The UK Workplace Happiness Report 2026 from The Happiness Index, which we went through in Issue 015, put the UK's feedback frequency score at 5.7 against 6.4 globally. One employee comment in the report says the rest: "Feedback once a year is hardly encouraging is it!?"

Frequency is the part you can count. The part nobody counts is what happens after someone speaks up, and our guests kept circling it.

Venessa built feedback into 360s, performance reviews and the competency framework at Dock & Bay, so it's part of how work gets judged and not a yearly event. Jeremy asks why someone isn't answering before he assumes they won't, because the quiet is often fear and not resistance. And Sally's point about managers matters here too. Ask a manager to run those conversations with no training and no support, and you'll get exactly the feedback culture you'd expect. Here's a loop to try before your next round of one to ones.

Ethos One is our parent company. It exists for the gap between what people in a company are feeling and what leadership thinks is happening, a continuous read instead of an annual guess.

Our usual 14 days of free access is now 20 days, exclusively for Work Life Reporter subscribers. If the loop above is something you'd like to see in real numbers, it's a decent place to start. Claim your 20 days → ethosone.ai

And that's a wrap for Issue 016. This one was a bit different, no new guest and no new companies, just the best of the show so far. Hit reply and tell us which moment stuck with you most.

Follow The Work Life Reporter on LinkedIn for what we share between issues. Visit theworklifereporter.com for more.

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PPS. Got a guest you'd like to see on the show? Reply with their name.