Ever reached the end of the work day and thought, "Well I guess that's as good as it gets"? It's time to snap out of that; and the first step to making work suck less is to talk about it, writes Scott Spark.

I don't know about you, but if I make the slightest attempt to discuss work at home, I'm met with a side glare so sour that I'm paralysed mid-sentence. Much like a toilet-trained mutt, I've learned that home is no place to unload.

And here's another reason I suspect we've all stopped discussing work: many of us have reached the end of our day, reflected wearily and sighed, "Well, I guess that's as good as it gets."

But resignation is no way to live. And the best chance of making our workplaces fairer and friendlier is to talk about work a whole lot more.

For the past few months I've been exploring how we can improve our lives at work for a new six-part series called WorkLife. And no matter what stage you're at - whether you're applying for a new job or happily established where you are - there's plenty we can all do to make work suck less.

Making work "suck less" is what Laszlo Bock's all about. He's responsible for attracting and keeping staff at the company that's often singled out as the best place to work (you guessed it, Google). He recently had an epiphany: we spend more time working than doing anything else and everyone deserves meaningful work.

The first step to achieving this is hiring the right people. A crucial bit of advice here is to not trust your gut because all kinds of unconscious bias leads you astray. Instead, hire by committee and ensure that whoever does the interview doesn't make the final decision. This keeps standards high and avoids people being hired just to serve personal needs.

Another thing that helps immensely is standardising job interviews - ask the same thing of all applicants and apply the same evaluation methods to everyone. And during interviews, ditch brainteasers like "how many golf balls would fit inside a 747?" They tell you nothing about how someone will perform in a job. Also meaningless - where people went to school and what grades they achieved.

Not only will this help us appoint the best people, it'll also make our workplaces more diverse. Currently, there's a shocking sameness - devoid of merit - in many of our workplaces, and it's leading to a bunch of poor decisions. A lot of this homogeneity happens at the recruitment stage. In 2007, researchers at Australian National University sent out 4000 applications to entry-level jobs to test ethnic discrimination in the local labour market. The fake applicants were comparable in every way except for their ethnicity.

The study found that to get as many interviews as an Anglo-Saxon applicant, an Italian person must submit 12 per cent more applications, an Indigenous person must submit 35 per cent more, a Middle Eastern person 64 per cent more, and a Chinese person 68 per cent more. This sort of discrimination leads to the kind of situation that Diversity Council Australia found, where Australian businesses expanding into Asia are more likely to call on white expatriates who've lived in Asia, than Australians with Asian cultural heritage for their executive roles.

As for job-seekers, a big personal lesson for me from all these conversations is to be gutsy. Don't wait till you're 100 per cent ready for a role; if something excites you, go for it when you're 70 per cent. You'll want it more and stay satisfied longer. And, when you get to the interview stage, ask plenty of questions about what the organisation is trying to achieve. It'll help you avoid nasty surprises if you end up scoring the job.

In fact, starting a new job is the perfect time to think about your next pay rise, according to psychiatrist Dr Mark Goulston, a former FBI hostage-negotiation trainer who consults to business leaders. He recommends getting your boss to spell out what success in your role looks like early on.

"It's not what you tell your boss, it's what you get your boss to tell you that would cause them to think well of you," he says. And it makes a great deal of sense, even if it feels a little more forthright than what you're used to.

There are plenty of other lessons in the series and they almost always come back to this: workplaces will only change when we do. And change will only happen when there's more open conversation, greater transparency and a determination to make work somewhere we all want to be. Some of these conversations will be difficult and that makes them even more necessary.

It's the kind of social movement that'll reduce stress and injuries, help parents juggle home and work commitments more flexibly, provide a greater sense of personal agency and ultimately lead to smarter decisions. After all, improving our lives at work should be a goal we can all agree on.

Scott Spark presents WorkLife and is ABC RN's audience engagement manager.