By David Creelman

Harvard’s Leslie Perlow has spent years researching the human side of business issues. Sleeping with Your Smartphone, her most important work to date, shares the story of how a low-key ethnographic research project turned into a high-profile global program for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG); a program that enhanced the lives of consultants and simultaneously improved business effectiveness. 

Creelman: Your start by studying work-life balance. It’s not a new issue. Why did you pursue it?
Perlow: We have endless policies to address work-life tensions and yet the problems persist. Why? When policies are fundamentally at odds with the culture the problem doesn’t get solved. My research at BCG focused on whether the culture itself could be changed. 

When I started Sleeping with your Smartphone I was excited by the ideas about work-life balance. Yet as I read further, I realized that you were onto something much bigger than that. Your work revealed a way to change culture. You warn people, however, not to jump ahead to the section on culture change before reading the case study on getting control of work-life. Why is that?
The case brings to life what’s involved. The changes I suggest are based around two straightforward techniques. However, if you do not understand the context and how these techniques evolved to address a difficult problem then you will not really understand what’s entailed in implementing them. They are simple – that is the whole idea – but it is important to understand why you’re doing what you are doing in order to do it right. It is not enough to just go through the motions. 

So let’s go to the start and talk about the situation at BCG.
I went in as an academic ethnographer who wanted to understand how people were spending their time and if it had to be that way. I soon recognized that the problem for people was much more about the unpredictability of their work hours than the travel or long hours. I proposed an experiment to see if they could work together to “turn off” one night a week. 

This sounds like the typical work-life policy you mentioned at the start of the interview—well-intentioned but at odds with the culture and nature of the work.
The difference is that instead of individuals being left on their own to make change, team members worked together to change the way they worked. And when they did so, we not only found they could turn off, we found that in the process they became more efficient and effective – both individuals and the team benefited. 

Tell me about the change process.
The first thing you need is a collective goal of personal interest. In BCG’s case it was finding a way to give people predictable time off without compromising the very demanding work they do for clients. The second thing is having a structured dialogue so that the team can figure out how to achieve this collective goal, and engage more generally in conversations about the work process itself.

What we are trying to create is open dialogue, but you can’t mandate that. What you can do though is create the space for people to have the dialogue and provide some structure in the form of questions to engage in. Teams agreed to talk once a week about the goal of achieving predictable time off. The questions were, “Have you achieved the goal and if not why not?” “Looking ahead, how will we achieve the goal next week?” In addition, they were asked to discuss the work process itself: “How are you feeling about this? Are we delivering to our clients? Are you learning and developing? And, is this sustainable?”

The team might look ahead and see someone had a big deliverable coming up on Thursday which would interfere with their goal of having Wednesday as a predictable night off. In the past the person would simply have sacrificed their personal life and worked all Wednesday night; now they would surface the issue in advance and the team worked together to see what they might do differently to make the time off possible.

What were the results?
The original experiment was conducted in the Boston office, strictly as a research project, but it was so successful it became a global initiative, directed by BCG and staffed entirely by BCG employees. BCG has invested substantial resources, with 25 full time equivalents currently facilitating the project, because it is creating a genuine win-win. We might expect that the win-win is that employees are happier leading to better retention; but it is bigger than that. The dialogues lead to improvements in the work process itself. In fact, the process improvements make this worth doing on its own, and the benefits to individuals provide a lever to make that change happen. 

How is BCG working the process now that it has gone global?
The facilitators do weekly check-ins, observe some meetings, and remind people to follow through on the process. The facilitators are not HR people, they are high performers who have been taken out of client facing work for three to six months. They rotate people in and out of the facilitation role because it is so useful for leadership development. 

I want to stress that any team leader can make this happen with their own team. You do not need backing by the CEO. You do not need extra resources. The only limitation is that you cannot do it alone; it is about changing core interdependencies and interaction patterns, so the whole team has to be involved. The real synergy comes from a team working together to achieve a collective goal and engage in structured dialogue.

David Creelman writes and speaks on human capital management (www.creelmanresearch.com). For work on boards and HR, and investors and HR, see www.creelmanlambert.com.