First, let me apologize to those of you who tried to read this story I did for Gannett/USAToday in an earlier blog post. No matter what I tried the post ran together, refusing to mark paragraphs, bullets, etc. Well, today is a new day, so I'm trying this again.....
Do you take your smartphone to bed because you claim to use
it as a nightlight? Or you say it’s the only alarm clock you have? Or you don’t
want to miss a critical text?
Here’s the problem with that thinking: Now that the phone is
only an arm’s reach away, it’s easy to check a few emails, perhaps sending off
a few responses so you have one less thing to do tomorrow.
You’ve just stepped onto a very slippery slope that will
make it difficult not to be connected 24/7. You’ve become one of those millions
of workers who fire off emails at midnight, or reach for the smartphone before
your first cup of coffee every morning.
You may claim that you have to work this way because your
job – or your employer – demands it. But Leslie A. Perlow finds that this drive
to stay connected all the time is really our own fault, and not something that
can be blamed on just an employer or a job.
Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at
Harvard Business School and decided to conduct some research into our need to
be “on” 24/7 and learn if such a habit could be broken.
Using professional services firm The Boston Consulting Group
(BCG) as a sort of guinea pig, she asked a team of high-powered,
always-connected consultants to see if they could disconnect more and actually
improve their performance and job happiness.
Perlow unveils the results in “Sleeping With Your
Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way Your Work,” (Harvard
Business Review, $27). She found that
the team not only found ways to turn off one night a week, they became closer
as a team, more satisfied with their jobs and produced better company results.
The company saw a clear improvement in recruitment, retention and engagement,
and the process spread throughout the organization, she says.
Perlow says she chose the consultants because they were an
extreme example of being connected, often putting in long work days and staying
connected even through vacations or other time off. But by committing as a team
to “predictable time off” for each person, they communicated more and supported
the efforts of disconnecting by everyone – and held one another accountable for
slip-ups (such sending emails during designated time-off periods).
“The problem when someone is connected 24/7 is that it sets
a norm for other members of the team,” she says. “They start to feel that to be
responsive, they have to respond late at night to emails. It’s not even urgent,
but it just matriculates all this bad behavior.”
In other words, the biggest enemy to work/life balance
is…us.
“Even doctors – who do life-saving work – have times when
they are off and times when they are on-call,” she says. “So, why don’t the
rest of us?”
The process of predictable time off will work only if all
the team members agree to it, she says. If a team wants to try it, she gives a
list of suggestions in her book:
- Be honest. Tell other team members your hopes and fears.
- Don’t be stubborn. Maybe the collective goal of the group – having an afternoon off every two weeks – doesn’t meet your top priority. Still, don’t let that stop the process. Look for goals everyone can meet that seem doable, but also are a stretch. For the BCG team, for example, the job’s unpredictable nature of never knowing there might be a night off was solved by giving everyone a certain night off. Just having that predictability was valuable for everyone, she says.
- Meet regularly. It’s critical that a team shares on a regular basis what is happening in their lives. This helps build trust and a willingness to support one another. If things get off track with a team member, don’t jump to conclusions or judgments but try to understand what’s going on by asking questions.
- Hold one another accountable. While the agreement may be entered into with the best of intentions by team members, it can be easy to slip back into old patterns when work becomes stressful. That’s when it’s the most important, however, to remind one another to take a step back and realize that the work will get done better if the balance is maintained. Perlow says that her research has found that people with unpredictable work often try to gain predictability by becoming more connected – but that only leads to more unpredictability.
“The key to remember is that we’re
often our own worst enemy,” Perlow says. “You do have a choice in changing
things.”