Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture
When Leslie Perlow began her research at the Boston Consulting Group, she was well aware of the firm’s round-the-clock reputation. Her interviews with BCG staff soon revealed why the company struggled with an employee retention problem.8 Lack of control over their schedules and the expectation that they would be constantly connected were major reasons why people left the firm.
To tackle the issue, Perlow came up with a simple proposition: If everyone who worked at BCG hated the always-on lifestyle, why not try to give consultants at least a “single predictable night off a week”? This would give people time away from phone calls and email notifications and allow them to make plans without the fear of being pulled back into work.
Perlow ran the idea by George Martin, the managing partner of the Boston office, who promptly told her to keep her hands off his teams. However, perhaps in an attempt to dismiss the curious researcher, he gave her permission to “wander around the office” and look for “another partner who might be willing.” Perlow finally found a young partner named Doug who had two small children at home and a third on the way. Doug was struggling to balance his own work life and agreed to let his team serve as the guinea pigs in Perlow’s experiment. Starting with Doug and the people he managed, Perlow proposed the challenge and began studying how the team went about finding a way to let everyone unplug.
First, Perlow confirmed that one night off per week was a universally desired goal for everyone on the team. After hearing a resounding yes, the team was left to figure out exactly how they would structure their workdays to achieve the goal. The team met regularly to discuss roadblocks that were preventing them from achieving the “one night off” mission and came up with new practices they’d need to implement to make it happen.
For years, BCG consultants had heard countless reasons why they had to be accessible at all hours. “We’re in the service business,” “We work across time zones,” and “What if a client needs us?” were common responses that cut off attempts to find better ways of working. However, once they had an opportunity to openly discuss the problem, Doug’s team discovered there were many simple solutions.
A common workplace dilemma that was often dismissed as “the way things had to be” could be solved if people had a safe space to talk about the issue, without fear of being labeled as “lazy” for wanting to turn off their phones and computers for a few hours.
To Perlow’s surprise, these meetings yielded far greater benefits than she expected, addressing topics well beyond disconnecting from technology. The meetings to discuss predictable time off “made it okay for people to speak openly,” which, in Perlow’s words, “was a big deal.”
Team members found themselves questioning other company norms. Having a place to ask, “Why do things have to be this way?” gave them a forum to generate new ideas. “There was no taboo,” one consultant said. “You could talk about anything.” The senior members of the team “did not always agree, but it was okay to bring anything up.”
What had started as a discussion about disconnecting became a forum for open dialogue.
Managers also found a venue to explain their larger objectives and strategy—topics that had previously been brushed aside when things got busy. With a clearer view of how their work contributed to a larger vision, team members felt more empowered and able to affect the outcome of their projects. As ideas flowed, meetings became natural opportunities to praise team members for their contributions, raise concerns, and voice issues that previously could not be addressed elsewhere.
Embracing Perlow’s challenge stopped the cycle of responsiveness. Rather than blaming the technology for their problems, the teams reflected on the reasons behind its overuse. The toxic always-on culture was no longer accepted as the way things had to be but was seen as another challenge that could be overcome once people were allowed to address it openly.
What began as a challenge to find a way to let members of one team disconnect one night per week profoundly changed the working culture at BCG. Once the epitome of the sort of workplace environment associated with higher rates of depression, as identified in Stansfeld and Candy’s study, BCG began a company-wide transformation.
Today, teams throughout the firm (including George Martin’s Boston office) have adopted the practice of conducting regular meetings to ensure everyone has time to disconnect. More important, providing a safe place for open dialogue about all sorts of issues increased employees’ sense of control and turned out to be an unexpected way of improving job satisfaction and staff retention. When team members were given what they needed to flourish, they found ways to address the real problems that had been holding them, and their company, back.
Companies consistently confuse the disease of bad culture with symptoms like tech overuse and high employee turnover.
The problem Perlow discovered at BCG plagues organizations of every size and in every industry. Google recently set out to understand the drivers of employee retention and the quality of team outcomes. The search giant announced the results of a two-year study to understand, once and for all, the answer to the question “What makes a Google team effective?”
Heading into the study, the research team was fairly confident of what they would find: that teams are most effective when they are composed of great people. As Julia Rozovsky, a researcher on the project, writes,
Take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right? We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.
The researchers found five key dynamics that set successful teams apart. The first four were dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work. However, the fifth dynamic was without doubt the most important and actually underpinned the other four. It was something called psychological safety. Rozovsky explains,
Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.
The term “psychological safety” was coined by Amy Edmondson, an organizational behavioral scientist at Harvard. In her TEDx talk, Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” Speaking up sounds easy, but if you don’t feel psychological safety you’ll keep your concerns and ideas to yourself.
Rozovsky continues,
Turns out, we’re all reluctant to engage in behaviors that could negatively influence how others perceive our competence, awareness, and positivity. Although this kind of self-protection is a natural strategy in the workplace, it is detrimental to effective teamwork. On the flip side, the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.
Psychological safety is the antidote to the depression-inducing work environments Stansfeld and Candy found in their study. It’s also the magic ingredient the teams at BCG found when they began regular meetings to address the challenge of giving employees predictable time off.
Knowing that your voice matters and that you’re not stuck in an uncaring, unchangeable machine has a positive impact on well-being.
How does a team—or a company, for that matter—create psychological safety? Edmondson provides a three-step answer in her talk:
• Step 1: “Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.” Because the future is uncertain, emphasize that “we’ve got to have everyone’s brains and voices in the game.”
• Step 2: “Acknowledge your own fallibility.” Managers need to let people know that nobody has all the answers—we’re in this together.
• Step 3: Finally, leaders must “model curiosity and ask lots of questions.”
Edmondson insists that organizations—particularly those operating in conditions of high uncertainty and interdependence among team members—need to also have high levels of motivation and psychological safety, a state she calls the “learning zone.”
It’s in the learning zone that teams perform at their best and it’s where they can air concerns without fear of being attacked or fired. It’s where they can solve problems, like that of tech overuse and distraction, without being judged as unwilling to carry their share. It’s where they can enjoy a company culture that frees them from the nagging internal triggers brought on when they feel a lack of control.
Only when companies give employees a psychologically safe place to air concerns and solve problems together can they solve some of their biggest workplace challenges. Creating an environment where employees can do their best without distraction puts the quality of the organization’s culture to the test. In the next chapter, we’ll learn from companies that pass with flying colors.
REMEMBER THIS
• Don’t suffer in silence. A workplace where people can’t talk about technology overuse is also one where people keep other important issues (and insights) to themselves.
• Knowing that your voice matters is essential. Teams that foster psychological safety and facilitate regular open discussions about concerns not only have fewer problems with distraction but also have happier employees and customers.
8 My first job out of college was at BCG, well before Perlow’s work at the company. I did not stay at the firm for long.