Leslie Perlow, HBS: Helping Women by Helping Men, Improving Lives by Improving Work: Creating Better Work and Better Lives for Everyone
The following are my notes from Perlow's talk at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, March 1, 2013
I went to Disney World last week with the kids, and noticed smart phones everywhere. They were being used to take photos, call home, entertain the kids with games, and to do work. At one point a kid fell while her dad was working on his phone and the mother exclaimed, "Enough work already! We’re on vacation."
The boundary between work and life is increasingly blurred. It's not a woman’s issue, it's everybody’s issue.
Approaches to getting us to help our employees to work better (e.g., flexibility, six sigma, empowerment) usually translates to any extra time getting reinvested in work. Such initiatives struggle because they don’t get people to open up and rally around the change they’re aspiring to.
The two worlds of organizational change and work-family balance can be brought together. Seeking better lives can lead to work re-design which can lead to better work and better lives.
“Enlivening the team” case study she’s been doing for the past 8 years. Approached Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 8 yrs ago. As an ethnographer, they allowed for incredible access to employees and information. She concluded that their problem was not so much the long hours and all the travel, but the unpredictability of those hours. People could not make plans in their lives. She had people report how many hours they worked yesterday and how many they expected to work in the coming day, and they were always off by an average of 1.8 hours.
She decided to try an experiment: Give me a single BCG team and I'll give them a collective goal of scheduling predicable time off. Each team member will get one night “off” starting at 6:00pm for a defined and predictable unit of time each week. Off means no work, no phone, no email, etc. She thought she had identified several characteristics that might make this intervention successful: there was personal interest among the employees for such predictable time off, it was a stretch goal for the organization but it was also doable, it involved collective shared responsibility, it was concrete and measurable.
Perlow also said she'd require the team to have a weekly meeting, at which attendance would be mandatory, for 30 minutes to talk about the calendar for whose night off would take place when, and to review whether people took their night of and if not, what to do differently next time. This meeting should also be used to talk about how they were feeling (e.g., rating selves on smiley to frowny faces scale).
Perlow was not allowed to do this experiment. She was told by manager that it was “too risky” to do on any of his teams.
She spent six months looking for a partner to do this experiment within the company, and finally found one. Doug (a partner) had just been promoted, had three little kids. He couldn’t imagine that he could work at a firm in which he could not take just one night off a week. Mark (the project manager) was a former army guy and resisted. The consultants on the team were Lisa (who wanted more time to work on school applications) and Charlie (who had a friend in Indianapolis where the team was about to travel) and Bob (who was married to a doctor).
Mark’s first night off: He went back to the hotel, went to the exercise room, got back and didn't know what to do with himself so called his wife and kept her on the phone much longer than she expected, they got caught up on things and reconnected, he ordered dinner and watched a show, then went to bed early. He liked it!
Bob resisted and others were worried they were going to lose their nights off due to his resistance (all team members had to agree for it to work). What were Bob’s issues? The team opened up about their work issues, their personal issues, in order to discuss the night off practice.
The project team got to know each other in a very different way; a sense of humanness, connection, and they began bringing this human connectedness into the work, meetings, and a feeling that they were empowered to make change. If they made it possible to take a night off, perhaps it was possible to do other things.
After this first team's success, it was easier to get other teams to try the experiment. Perlow ran the next 10 teams in the Boston office collaboratively with BCG. Now it's a big BCG global rollout initiative. There are now 2000+ teams in 32 offices with 30 facilitators in 14 countries (2005-today).
Giving employees control over work-life: does not make a tough job easy, but does make it better.
Leadership support is really important.
Small do-able goal led to powerful change -- legitimated a conversation -- if a night off is okay, then it's okay to talk about it.
Perlow presented this at a conference Joan Williams & Shelley Correll were running -- Williams and Correll said it was all fine and good, but what about the women?
Perlow responded that both men and women at BCG felt more appreciated, more control over their lives, more satisfied with their jobs, and after the introduction of this night off practice, the gap between men and women's sense of appreciation, control and satisfaction closed.
This type of intervention helped everyone: Helping men is helping women.
I went to Disney World last week with the kids, and noticed smart phones everywhere. They were being used to take photos, call home, entertain the kids with games, and to do work. At one point a kid fell while her dad was working on his phone and the mother exclaimed, "Enough work already! We’re on vacation."
The boundary between work and life is increasingly blurred. It's not a woman’s issue, it's everybody’s issue.
Approaches to getting us to help our employees to work better (e.g., flexibility, six sigma, empowerment) usually translates to any extra time getting reinvested in work. Such initiatives struggle because they don’t get people to open up and rally around the change they’re aspiring to.
The two worlds of organizational change and work-family balance can be brought together. Seeking better lives can lead to work re-design which can lead to better work and better lives.
“Enlivening the team” case study she’s been doing for the past 8 years. Approached Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 8 yrs ago. As an ethnographer, they allowed for incredible access to employees and information. She concluded that their problem was not so much the long hours and all the travel, but the unpredictability of those hours. People could not make plans in their lives. She had people report how many hours they worked yesterday and how many they expected to work in the coming day, and they were always off by an average of 1.8 hours.
She decided to try an experiment: Give me a single BCG team and I'll give them a collective goal of scheduling predicable time off. Each team member will get one night “off” starting at 6:00pm for a defined and predictable unit of time each week. Off means no work, no phone, no email, etc. She thought she had identified several characteristics that might make this intervention successful: there was personal interest among the employees for such predictable time off, it was a stretch goal for the organization but it was also doable, it involved collective shared responsibility, it was concrete and measurable.
Perlow also said she'd require the team to have a weekly meeting, at which attendance would be mandatory, for 30 minutes to talk about the calendar for whose night off would take place when, and to review whether people took their night of and if not, what to do differently next time. This meeting should also be used to talk about how they were feeling (e.g., rating selves on smiley to frowny faces scale).
Perlow was not allowed to do this experiment. She was told by manager that it was “too risky” to do on any of his teams.
She spent six months looking for a partner to do this experiment within the company, and finally found one. Doug (a partner) had just been promoted, had three little kids. He couldn’t imagine that he could work at a firm in which he could not take just one night off a week. Mark (the project manager) was a former army guy and resisted. The consultants on the team were Lisa (who wanted more time to work on school applications) and Charlie (who had a friend in Indianapolis where the team was about to travel) and Bob (who was married to a doctor).
Mark’s first night off: He went back to the hotel, went to the exercise room, got back and didn't know what to do with himself so called his wife and kept her on the phone much longer than she expected, they got caught up on things and reconnected, he ordered dinner and watched a show, then went to bed early. He liked it!
Bob resisted and others were worried they were going to lose their nights off due to his resistance (all team members had to agree for it to work). What were Bob’s issues? The team opened up about their work issues, their personal issues, in order to discuss the night off practice.
The project team got to know each other in a very different way; a sense of humanness, connection, and they began bringing this human connectedness into the work, meetings, and a feeling that they were empowered to make change. If they made it possible to take a night off, perhaps it was possible to do other things.
After this first team's success, it was easier to get other teams to try the experiment. Perlow ran the next 10 teams in the Boston office collaboratively with BCG. Now it's a big BCG global rollout initiative. There are now 2000+ teams in 32 offices with 30 facilitators in 14 countries (2005-today).
Giving employees control over work-life: does not make a tough job easy, but does make it better.
Leadership support is really important.
Small do-able goal led to powerful change -- legitimated a conversation -- if a night off is okay, then it's okay to talk about it.
Perlow presented this at a conference Joan Williams & Shelley Correll were running -- Williams and Correll said it was all fine and good, but what about the women?
Perlow responded that both men and women at BCG felt more appreciated, more control over their lives, more satisfied with their jobs, and after the introduction of this night off practice, the gap between men and women's sense of appreciation, control and satisfaction closed.
This type of intervention helped everyone: Helping men is helping women.
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