7 Work Habit

On the Job by Anita Bruzzese How to Break the 24/7 Work Habit 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 its the only alarm clock you have? Or you dont want to miss a critical text? Heres the problem with that thinking: Now that the phone is only an arms reach away, its easy to check a few emails, perhaps sending off a few responses so you have one less thing to do tomorrow. Youve just stepped onto a very slippery slope that will make it difficult not to be connected 24/7. Youve 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. Its not even urgent, but it just matriculates all this bad behavior. In other words, the biggest enemy to work/life balance isus. Even doctors who do life-saving work have times when they are off and times when they are on-call, she says. So, why dont 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. Dont be stubborn. Maybe the collective goal of the group having an afternoon off every two weeks doesnt meet your top priority. Still, dont 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 jobs 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. Its 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, dont jump to conclusions or judgments but try to understand whats 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. Thats when its 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 were often our own worst enemy, Perlow says. You do have a choice in changing things.