This is How to Repair a Toxic Work Culture

Note: This essay is adapted from Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal.

When Harvard’s Leslie Perlow began to study The Boston Consulting Group, she was well aware of the firm’s round-the-clock reputation. After conducting interviews with BCG’s staff, Perlow found that this reputation was coming at a major cost.

Employees were leaving the elite consulting firm, in part because they lacked control over their schedules. To address the issue, Perlow offered 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 BCG’s Boston office. He told her to keep her hands off his team. He gave her permission to “wander around the office” and look for “another partner who might be willing.”

Perlow 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 guinea pigs in Perlow’s experiment. Starting with Doug and the people he managed…