Indistractable

by Nir Eyal;

  The second factor that correlates with workplace depression is an environment with an “effort-reward imbalance,” in which workers don’t see much return for their hard work, be it through increased pay or recognition. At the heart of both job strain and effort-reward imbalance, according to Stansfeld, is a lack of control.

  Depression costs the US economy over $51 billion annually in absenteeism, according to Mental Health America, but that number doesn’t even scratch the surface of the lost potential of millions of Americans who suffer at work without a medical diagnosis. Furthermore, it doesn’t account for the mild depression-like symptoms caused by unhealthy work environments that lead to unwanted consequences, such as distraction. Because we turn to our devices to escape discomfort, we often reach for our tech tools to feel better when we experience a lack of control. Checking email or chiming in on a group-chat thread provides the feeling of being productive, regardless of whether our actions are actually making things better.

  Technology is not the root cause of distraction at work. The problem goes much deeper.

  Leslie Perlow, a consultant turned professor at Harvard Business School, led an extensive four-year study that she documented in her book Sleeping with Your Smartphone. In the book, she writes of managers at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a leading strategy consulting firm, who perpetuated the high expectations and low-control work culture associated with mental illness.

  For example, Perlow describes a project led by two partners at the firm with opposing work styles. One of them was an early riser, while the other was a night owl. Like parents embroiled in a nasty divorce, the two were rarely in the same room and would communicate through their team. A consultant on the team recalls,

  The more junior partner was continually asking us to expand and add things, so we would end up with forty- to sixty-page slide decks for the weekly meetings. The senior partner would wonder why we were all in the red zone [working more than sixty-five hours per week] . . . One partner was up late and would send us changes at 11 pm, the other was up early sending emails at 6 am . . . We were getting it on both ends.

  The anecdote may be unique, but the problems it highlights are not. Employees doing their duty and trying to please their managers often feel unable to change the way things function. As a consultant Perlow interviewed said, “Partners like hearing ‘yes,’ more than they like hearing ‘no,’ and I’m trying to give them what they want.”

  If a manager sent an email at an hour traditionally reserved for one’s family or sleep, it would be read and replied to. If a manager wanted a meeting to discuss whatever they felt needed discussing, despite other pressing matters, the team would drop everything and attend the meeting. If a manager felt the team needed to work late (irrespective of employees’ existing personal plans), well, you can guess what happened.

  The addition of technology to this corrosive culture made things worse. Perlow describes how the pressure employees feel to be constantly on-call gets amplified in what she calls the “cycle of responsiveness.” She writes, “The pressure to be on usually stems from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones.” As a result, employees “begin adjusting to these demands—adapting the technology they use, altering their daily schedules, the way they work, even the way they live their lives and interact with their families and friends—to be better able to meet the increased demands on their time.”

  Increased accessibility comes at a high price. Answering emails during your child’s soccer game trains colleagues to expect quick responses during times that were previously off-limits; as a result, requests from the office mutate personal or family time into work time.

  More requests mean more pressure to respond, as email inboxes overflow and Slack messages continue to pour in. Soon, a culture of always-on responsiveness becomes the office norm—exactly as it did at BCG.

  While technology perpetuates a vicious “cycle of responsiveness,” its cause is a dysfunctional culture. (Source: Inspired by Leslie Perlow book, Sleeping With Your Cell Phone)

  The cycle of responsiveness is caused by a cascade of consequences. Technology such as the mobile phone and Slack may perpetuate the cycle, but the technology itself isn’t the source of the problem; rather, overuse is a symptom.

  Dysfunctional work culture is the real culprit.

  Once Perlow realized the source of the problem, she helped the company change its toxic culture. In the process, she revealed that if a company was unable to address an issue like technology overuse, it was likely also concealing all sorts of deeper problems. In the following chapters in this section, I’ll expand on what Perlow did to help BCG and what you can do to change the culture of distraction at your workplace.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Jobs where employees encounter high expectations and low control have been shown to lead to symptoms of depression.

  •Depression-like symptoms are painful. When people feel bad, they use distractions to avoid their pain and regain a sense of control.

  •Tech overuse at work is a symptom of a dysfunctional company culture.

  •More tech use makes the underlying problems worse, perpetuating a “cycle of responsiveness.”

  Chapter 27

  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.

  8My 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.

  Chapter 28

  The Indistractable Workplace

  If there’s one technology that embodies the unreasonable demands of the always-on work culture that pervades so many companies today, it’s Slack. The group-chat app can make users feel tethered to their devices, often at the expense of doing more important tasks.

  Over ten million people log on to Slack every day. The platform’s employees, of course, use Slack—they use it a lot. And if distraction is caused by technology, then they should surely suffer the consequences. Surprisingly, according to media reports and Slack employees I spoke with, the company doesn’t have that problem.

  If you were to walk around Slack’s company headquarters in San Francisco, you’d notice a peculiar slogan on the hallway walls. White letters on a bright pink background blare, “Work hard and go home.” It’s not the kind of motto you’d expect to see at a Silicon Valley company that makes the very tool many people say keeps them at work, even after they’ve gone home.

  However, at Slack, people know when to log off. According to a 2015 article in Inc. magazine that named Slack its Company of the Year, the slogan is more than just talk. By 6:30 pm, “Slack’s
offices have pretty much cleared out.” And according to the article, “That’s how [Slack CEO] Butterfield wants it.”

  Surely, Slack employees log back in when they get home, right? Wrong. In fact, they are discouraged from using Slack after they’ve left. According to Amir Shevat, Slack’s former director of developer relations, people there understand the norm is to know when to disconnect. “It’s not polite to send direct messages after hours or during weekends,” he adds.

  Slack’s corporate culture is an example of a work environment that hasn’t succumbed to the maddening cycle of responsiveness endemic to so many organizations today.

  To facilitate focus, Slack’s culture goes even deeper than its slogans. Slack management leads by example to encourage employees to take time to disconnect. In an interview with OpenView Labs, Bill Macaitis, who served as Slack’s chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer, states, “You need to have uninterrupted work time . . . This is why—whether I’m dealing with Slack or email—I always block off time to go in and check messages and then return to uninterrupted work.” The fact that someone as senior as Macaitis makes uninterrupted work a priority and goes as far as scheduling time for email and Slack sends a profound message that exemplifies the principle of “making time for traction” we covered in part two.

  Shevat echoes Macaitis’s sentiment. At Slack, he said, “It’s okay to be offline.” He is religious about giving his coworkers his complete attention when meeting in person. “When I give someone my time, I’m focused 100 percent and never open a phone during a meeting. That is super important for me.” By taking steps to remove the buzzes and rings typical of modern meetings, he practices the idea of “hacking back external triggers” we discussed in part three.