The Boston Consulting Group – Turning Off and Speaking Up for Better Work and Better Life (Practices)

The professional services industry is characterized by a 24/7 on-call culture, in which the ethic of being “always on” is seen as necessary for success in the global marketplace. Beginning in 2005, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) took part in a project led by Leslie Perlow of the Harvard Business School to challenge the notion that improving individuals’ work-life balance was at odds with maximizing the firm’s productivity. Lessons from hundreds of project teams have revealed an approach to teamwork that not only offers sustainability for team members, but, has also enabled superior work output. What started as an experiment to offer predicable units of downtime every week (Predictable Time Off), has now become a holistic program that promotes a new way of working focusing on delivering high value work, improving individual learning, and increasing effectiveness and efficiency of a team’s day to day work all while improving work-life balance.