This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
I constantly heard of folks telling me how the workplace is this source of constant distraction, whether it’s the fact that people work in open floor plan offices or the constant ping and ding of emails or group chat channels. One of the tools I heard mentioned most often as people complained about the technology that keeps them tethered to the work was a product called Slack. Slack is the world’s largest group chat app, and so I decided to pay Slack a visit. And what I discovered when I went to visit Slack headquarters is that Slack somehow doesn’t suffer from this problem of distraction. I mean, you would think if technology was the source of the problem, if Slack was causing people to get distracted, the people at Slack – who use the product more than anyone on Earth – should be more distracted than anyone, but that’s not what I found. At six o’clock, the office was empty, and on nights and weekends, it turns out people who work at Slack are chastised if they use the product outside of working hours. Well, why is that? It’s because technology is not the root cause of distraction at work.
Fix cultural dysfunction
Distraction at work is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. The real source of the problem is a dysfunctional workplace culture where people can’t talk about this problem of distraction, just as they can’t talk about all kinds of other problems in the workplace. Companies that have a healthy workplace culture portray three attributes. First, they give employees psychological safety, the ability to raise their hand, to raise concerns and say, “Hey, something’s not working out here. Can we talk about this problem?” without fear of retribution, without fear that they might get fired for voicing a concern. The second attribute of these companies with a healthy workplace culture is that they give employees a forum to talk about their concerns. At Slack, they actually use their own technology to give employees this forum. They have these Slack channels, one of them is called Beef Tweets, where any employee can post a complaint, concern, or a comment about the company, and company management will acknowledge they have seen those concerns with — get this — an eye emoji or a check mark emoji. It lets employees know that their concerns are acknowledged and being handled. And then finally, and perhaps the most important attribute of these companies with a healthy workplace culture when it comes to distraction is that management displays what it means to become indistractable. They’re fully present with their employees, as opposed to being on their devices during meetings. They show employees what it means to do focused work by tuning out distraction, turning off all those external triggers, and not working 24/7 and perpetuating this terrible cycle of responsiveness.
So, if we are to do our best work, what we need to acknowledge in corporate America today is that we have to give people the time to do reflective, as opposed to simply reactive, work. Reacting to emails and meetings all day long doesn’t give people the time to have the focus to do their best work. But when we give employees psychological safety, a forum to talk about these issues, as well as displaying for employees what it means to become indistractable, this is where we give people the opportunity to do their best work.
Solve for more than distraction
So, my first job out of college was at the Boston Consulting Group. Boston Consulting Group is a leading strategy consulting firm, and it was known for its very high employee turnover when I was at the company. A few years after I left Boston Consulting Group, a researcher from the Harvard Business School by the name of Leslie Perlow decided to do a project with the Boston Consulting Group. And she wanted to see what would happen if she gave one case team of just eight people the opportunity to take one night off per week. She called it “predictable time off.” And what she heard from company management was that this could not work, that the company was dependent on a constantly connected workforce, that it was distributed all over the world, and that they were in the client services business, and they always had to be ready to help their clients at all times of day or night. So, Dr. Perlow said, “Well, what if we acknowledge that this was a case from one of our clients, right? We’re in the strategy business. What if one of our clients said, ‘We want to give this to our employees. We want to give them one night off per week.’ ” And she said, “Let’s talk about this. What would it take to make that happen?” She challenged one case team of just eight people to have a weekly meeting to solve this problem together. And what she discovered was that this problem was actually very solvable. When people had the challenge of giving each other one night off per week, along with an environment where they felt psychologically safe to talk about the issues they were having and find new solutions, not only did they quickly solve this problem of giving one night off per week to everyone on the team, they actually uncovered all kinds of other problems in the organization. They were now free to talk about all the other skeletons in the closet, about how they could reduce employee churn, how they could improve customer service, all of the ways they could improve the way the company functioned because finally, they had a way to talk about the problem of distraction, as well as all these other problems.
So, what Dr. Perlow discovered in her research with the Boston Consulting Group is that by starting with a small case team just of eight people and having them work on this problem together in regular intervals, by giving them psychological safety and a forum to discuss this problem, not only did they solve this problem of constant distraction, this horrible cycle of responsiveness that so many of us work in, but they also improved the business in many other realms. And today, the Boston Consulting Group is ranked as one of America’s best places to work.