Sleeping with Your Smartphone

How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work

Leslie A. Perlow

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781422144046
• eBook ISBN: 9781422144060
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Does it have to be this way? Can’t resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the office—but at what cost?In Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work.The good news is that this doesn’t require a grand organizational makeover or buy-in from the CEO. All it takes is collaboration between you and your team—working together and making small, doable changes.What started as an experiment with a six-person team at The Boston Consulting Group—one of the world’s elite management consulting firms—triggered a global initiative that eventually spanned more than nine hundred BCG teams in thirty countries across five continents. These teams confronted their nonstop workweeks and changed the way they worked, becoming more efficient and effective.The result? Employees were more satisfied with their work-life balance and with their work in general. And the firm was better able to recruit and retain employees. Clients also benefited—often in unexpected ways.In this engaging book, Perlow takes you inside BCG to witness the challenges and benefits of disconnecting. She provides a step-by-step guide to introducing change on your team—by establishing a collective goal, encouraging open dialogue, ensuring leadership support—and then spreading change to the rest of your firm.If you and your colleagues are grappling with the "always on” problem, it’s time to disconnect—and start reading.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Does It Have to Be This Way?
• Part I: HOW A TEAM TURNS OFF
• 1. The Experiment
• 2. The Winning Formula
• Part II: THE MAGIC OF THE PROCESS
• 3. Speaking Openly
• 4. Passion and Action
• 5. Experimenting with Change—Together
• 6. Small Steps, Big Results
• Part III: GETTING STARTED ON YOUR TEAM
• 7. The Team Leader’s Crucial Role
• 8. Defining the Team and the Goal
• 9. The First Meeting and Beyond
• Part IV: FROM TEAM TO ORGANIZATION
• 10. A Firmwide Initiative
• 11. Introducing Facilitators
• 12. Reimagining Work
• Appendix: About the Research
• Glossary: Consulting Terminology
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author