Executive Summary

At home and at work, busy culture worsens the problems it promises to solve. We think that the busier we are, the bigger impact well be able to make. But in reality, busy culture destroys productivity, while pulling us away from our families and coworkers alike. What can leaders do to dismantle a toxic culture of busyness? In this piece, the author shares three strategies to encourage healthier work-life boundaries, including instituting financial incentives for disconnecting from work, modeling focus on your primary goal, and leaning on peers within the organization to support a more positive company culture.

At home and at work, busy culture worsens the problems it promises to solve. Its natural to assume that the busier we are, the bigger the impact well be able to make but in reality, studies have shown that busy culture destroys productivity and pulls us away from both our families and deeper relationships with our coworkers.

Like all work cultures, busy culture starts at the top, with leaders who want to appear successful, important, and productive. But what makes it so tough to overcome is that it also has roots at the bottom, where junior employees compete to stand out as hard workers eager to contribute and move up.

And then, of course, theres the problem of how porous our work-life boundaries have become, thanks to the proliferation of technologies that make it possible to work and connect with one another from anywhere, at any time.

So what can leaders do to combat a toxic culture of busyness? Theres no easy answer, but here are three strategies that can help:

Incentivize boundary-setting. Busy culture has to be fought with unquestionable company commitment. Praising employees and awarding them extra time off is a good start, but those measures can often come across as token gestures. What works better, it turns out, is paying people to be less busy.

That may sound radical, but paying people to work less is an appropriate solution for what has become a serious problem. More than four-fifths of employees send work emails on weekends. Nearly six in 10 do so while on vacation, and more than half check email after 11 PM.

These are problematic behaviors if youre worried about the health, satisfaction, and productivity of your employees. The good news is, theyre also behaviors that managers can easily track and use to promote boundary-setting.

One tech company, FullContact, has been doing this for years. Employees can earn a $7,500 annual vacation stipend by following three simple rules: No checking work messages, no working, and no staying home (although recently, staycations have also qualified). Referred to internally as a paid, paid vacation, the stipend is enforced through a combination of vacation photo-sharing, communication channel monitoring, and self-reporting.

A few years after launching the program, the companys communications director, Brad McCarty,told the Washington Postthat the program was working incredibly well, adding that when employees returned from these vacations they were shining brighter, working harder, and more excited to get back into the swing of things.

Another popular approach is to structure vacations as paid sabbaticals. In 2011, just 4% of employers offered paid sabbaticals. By 2017, more than four times as many employers did.

Because unused sabbatical time doesnt have to be paid out when the term of employment ends, companies are able to offer more generous policies if they treat that time as a sabbatical rather than a vacation. In addition, especially in the academic sphere, sabbaticals are a culturally accepted way to take time for personal development not directly related to work. Reframing vacations as sabbaticals may help employees feel less stigma around taking time off.

Focus on your core contribution. Countering busy culture means saying no to tasks that dont align with your primary duties and leaders have to set that example. Until the rest of your team sees you saying no to secondary duties, they wont feel comfortable doing so either.

Do you enjoy downtime when you get it, or do you fill it with less-than-critical work? Do you abandon side projects which are only useful insofar as they serve your core focus early and often? Does everybody you work with know what your primary duties are? Even employees you dont work directly with should know what those duties are and recognize your commitment to them.

On this front, too, a radical approach is often the most effective. In his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, the leadership strategist Greg McKeown argues that to combat busy culture and create a healthier and more productive work environment, leaders should say yes to only the top 10% of the tasks presented to them. Show through your actions that your core duties are your priority, and make saying no to other work the norm.

Thats the approach that the co-founder of CD Baby, Derek Sivers, has adopted. If its not a hell, yeah, he says, its a no. Sivers understands that its not bad opportunities that can kill his business but mediocre ones.

Lean on lateral and external influencers. Culture is built informally, interaction by interaction. But no single individual can change the culture of a large organization alone. What works to effect change is positive peer pressure, exerted by social connections rather than top-down directives.

Consider how Ben & Jerrys finally got workers to use its nap rooms. At first, people were so embarrassed about using them that they would use phony names like Donald Duck on the signup sheet. After removing the signup sheet, Ben & Jerrys realized a simpler system could still show everyone that the rooms were being used without revealing individual users identities: If the door is closed, a spokesperson explained, you know it is being used. Although rooms can no longer be booked in advance, Ben & Jerrys realized the higher priority was making everyone feel comfortable using them in the first place.

Similarly, the founder of Gabb Wireless, Stephen Dalby, who I met while working in the nonprofit world, struggled to put his phone down after work until his 6-year-old son asked a cutting question: Daddy, can we play a game or is your phone too important? Despite founding Gabb to help young people spend less time on screens, Stephen struggled to turn off business mode. To combat this culture in himself and his team, he encouraged employees to establish small, daily traditions like device-free dinners and he talked about those dinners at work, reminding his people that healthy boundary-setting was the norm.

All companies get busy. The trick is to keep that busyness from becoming chronic and cultural, because when that happens, it also becomes corrosive no matter how productive or positive it may seem.

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How to Defeat Busy Culture - Harvard Business Review