How Adam Grant helped fixed a broken culture

I spent some time in The Joy of Work talking about the lessons we can learn from the broken working practices in banking (where 120 hour weeks have historically been common). Professor Adam Grant takes up this subject in his latest audio project Power Moves. 

Eventual CEO David Solomon, Goldman Sachs brought Grant in to help them improve a culture that was suffering from growing staff turnover and rampant burnout.

As you'd expect Grant started by gathering data. Historically, plenty of the current Goldman leadership had clocked up 120 hour weeks as they rose through the ranks, but historically when these future bosses had left the office they had stopped working. “When you left that office no one could get hold of you,” Solomon tells Grant. “There were no cellphones… and if they called you at home you didn’t have to answer the phone, you could screen the call”. Everything changed with the arrival of smartphones. Any separation that had existed between work life and home life was soon eliminated. Preposterously long weeks in the office were one thing, but when these hours at work were combined with constant connectivity away from the office the effect was to drive workers to resignation (or even breakdown). 

The challenge that Goldman found was that there such a power imbalance between a 22 year old starter and their bosses that young workers didn’t know how to push back against continuous demands upon them.

Grant came back with 26 recommendations. One of the main ones was to mandate restrictions to weekend working. In banking there is always an opportunity to pull one more set of data analysis and so weekend working had become incredibly common. Grant's suggestion became Goldman’s 'Saturday rule'. Your badge would no longer get you into the building on Saturday (from 9pm Friday to 9am Sunday to be precise). It was a deliberate signal of change to the organisation. It was also a big indication that what the organisation expected of its workers had changed. 

Grant's Power Moves is an Audible original, continuing his trend of being more prolific on audio only content than he has been in books (after his TED podcast Work Life last year). It's a curious 3 hour mix of discussions about power and some of his most satisfying discussions of workplace culture. Grant is the Daniel Kahneman of work and we're still waiting for his Thinking Fast and Slow, but in the meantime I really enjoyed some of the stories included here.