One on One with BCG's Joe Davis

The always-connected workforce has it advantages, for sure. Round the clock access to clients, and other employees, is the way much of the world works. But at consulting firms, where work/life balance is usually already an issue, that 24/7 connectivity can be very damaging to morale and culture. "I think it got way out of control at BCG," says Joe Davis, a Senior Partner, Head of the East Coast region and Americas leader of The Boston Consulting Group's Public Sector practice. "Smart phones completely changed the culture. People always worked a few hours here and there on the weekend but it went overboard." The result was regrettable attrition. BCG was losing high-value people. To combat the problem, BCG embarked on an innovative program it calls PTO, which stands for Predictability, Teaming and Open Communication. The program was piloted in the firm's Boston office seven years ago and has been rolled out throughout most of North America and Europe. Davis will walk us through the PTO program as part of his "Working Smarter: How BCG Redefined Employee and Client Satisfaction" presentation at the Consulting Summit in New York on Oct. 25. Davis sat down with Consulting One on One to talk about the PTO program.

Consulting: Why did BCG adopt the PTO program?

Davis: A consulting firm simply can't have attrition of its high-value employees and the No. 1 reason people leave the firm is because of work/life balance issues. We thought it was getting out of control at BCG so we hired a Harvard professor to take a look at it for us. Smart phones were, essentially, putting people on call all of the time. We lost control of work/life balance. People were monitoring their smart phones around the clock and that can be pretty painful. That also contributed to the unpredictable nature of the job, which was something our people were saying was frustrating about their work.