American culture has always valued high worker productivity; it’s hard to encourage people in the U.S. to take time off from work. But one company thinks it can make more money by forcing employees to get out of the office and work fewer hours. For our weekly work segment, we talk with our contributor Beth Kobliner, Boston Consulting Group's Grant Freeland and Harvard Business School's Leslie Perlow about time off's benefits for employers and employees alike.
"By working as a team to try to create that predictable time off, it forced them to actually think about how they were doing their work, as a team, and to challenge some very deeply held assumptions about how work had to be done, and to realize things could be done differently."
—Harvard Business School's Leslie Perlow, on an experiment in which business groups were required to take regularly scheduled hours off work every week
The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with The BBC World Service, New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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