Leslie A. Perlow

Leslie A. Perlow

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Organizational Behavior
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Leslie A. Perlow
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(617) 495-6173
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors
Research Summary

There has been tremendous change in the workplace — ubiquitous technology, 24/7 globalization, hyper-efficiency and now significant changes in work location. Professor Perlow’s research focuses on the implications for the ways we work and live, and what we can do to improve both. She finds we have become less efficient, unable to plan or prioritize work; less effective, with speed substituting for strategy and innovation; more isolated, overwhelmed, harried, as the dividing line between work and home disappears. She further finds that change is possible – change that results in better work and better lives.

As an ethnographer, Professor Perlow does in-depth studies, often for years at a time. Her work to date has been based predominantly on firms in high tech, professional services, and pharmaceuticals. She has studied companies with co-located teams and global teams. She has lived for months at a time in both China and India. She is currently conducting an ethnographic study that began with the sudden shift to virtual in March 2020 and continues today as the organization grapples with how to most effectively make hybrid work work. She has also launched several other projects to gather data about working hybrid and what makes it more effective for both the individuals but also the teams of which they are apart.

Other recent projects include the study of meetings and their deeper roots in the way we organize and execute work; the study of team dynamics as they are experienced simultaneously by team members in different locations (having researchers at multiple sites at the same time); and the effects of being connected 24-7.

Professor Perlow has further been developing and implementing a change process that revolves around empowering groups of people to rally around a collective goal, catalyzing a process of innovating and improving how they do their work. Most recently she is experimenting with data as a source of learning and motivating change.

Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. She recently launched a second year elective, Crafting Your Life: The First 10 Years Post MBA. This course encourages students to be more intentional about their choices, and provides guidance to help them in terms of managing their careers, relationships, and lives. Beyond this course she has become involved in building and studying the HBS alumni community.  She leads the LIFE Special Project that seeks to create ways to simultaneously help individuals learn about themselves and their choices and tradeoffs in life while also enabling more general knowledge creation about what it means to live a good life.

Professor Perlow’s research focuses on the micro-dynamics of work and life. She has long studied how individuals act within an organization – i.e., what do people do all day, how do they spend their time, with whom do they interact– and the consequences for organizations and individuals. She documents individuals’ work practices including the use of technology, meetings, virtual interactions, and managing across cultures with global teams, and explores the implications of these practices for organization productivity, individuals’ careers, and family lives. Professor Perlow has recently launched several projects to explore hybrid work and how individuals' work location relative to their co-workers as well as others in their lives (i.e., family, partners, roommates) effects their work productivity and their individual (and family's) well-being. She combines deep inductive qualitative research with data analytics to better understand and empower teams to improve the way they work.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Perlow was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Business School. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from MIT. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a management consultant.



Featured Work
Stop the Meeting Madness
How to free up time for meaningful work by Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun
Manage Your Team's Collective Time
Time management is a group endeavor. Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow shares how the payoff goes far beyond morale and retention.
Sleeping with Your Smartphone
How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work
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.
TED Institute
Leslie Perlow: Thriving in an overconnected world
While email and mobile technology have greatly accelerated the way we do business, Leslie Perlow argues that the always “on” mentality can have a long-term detrimental effect on many organizations. In her sociological experiments at BCG and other organizations, Perlow found that if the team – rather than just individuals - collectively rallies around a goal of personal value, it unleashes a process that creates better work and better lives.
The Economist Intelligence Unit report
The Personalization Challenge: Business culture and mobile security
Video Interview: EIU Editor Riva Richmond interviews Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow about the risks to organisations from the undirected, always-connected work enabled by mobile devices.
Switching off an "Always on" Culture
Leslie talks about the pervasive responsiveness trap in the workforce.

“The problem is that now everyone's on all the time and we come to expect that of each other. And then, we email each other late at night and we actually may or may not expect a response, initially.  But the person getting the e-mail, their response is, 'Well, maybe it’s not urgent but I should respond anyway and maybe it’s because I want to prove that had it been the clients, I was on.'"
Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Perlow, Leslie. "Collaborative Implementation: 'What If,' Asked George?" In Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments in Doing Qualitative Research. Vol. 27, edited by Arne Carlsen and Jane E. Dutton. Advances in Organization Studies. Copenhagen Business School Press, 2011. View Details
  • Trefalt, Spela, and Leslie Perlow. "Learning from Women Who Make It Work: A Call for Dynamic Flexibility." In Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, edited by K. Elsbach, 227–251. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing (IAP), 2005. View Details
  • Perlow, Leslie. "Studying Work Groups in India, China, and Hungary." In Gaining Access: A Practical Guide for Field Researchers, edited by Martha S. Feldman, Jeannine Bell, and Michele Tracy Berger. Altamira Press, 2003. View Details
  • Perlow, Leslie, and L. Bailyn. "The Senseless Submergence of Difference: Engineers, Their Work and Their Careers." In Between Technology and Society: Technical Workers in Modern Workplaces, edited by B. Barley and J. Orr. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, 1997. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
Research Summary
Research Summary

There has been tremendous change in the workplace — ubiquitous technology, 24/7 globalization, hyper-efficiency and now significant changes in work location. Professor Perlow’s research focuses on the implications for the ways we work and live, and what we can do to improve both. She finds we have become less efficient, unable to plan or prioritize work; less effective, with speed substituting for strategy and innovation; more isolated, overwhelmed, harried, as the dividing line between work and home disappears. She further finds that change is possible – change that results in better work and better lives.

As an ethnographer, Professor Perlow does in-depth studies, often for years at a time. Her work to date has been based predominantly on firms in high tech, professional services, and pharmaceuticals. She has studied companies with co-located teams and global teams. She has lived for months at a time in both China and India. She is currently conducting an ethnographic study that began with the sudden shift to virtual in March 2020 and continues today as the organization grapples with how to most effectively make hybrid work work. She has also launched several other projects to gather data about working hybrid and what makes it more effective for both the individuals but also the teams of which they are apart.

Other recent projects include the study of meetings and their deeper roots in the way we organize and execute work; the study of team dynamics as they are experienced simultaneously by team members in different locations (having researchers at multiple sites at the same time); and the effects of being connected 24-7.

Professor Perlow has further been developing and implementing a change process that revolves around empowering groups of people to rally around a collective goal, catalyzing a process of innovating and improving how they do their work. Most recently she is experimenting with data as a source of learning and motivating change.

Awards & Honors
Recipient of the 2012 Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute.
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