Consulting for life?
Those who choose the consulting career can enjoy its several perks. Interesting projects, working with senior managers as a twenty-something-year-old and 5-star hotels all around the world, just to name a few. Of course there is a serious downside of the job: there is no time left for life itself.
Past
Clients have enormous expectations towards consultants (and investment bankers, lawyers). In turn for the millions of dollars paid for their professional services, clients expect precise and flawless work and the pursuit of perfection takes a lot of time. The development of the info-communicational technology has only made the situation worse: today everyone can be reached anywhere and anytime. According to an estimate the employees of professional service providers look at their BlackBerries 20-25 hours a week.
The “Always On” attitude and the 14-18-hour workdays are basically built in the system. The “Up or Out” promotional paradigm only strengthens this practice by implying to young consultants that by working harder they can rise above the rest of the juniors relatively fast. Otherwise the results is “Out” which means that a promising career can soon come to an end. And there are plenty of new applicants: McKinsey received 225,000 applications last year but they only hired 1% of them, 2,200 people.
Present
Of course, this above-described work tempo is harmful both mentally and physically. The workload can be fatal sometimes: in August 2013, Moritz Erhardt, an analyst trainee at Merrill Lynch’s London office died in a stroke after working through three nights. He was 21 years old.
Although there have been flexible work programs at service providing companies, they received most of the public’s attention only after the above-mentioned incident. Among consulting firms the most well-know is probably McKinsey & Company’s “Take Time” initiative. Those consultants that apply for the program get 4-8 weeks of extra holiday per year. This is just enough to rest a little between two projects and take time for their hobbies. McKinsey’s website has announcement of success stories like the engagement manager who learned to play clarinet in two months or John from Tokyo who wrote a novel and composed music. Bain & Company’s “Take Two” program is very similar to its McKinsey counterpart not only with respect to its name but regarding the content as well: participants of the program can take two months a year to relax.
The Boston Consulting Group’s approach is not based on time blocks of vacation but on reduced workload. In the pilot of the “Predictable Time Off” initiative, they extended a four-member team with one extra member then removed each member from the project for one day per week. Although consultants were resisting in the beginning, and sometimes they even had to use force to stop them from working, the method succeeded. Not long after this, the entire Boston office wanted to try the program. By carrying out a relatively simple change, satisfaction with work increased significantly, communication became more open and consultants reported improvements regarding the so important Work/Life Balance.
Future
Although the programs that make flexible work possible have not been introduced in all countries, the trend is obvious. Human resources are the most important for consulting firms, so the different forms of flexible working are expected to spread even further in the future
The latest programs are aiming for a more active involvement of women: firms are organizing separate recruitment events and they monitor the young mothers after they started their families. As Dominic Barton, McKinsey’s global managing director put it: ’these women were phenomenally smart, and we lost all that talent, and we’re going to get it back”. The company offers a slower career path for mothers with the aim of enabling those women working only part-time to reach partner level. Although as Victor Cheng, McKinsey’s former employee stated with some irony: “working half-time was still 40 hours a week”.
The internet puts this question into a new perspective of course. A website called Flexing It is offering the services of professionals, encouraging consultants to simply outsource some of their work. Whatever the solution may be, Peter Drucker’s words fit the situation perfectly: “Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.”