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| Gregg Slager is spending more time with his family. |
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| Get a life
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| Working 24/7 may seem good for companies, but it's often bad for the talent. So businesses are hatching alternatives to the punishing, productivity-sapping norm. (Main story)
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NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Gregg Slager saw the clock nearing midnight, sighed, and reached for the next file. All along the 25th floor of Ernst & Young's headquarters at 5 Times Square, lights were ablaze. It was another 80-hour week for the M&A department, where Slager, a senior partner, had been in the trenches for a decade.
Slager doesn't do garden-variety accounting; his unit handles due diligence on major deals in which billions of dollars (and thousands of jobs) hang in the balance. On viselike deadlines, they plow through vast piles of financial and operational data to get a fix on a business and look for danger signs. With the boom in private-equity investing, the pace only seemed to be getting more intense.
Top partners like Slager can pull down seven-figure incomes for shepherding such high-pressure deals. Yet last year, at age 45, with 4- and 6-year-old boys at home, he often found himself wondering whether the sacrifices were worth it.
Vacations, he recalls, had become merely "a change of work venue." Some nights his wife, Sue, would bring the kids to his office in their pajamas so that they could spend some quality romping-around time with their dad. The young professionals Slager was trying to hold on to in his department said they wouldn't put up with the pace year after year. Something had to give.
So this year Slager did something taboo for a top performer in a world-class firm: He declared this wasn't the kind of life he and his team wanted and reached out to colleagues to change the way M&A due diligence works.
Over six months, the unit rethought every job, reallocated tasks -- and won better lives for the due-diligence teams while providing better service for clients. Including the boss. Not that M&A will ever be a breeze, but Slager's vacations are now real. Weekend work is no longer the norm. And a manager who works for Slager says his family has stopped threatening to throw away his BlackBerry.
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