How long can you work without sleep? My personal record is 72 hours. Another record I hold is working for five days non-stop with only six hours of rest. Why would anyone in their right mind agree to such torture? The answer: To become a hero.

Back in the 90s I worked for a successful multimedia firm. Our client list was the envy of the competition and our products won every industry award possible. There was just one problem: None of us had a life. I'm not just talking about working late every once in a while. I'm talking about sleeping so many nights in the office, that you get to know which PC manufacturer ships its computers with the best padding, something you know only because you've used them as a mattress for so many nights.

That's exactly the conclusion that MIT Professor Lotte Bailyn and her colleagues came to after a multiyear project in one of the world's largest high-tech companies. The company, which has one of the most extensive employee benefits programs, had a peculiar problem on its hands: Hardly anyone took advantage of the benefits it was offering.

Bailyn and her team found out that the reason people weren't taking advantage of the flexible working arrangements and family benefits offered by the company was that doing so ran against the company's culture: Work hard, work long and don't complain.

Bailyn's team started their research by trying to figure out why people worked such long hours in the first place. What they found was that people simply couldn't get their individual work done during normal working hours. Meetings, reviews, and requests from other colleagues took up so much time, that people often didn't start doing the "real work" until the afternoon. This lack of time to focus on designing, producing and manufacturing products meant that people worked in a continuous crisis mode.

Bailyn's team learned how "...emergencies are glorified and the people who respond to them are seen as heroes, how staying late is a way to show you care about the work, how solving crises is rewarded while preventing them is not, or how a willingness to sacrifice personal time signals commitment." More interviews exposed an even darker reality - though almost everyone in the organization knew that working the way they did was inefficient - no one attempted to introduce any change.

Bailyn and her team found that there is a way out of this dilemma; that it is possible to get the job done AND have life. The reason most companies fail in the process, argues Bailyn, is that they attack only one part of the problem: They either try make life easier for their employees OR try to change business processes that hinder productivity.

The secret to success, claims Bailyn, is for managers to develop a "Dual Agenda": Discover and change the work practices that have a negative effect on both the business and people's lives.

Bailyn's approach includes three major phases:

1) View work from the perspective of people's lives. According to Bailyn, people normally see 'work' and 'life' as something that has to be balanced, the responsibility of which is the employee's own. A better approach, claims Bailyn, is to try and integrate the two. How? Ask your team members "what is it about how work is done in your area that makes it difficult for you to integrate your work and personal life?" Posing the question like this, instead of simply asking people which work practices they would change, or eliminate, forces them to uncover the (often hidden) cultural assumptions that shape the way things are done in the company.

2) Identify leverage points for change. In this phase, work teams need to consider how changing work practices will have an impact on both improved business effectiveness AND an improved life. The question to ask here is "If a certain change is made, how will it improve the team's ability to meet a key strategic challenge? How will it enhance the group's ability to integrate work and personal lives?"

3) Implement change. This is often a risky phase that combines bursts of creativity with periods of fear and frustration. The key to success in this phase is senior management that is willing to bear the consequences, if only for a short period of time, of taking out certain operating procedures that serve as barriers for integrating work and personal life.

Putting Bailyn's approach into action isn't easy, and each organization will have its unique obstacles to surmount. But even if your organization isn't ready to go through the whole process, simply asking yourself the following questions could make a big difference:

--> Lotte Bailyn's latest book can be found here.

--> SAS, one of the world's largest software companies, is considered one of the best integrators of work and personal lives. You can read about it here.