Since the pandemic and the increased ease at which we can remain contactable, things have escalated to the point that the government has this week implemented a new “right to disconnect” law, stipulating that employees can no longer be penalised for not being contactable and responding to work communications outside of work hours.
This problem, of being contactable 24/7, is not purely an Australian problem, it is an issue on a global scale, with France being the first country in 2017 to legislate protecting it’s citizens from being expected to be answerable to employers outside of their standard work hours. According to an article in The Economist, this followed a case where pest management company Rentokil were fined 60,000 euros for implementing a rule that mandated staff always have their phone switched on to take phone calls and answer text messages outside of their work hours.
This change is a big win for those who have felt overwhelmed by the constant intrusion of work into their personal time, a situation that’s become all too common since the pandemic blurred the lines between home and office. Supporters of the law believe it empowers employees to reclaim their time and push back against the relentless demands of work outside regular hours. But how did we end up at this point? Not that many years ago, we went to work, did our job and when we left the office, our work was left behind for the day. We were not contactable at home. This slowly began to change with the introduction of the mobile phone. And the pandemic allowed us to have home offices and laptops and apps put on our phones to keep us constantly connected.
Sure, this connectivity and contactability can be useful if we are travelling for work or away from our desks in business hours. It’s given us the flexibility to say, leave our desk and go for a walk while we wait for feedback on a project with tight deadlines, knowing we don’t need to be chained to our desk so we don’t miss a highly anticipated email or message. It allows us to answer emails if we are away from the office travelling. It allows us greater flexibility to leave work early, attend our kids’ school assemblies if they are collecting an award, and log on to our computers later in the afternoon. It can certainly be useful to be contactable no matter where we are in the world, but the negative implications and the blurred lines of work and home lives that have resulted, it could be argued, outweigh the benefits.
Out of hours communication and the feeling that we need to be always contactable, is affecting our overall mental and physical health. To not feel able to ‘switch off’ completely every day, is having big implications on our ability to function healthily and achieve a good work life balance.
In 2020, The Conversation surveyed more than 2,200 Australian academic and professional employees and found the following results;
- 21% of respondents had supervisors who expected them to respond to work-related texts, calls and emails after work.
- 55% sent digital communication about work in the evenings to colleagues.
- 30% sent work-related digital communication to colleagues on the weekends, while expecting a same-day response.
- Employees who had supervisors expecting them to respond to work messages after work, compared to groups who did not, reported higher levels of psychological distress (70.4% compared to 45.2%) and emotional exhaustion (63.5% compared to 35.2%)
- Employees also reported physical health symptoms, such as headaches and back pain (22.1% compared to 11.5%).
- 62% of those surveyed said they thought the “psychological safety environment” – of their workplace — the degree to which it protected their psychological health — was “poor”.
Where to from here
Businesses need to recognise that the physical and mental repercussions of blurred boundaries between home and work are very negative and very big. We need to take responsibility from a leadership level and instil a refreshed culture that respects boundaries. As the old saying goes “we aren’t saving lives”. If the need or message is not urgent, if someone’s life is not dependent on it surely it can wait until everyone is back in the office.
The same is true if you give yourself blurred lines. It’s very easy to finish off an email or a job in the evening, to get ahead for the next day, to get it out of the way. To quickly send that email as you know you have meetings tying you up all morning. We all need to take a good look at our workplace, what’s expected of us, what sort of pressure we are putting on ourselves and others and to think of different ways to address any underlying issues that make us feel we have no option but to contact and be contactable at all hours of the day. More than ever before we need to create strong boundaries and be able to disconnect.
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