After hours email bad for employee health
Responding to work email after work hours no more seems to increase productivity, rather, it negatively impacts employee wellbeing.
A new study, authored by Liuba Belkin of Lehigh University, William Becker of Virginia Tech and Samantha Conroy of Colorado State University, found a link between organizational after-hours email expectations and emotional exhaustion, which hinders work-family balance.
The results suggest that modern technologies used at workplace may be hurting the very employees that those technologies were designed to help.
Using data collected from 365 working adults, Belkin and her colleagues looked at the role of organizational expectation regarding “off” hour emailing and found it negatively impacts employee emotional states, leading to “burnout” and diminished work-family balance, which is essential for individual health and well-being.
‘Email is notoriously known to be the impediment of the recovery process. Its accessibility contributes to experience of work overload since it allows employees to engage in work as if they never left the workspace, and at the same time, inhibits their ability to psychologically detach from work-related issues via continuous connectivity,’ wrote the authors.
The research team also found that it is not the amount of time spent on work emails, but the expectation which drives the resulting sense of exhaustion.
Due to anticipatory stress, defined as a constant state of anxiety and uncertainty as a result of perceived or anticipated threats, according to research cited in the article, employees are unable to detach and feel exhausted regardless of the time spent on after-hours emails.
‘This suggests that organizational expectations can steal employee resources even when actual time is not required because employees cannot fully separate from work,’ stated the authors.
According to the study, the expectation does not have to be explicit or conveyed through a formal organizational policy. It can be set by normative standards for behavior in the organization.
The organizational culture is created through what its leaders and members define as acceptable or unacceptable behavior.
‘Thus, if an organization perpetuates the ‘always on’ culture it may prevent employees from fully disengaging from work eventually leading to chronic stress,’ said coauthor Belkin.
Meanwhile, in France, sending work-related emails after business hours is now illegal.
French MP Benoit Hamon told the BBC, ‘All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant.’
The French MP further added, ‘Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.’
In Canada, it is a ‘national epidemic’.
Germany’s labor ministry also banned its managers from calling or emailing staff outside of work hours in 2013, to prevent employees from burning out.
In 2011, Volkswagen, made it so that its servers would shut down the ability to send emails 30 minutes after an employee’s shift ended.
Management of companies should take a serious note of this study and work out a method to discourage employees to send/reply to emails after usual work hours!
