Forcing us to switch off may be harder than the French think

Why blame the boss for emailing at midnight when we’re still on our smartphones anyway, asks Eilis O’Hanlon

THE poet Philip Larkin imagined work as a toad, squatting on his life. He didn’t know the half of it. That was 1955. It was a golden age, if only he knew it. Now the toad follows you home and squats in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, in the form of a smartphone, vibrating with notifications, uncaring of employment hours and the delicate work/life balance.

The French have had enough of it. From January 1, companies are required by law to negotiate with workers on ways to reduce the intrusion of their day jobs into their private lives, allowing them to switch off those damned smartphones at home and start relaxing instead.

It’s being hailed as the answer to a host of modern ailments from sleeplessness to stress to broken marriages.

The French are calling it the “right to disconnect”, and it sounds fantastic. In principle. In practice, it’s probably pie in the sky. You can’t just legislate away these things, because they represent deeper social and cultural shifts.

At the same time as we’re blaming employers for creating a culture that means workers are “always on”, studies show that people are glued to their smartphones for an average of three hours a day. They’re not doing so only to check their work emails, but to update Facebook, post on Twitter, download some funky new apps, play games.

Much of the dependency on technology is self-inflicted. We’re “on” 24/7 by choice.

Of course, choice is never entirely free. If the boss expects you to check your emails in the evening or at weekends, how truly “free” are you to refuse? How can you be sure you’re not just responding to a fear of losing your job?

Philosophical debates on the nature of free will, however, are far too complicated for employment law. Legislation is a blunt tool. It’s for amputations, not keyhole surgery.

That’s what makes the new French law impractical, if nothing else.

The nature of work has changed. Most of us aren’t making widgets in a factory nine to five. In those days, the boss couldn’t ring you at bedtime and demand to know why you weren’t down in the factory clocking on.

These days you can be on the other side of the world and that email will still find you within seconds. Sometimes you’re working with people in different time zones, so at least one of you has to be out of hours.

We’re constantly “on” because modern work is more cerebral, and ideas don’t stick rigidly to a timetable.

Some people like it that way. Speaking for myself, I do a lot of thinking and working at night, when it’s quiet.

What if someone like me wants to have a look at their emails at midnight, in order to get a heads up on what they’ll be doing next day? Would night owls be breaking this new law if they work according to a pattern that suits them?

The law of unintended consequences is bound to kick in somewhere down the line, too. What if forbidding us from checking our emails actually makes us more stressed? Worry does not obey logic.

Nor does compulsion. Smartphone addiction sounds silly, but it’s a real thing. Being deprived of it might cause as many problems as it solves.

Then there’s employers to consider, too. No, bear with me, bosses have rights, too.

It’s all very well to resent the office head honcho for sending you emails out of hours, and to see that as a gross invasion of one’s private time and space; but we’re constantly “on” now in other ways.

Once upon a time, whether you spent the day in a factory or an office, you came to work, did an eight-hour shift, and went home.

Now most of us are sitting in front of screens all day, and spend significant amounts of that time on the internet. If you’re emailing friends from your work station, or surfing the web, is that not as great a waste of the company’s time as their emails in the evening are an invasion of yours?

In a 2014 study, 89pc of workers admitted that they wasted time on the internet during the day. It’s surely gone up since, especially among younger people who consider round-the-clock access to the internet a human right.

Of these, a third admitted wasting half an hour; another third, more than an hour; 16pc admitted to more than two hours. This inevitably has a detrimental effect on productivity and profitability.

Four-in-10 spent time on the internet, with the same proportion admitting to being on social media; half said they were texting or talking on the phone; a third said they were gossiping with colleagues. Sometimes they do it because they’re bored, or not being paid enough to give a damn about the company’s fortunes.

It still raises an interesting question. Why is this apparently acceptable, but getting an email from the boss during Coronation Street isn’t?

He might think he’s just evening the score for all the time you spent on Buzzfeed when you were meant to be working that afternoon. If his email to you is unpaid overtime, then your web-surfing in office hours is paid leisure. Perhaps the two simply cancel one another one out?

Ultimately, the “right to disconnect”, as envisioned by French legislators, only works if the right can be enforced, or if enforcing it doesn’t cause as many problems as it solves.

A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t always the best way to tackle problems, particularly when this new law is only designed for companies with more than 50 employees.

Most of us work in smaller businesses, where relationships with employers are more informal, so we simply won’t have the protection of these grand gestures of legislation.

Put that way, this new law starts to sound like another measure that will benefit public sector employees in large organisations who already have enough advantages in terms of pay and work conditions and security of tenure, while leaving behind those in the private sector who have to live by their wits and willingness to put in the extra effort.

Then again, perhaps the French should be commended for at least laying down a marker? Stress is a modern epidemic, and burn-out a constant danger.

We’re all tired and demoralised by a fast-paced modern life that feels increasingly ill suited to positive mental health. We’re only human beings, not machines, and we’re certainly not toads.

‘What if a ban on checking emails at home just increases our stress?’