Should the boss send an email when you’re off?
24/7 access puts employees on a work/life tightrope
See if this sounds familiar. You’re sitting down to dinner with the family when your phone pings and you spot a text from your boss. Or maybe you’re a manager, and over the weekend you wake up to an email from an employee asking about a pending assignment. Technology – from texts to Teams, email to Slack – allows employers and employees to keep in constant contact. But when should off-hours communication be off-limits? Is it OK to bug your boss or an employee when they’re technically off duty?
The answer is it depends.
“I think it is fair, but we need to monitor it,” says Frances Taplett, a partner in the People and Organization practice at Boston Consulting Group. “We’re ending up at a place where we’re creating this 24-hour-a-day expectation.”
At a time when staff is scattered, working remotely from home or in different time zones, the need to reach out at odd hours may be hard to avoid. And some jobs may require workers to be available around the clock.
“Executives may require their direct reports to be available for urgent matters,’’ says Amber Clayton, director of the Society for Human Resource Management’s human resource knowledge center. “Some companies have employees working without supervision, and it may be acceptable or even encouraged for employees to reach out to their managers on their day off.”
But increasingly, many employees don’t even disconnect when they’re on
vacation. Among those surveyed by jobs site CareerBuilder, 31% said they checked their work-based email account when they were away, and 18% got in touch with their office during their time off.
“Now that technology allows us to be connected 24/7, it is hard for managers and colleagues not to contact a team member even while they are on vacation,” says Michelle Armer, CareerBuilder’s chief people officer. “However, everyone ... needs time to unwind in order to avoid burnout.”
Disconnecting from work can be hard to do
Len Johnson of Atlanta works in internet technology, but he recognizes how disruptive all those devices and communication channels can be.
It’s “very intrusive, very detrimental to the whole family, work balance issue,” Johnson says. “And of course, even after the problem has been resolved, you have to go back into the whole winddown process in order to disengage yourself from your job again.”
He recalls getting a call during a trip to visit his brothers. “It ended up being a four-hour issue,” he says, “so as a result, I probably lost a few hours that I can’t get back.”
It ultimately led him to take another job, working in data management at a smaller company. “I decided to take the job that I have now because I got tired of the whole artificial urgency,” he says.
The exhaustion that can come from constantly being on-call can undermine staff productivity and make for a generally unhappy workplace, experts say. Millennials, in particular, have been vocal about the need to maintain a balance between their professional and private lives, Taplett says.
“Some people ... want to work all the time, maybe for a period of their life, but then later decide that what’s acceptable and exciting in their 20s isn’t as good a fit in their late 30s,” says Taplett, adding that some people may seek out new jobs where managers are more respectful of their downtime.
BCG consults with companies on best practices in a variety of areas, Taplett says. And one model businesses can adopt to make sure their employees unplug is setting specific hours where all hands are on deck for meetings and other tasks, then they can allow employees to state specific periods where they cannot be disturbed, she says.
More than a decade ago, BCG put its own “protected time” policy in place. At the start of every project, teams establish how and when they will communicate. Coaches make sure the teams stay on track, and there is a weekly check-in to make sure the goals are being met.
For instance, if an email is sent after 6 p.m. and is urgent, the message may be followed up with a phone call, while if it’s sent after 9 p.m., “I don’t expect you to look at it,” Taplett says.
A worker’s protected time
Additionally, “every individual describes what they want as their protected time,” she says. “That can be ‘I want to fly home early from a client site on a Wednesday night because that’s when I have my daughter’s dance class.’ Or it could be ‘I want to go take pilates every morning and so I don’t start work until 9 a.m.’ ”
Even the signature BCG employees send within emails can come with a caveat that if the message is being sent late at night or early in the morning, the recipient doesn’t need to respond immediately.
But it’s critical that companies have to trust that employees, left alone after hours, will be focused on their duties when they’re on the clock, experts say.
It’s also critical that managers and employees actually unplug when they say they will.
“Companies usually set expectations with their employees, but it’s the work culture that sets the tone,” says Clayton of SHRM.
Vacation should be a real break
Employees should be given a break when they’re on vacation – bothered only if it’s urgent, says Armer.
“It’s important that you cultivate a culture and policies that encourage your workers to make the most of their vacation time,” she says, “so that they can come back feeling rested and recharged.”