[Work Life Balance] Feeling constantly connected to work..?

The Email Urgency Bias — “By having nonstop access to our email and given that workplaces today tend to associate responsiveness with hard work and dedication, we have come to erroneously think we need to immediately, and thus constantly, respond to our work emails, even though others don’t necessarily expect us to do so,” — Laura Giurge

To provide experimental evidence for this phenomenon, the researchers recruited 739 Spanish employees of a large public organization to take part in a short online study. In the study, participants were randomly divided into one of two groups: email senders or email receivers (or instant message senders and receivers).

Participants in the sender's group were asked to think about a few non-urgent emails/messages they had sent their colleagues outside regular work hours (e.g., weekends, evenings) over the past few days and to indicate how important they felt it was that they received a response right away.

Conversely, participants in the receivers group were asked to think about non-urgent emails/messages they had received outside of regular work hours over the past few days and to indicate how important they felt it was that they replied right away.

The researchers found that participants in the receivers group thought senders expected a more immediate response than what senders actually said. Moreover, follow-up analyses showed that receivers who perceived the most urgency in needing to reply to the emails were most likely to report elevated levels of job stress and burnout.

Researchers found that one reason [why we end up working all the time when we have access to our devices] might be the implicit assumptions we make about how quickly we are expected to respond to every email we receive, even on the weekend.

Another Study (one of the solutions)

A second study conducted by the researchers offers a possible solution to the email urgency bias. The researchers found that adding a simple note to the end of an email, such as saying “this is not an urgent matter so you can get to it whenever you can,” removed the bias almost entirely.

The authors state, “As our research shows, others will not simply know when our requests are non-urgent and a failure to clearly communicate our expectations may contribute to the spread of the unhealthy ‘always on’ work culture.”

Another way to address an unhealthy ‘always on’ work culture is by scheduling the emails to send only during work hours though they compose emails outside of work hours (many email services support this feature now).

Do you know? Portugal recently passed legislation making it illegal for bosses to contact their employees by any means — phone, email, or text — outside of regular office hours. France has put similar policies in place.

I plan to continue this [Work Life Balance] series with a few more articles like this. Do let me know if you would like to read about any specific work-life balance problem.