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posted by n1 on Thursday July 28 2016, @04:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-have-mail dept.

Earlier this year, France passed a labor reform law that banned checking emails on weekends. New research—to be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management—suggests other countries might do well to follow suit, for the sake of employee health and productivity.

[...] Using data collected from 365 working adults, [Liuba] Belkin [of Lehigh University], and her colleagues [William Becker of Virginia Tech and Samantha A. Conroy of Colorado State University] look at the role of organizational expectation regarding "off" hour emailing and find it negatively impacts employee emotional states, leading to "burnout" and diminished work-family balance, which is essential for individual health and well-being. The study—described in an article entitled "Exhausted, but unable to disconnect: the impact of email-related organizational expectations on work-family balance"—is the first to identify email-related expectations as a job stressor along with already established factors such as high workload, interpersonal conflicts, physical environment or time pressure.

[...] Interestingly, they 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 [therefore] feel exhausted regardless of the time spent on after-hours emails.


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  • (Score: 1) by driven on Thursday July 28 2016, @05:24AM

    by driven (6295) on Thursday July 28 2016, @05:24AM (#381059)

    I can't make any use of the self-help articles out there that tell you to check your email once or twice a day. And don't check your email first thing in the morning - do the "important" stuff then.

    I've never had the luxury! When you're in a position where many people count on you to get _their_ work done, and servers must remain online, automation processes functional, questions answered, etc. that all breaks down if you don't stay on top of your email.
    Yes, it is draining and I can sympathize with the "anticipatory stress" mentioned in the article. I just can't see any way around it. I know when someone else takes 2 or 3 days to respond to an email of mine, it really affects my productivity. I've feel a similar kind of stress when I'm waiting for their response so I can take action and resume what I was doing before. In the meantime I juggle other tasks, pushing each one a bit further along. Keep in mind I'm working with people in different locations and timezones so walking over to their desk isn't always possible.
    Ticket tracking systems can help keep things straight better than email, but it's impractical to have everything turned into a ticket.

    As far as checking work email from home, I mostly manage to avoid that but of course there are exceptions.

    Anyone in a similar situation who has found a solution?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @06:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @06:18AM (#381071)

    Sounds like you don't have enough people in there.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @06:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @06:22AM (#381073)

    Get out of the industry while you still have your sanity.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @07:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @07:03AM (#381088)

      Too late. The pretty pink unicorns have come begging me to fuck them. They don't want to be virgins anymore. I keep telling them I won't do them because they'll cease to exist as soon as they lose their virginity. Why won't the pretty pink unicorns listen to reason.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday July 28 2016, @07:09AM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday July 28 2016, @07:09AM (#381090) Journal

    We've probably all been in that position, but some, (most?) find our way out of it as careers progress. Some just hand it off, others fix it.

    I remember being on call for large scale data-center production runs that took hours. If something crashed I had to get up, drive 20 miles, figure out what went wrong, fix it and start recovery. All the while humoring the bastard operators from hell who "owned" the computer in those days.

    Later, as I gained authority in the particular job I determined not to have to do this, nor assign someone else to do it. The whole thing was a stupid clattering fragile mess. We spent about three months doing a total restructure such that ANY failure was fixed such that it would AUTOMATICALLY roll back, self recover, and leave the system in a usable state where our users could use the system the next day and we could fix what failed and restart from that point.

    In other words, you are in a hell of your own making (or taking - in the case of an imposed job situation). One that, given some leeway and authority, you will find a way to work your way free of the pointless hand-holding (of people and systems). But only if you stop thinking of the job as something that can't be changed, and of yourself as someone who can't be replaced.

    You have to take ownership of the whole situation, and make it work for you, instead of just being one of its cogs.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 1) by driven on Thursday July 28 2016, @10:42PM

      by driven (6295) on Thursday July 28 2016, @10:42PM (#381361)

      'You have to take ownership of the whole situation, and make it work for you, instead of just being one of its cogs.'

      True, and it helps to be reminded of that from time to time. Cheers. :)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @08:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @08:20AM (#381107)

    It's on time frame and expectation.

    Anything gotten to me at the start of the day gets addressed that day (even if I have to stay late). Anything that is towards the end of the day gets addressed the next day (barring emergency). Emails are answered at the start and the end of the day. I accept no calls at home unless it is an emergency.

    The thing is if my position is so important to require around the clock hours, I should be paid accordingly, otherwise it is exploitation. And the only way I can guarantee when something will be accomplished is if I can plan my workload (and delegate if need be). I can't do that if I'm pulled seven different directions at once.

  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday July 28 2016, @12:19PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Thursday July 28 2016, @12:19PM (#381148)

    I can't make any use of the self-help articles out there [...]

    Well that's your first problem: you can't help yourself because yourself sucks. [youtube.com] (≧∇≦)/

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @12:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2016, @12:47PM (#381155)

    Not in IT but we used to have a guy who we eventually found out only checked his email like once a day. Everyone was getting annoyed that questions were not getting answered in a timely manner and it was holding up several other people on the project team. Finding out that he was rarely checking his email and often ignoring the phone just led to him getting an ongoing parade of engineers hunting him down at his desk and bothering his boss when we couldn't find him which led to just more pressure on him than if he just checked his damn email more frequently.

  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday July 28 2016, @08:35PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Thursday July 28 2016, @08:35PM (#381313)

    I can't make any use of the self-help articles out there that tell you to check your email once or twice a day. And don't check your email first thing in the morning - do the "important" stuff then.
    I've never had the luxury! When you're in a position where many people count on you to get _their_ work done,

    Stop right there! I suggest letting all your calls go to voice mail where you have a long, detailed message about the steps they need to take to get a response. Most will lose track before they get to answer and just hang up. By all means check your e-mail early. Answer every one with a slew of questions that will require them to spend a longer time replying than it would for them to figure it out themselves. Sort of a cross between Socrates and Wally (from Dilbert). This can use up quite a bit of your time, but you can claim you were helping others and should they be successful, you can claim you worked on that project.

    • (Score: 1) by driven on Thursday July 28 2016, @10:39PM

      by driven (6295) on Thursday July 28 2016, @10:39PM (#381358)

      What you suggest sounds similar to a thought I had: there should be some cost to a "transaction" so that people will consider whether they really need to go through with it. If the cost is zero then nobody will have any qualms about asking me for help about, well, everything. One question I like to respond with to people who over-use my help is this: what have you tried so far? I don't like to answer a question with a question too often, as that is one thing that really irritates me (especially when I'm waiting for a reply from another timezone and the reply I get is a question they could have answered for themselves given just a little thought, or they could have at least replied to the part of the email that they did fully understand).