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