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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: 2) by JeanCroix on Thursday July 28 2016, @01:54PM

    by JeanCroix (573) on Thursday July 28 2016, @01:54PM (#381183)
    One of the perks about being in my particular field (aerospace engineering) that I tend not to think about until this kind of article comes up. I've never had to be "on call," or expected to check work emails from home - I don't even have access to my work email server from home, although I hear there's a way if one were so inclined. Nineteen years in my industry, and I've only once been contacted by a supervisor outside standard office hours - it was about changing the schedule of an upcoming business trip on short notice. It's also very rare that I need to work more than the standard 40 hours a week. Not to say that there aren't distinct downsides to my career, but work/life time balance has never been one, thankfully.
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