SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Joe Desertrat on Thursday July 28 2016, @08:35PM
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
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).