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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, @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).