“I don’t know what to do! My manager has banned me from taking any work out of the office and I’m not allowed to email my work colleagues when I get home,” Astrid told me over the phone last week. “What do you mean?” I asked. Astrid replied, “My boss says that my office is my office and my home is my home and I need to make sure that I draw a distinct line between them. But, the problem is that I need my time at home to catch up with my emails. I don’t think I could manage my job if I didn’t do this.”
Coincidentally, the very next day, I read that Germany has proposed an ‘anti-stress’ law that would ban ‘out of office’ emails.
There are still those who say that the phrase ‘work-life balance’ is meaningless, because “work is life, and life is work”. Just because you are watching the next episode of your favourite soap-opera, your mind is, in fact, thinking about the last batch of invoices and emails that you need to clear out of the inbox. Although you may have physically left your office, in essence you are still there with your brain still in work mode.
Today, our iPhone or Android equivalent, rings, it vibrates and it pings when an email is received. We have, unwittingly, become totally dependent upon it in order to function efficiently — or at all!
In Germany, the Government Employment Minister, Andrea Nahles, has proposed an ‘anti-stress law’ that would make it illegal for companies to email staff outside of their scheduled working hours. It is already illegal for staff to be emailed when they are on holiday and so this action is taking this initiative one step further in order to protect staff, and managers, from work overload.
Workplace stress, as we know, results from prolonged, excessive pressure and is an acknowledged cause of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression. So we have to ask ourselves, is there a correlation between being available 24x7 and mental ill-health?
On the other hand, is it so dreadful to do some homework when you get home? After all, our children go to school and do homework – usually for a set period of time — and then do other things in the evening and they don’t necessarily get stressed out.
Because we are constantly available does not mean that we are more productive. It may make us feel that we are more in control and possibly working more efficiently by being available 24/7 — but is that really true? Will the office really collapse just because we don’t answer our email within an hour of it being sent? I think not.
Of course, if the boss or the manager has an expectation that emails will be answered out of hours and that “goes with the job” — that doesn’t make it right but does make it a fact. So, it must come from the top. Of course, if there is an emergency, then that is a different situation altogether and there needs to be vital contact numbers available. But every day work is not an emergency.
Switching off
If it is treated as such then it means that the body and mind will never be allowed to switch off. That may be OK for the computer because it is only an electronic motherboard with accessories that can be easily replaced when a memory chip or disk-drive fails. But what will happen when your disk-drive or memory chip fails? That’s right — you end up in hospital or, if you are unlucky, permanently disabled. Think about it.
So where does that leave Frau Nahles? Her innovative idea probably won’t be enforced. You cannot possibly police everyone at home. However senior teams can give guidance and lead by example. The point is that everyone in the workplace — from director, to manager and office-worker need to understand that a work-life balance is important. I have a colleague who suffered ‘burnout’ a few years ago at 40 years. She never worked full-time again.
Anyway, I must go home now. My day is over and my writing for today is finished.
