[Myoung-Gi Chon in The Conversation]

"We found a disturbing link between work-related communication outside of regular hours and increased employee burnout. Answering emails after hours was linked to worse productivity, employees badmouthing their employers and other negative behaviors."

This is an important (if perhaps obvious) finding, but it's worth diving a little deeper and asking follow-on questions. Is it just the act of sending communications out of working hours? Or is it also an underlying organizational culture of disrespect for employees that allows such a thing to be normal?

The reason I ask is that one might be tempted to address the symptom - those out of hours emails - when there's likely something deeper to also take care of.

In the same vein, that's not to say that you shouldn't address the expectation of ubiquitous availability because the larger cultural work is still to be done. They clearly are bad in themselves, and do lead to exhaustion and burnout. But it seems to me that you have to do the bigger work, too.

#Business

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