Imagine it's Friday night. You're about to binge-watch a brand new Netflix drama, attempting to unwind after an extended week. Suddenly, your phone beeps with a piece email marked “urgent.” Your heart sinks, your stress level rises. Even for those who determine not to reply straight away, the damage is completed. Work has once more interfered along with your personal life.
The intrusion of labor into personal life, aided by smartphones and other technologies, may look like a triumph of efficiency. But constant connectivity comes at a price for workers and employers, research shows.
As a professor of communicationI wanted to grasp what happens when people feel compelled to send quick work emails after dinner and before breakfast. So a colleague and I conducted a study examining the consequences of after-work communication within the workplace.
We found a disturbing connection between work-related communication outside of standard working hours and increased worker burnout. Answering emails after work was related to lower productivity, employees speaking poorly about their employers, and other negative behaviors.
The study, which was conducted as a part of a survey of 315 full-time employees within the USA from various industries, is predicated on the “Theory of resource conservation“ to clarify how communicating outside of labor hours depletes employees’ mental and emotional reserves.
The data is evident: work-related communication after regular working hours results in emotional exhaustion, which in turn can result in counterproductive work behavior.
Why it is crucial
This scenario is becoming an increasing number of common: More than half of American employees said they checked work-related messages at the least once over the weekend, Survey 2013 by the American Psychological Association. The numbers have undoubtedly only increased since then.
Our findings show the results of this variation in the fashionable workplace. When the boundaries between personal and skilled life develop into blurred, it not only harms people's job and life satisfaction, but additionally the corporate's performance.
We have seen firsthand the long-term impact of the blurring of labor time and free time brought on by communications technology. In my opinion, this study is a critical wake-up call that underscores the necessity for clear boundaries that prevent employees' free time from becoming just one other extension of their workday.
What happens next?
The blurring of the lines between work and private life stays a serious problem in corporate communications, and the impact of artificial intelligence has develop into a serious research topic because the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. That's why my team is currently investigating how AI impacts skills and wellbeing inside corporate communications.
The Research Brief is a summary of interesting scientific papers.
image credit : theconversation.com