Lifestyle

The out-of-hours email ban causing stress is proof our working culture needs an overhaul


If a job simply cannot be done within a nine-hour working day, that’s not an issue with workers, but with the job itself (Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

About to do some work you didn’t manage to finish on Friday?

Or are you reading through a grumpy email from your boss and already mentally drafting your immediate, apologetic response?

Stop. Please, stop. We simply can’t keep going on like this. Working into our weekends and being on constant alert, escaping the office physically but never, ever mentally (not entirely), not even when we vow to do a digital detox. We can feel ourselves worrying about what horrors lurk inside our inbox.

This week a study declared that while a ban on out-of-office emails could help some people to step away from work and feel a bit calmer, for others it could prevent them from getting all their work done, causing stress.

Dr Emma Russell, of the University of Sussex Business School, said ‘[Blanket bans] would be unlikely to be welcomed by employees who prioritise work performance goals and who would prefer to attend to work outside of hours if it helps them get their tasks completed.’

Cue a load of managers thinking: ‘ah, yes, it’s okay to send emails out of work-time and expect a response, because doing a blanket ban could make people worry!’

This is, quite frankly, insane.

If someone is unable to get the work done during their office hours, the solution is not to welcome working all weekend or encourage them to be constantly contactable.

Either they’re not equipped to do the job, or the job’s expectations need to radically change.

If a job simply cannot be done within a nine-hour working day, that’s not an issue with workers, but with the job itself.

We’re living in a bizarre world in which it’s perfectly reasonable – and often encouraged – to place caring about work as a higher priority than our own mental wellbeing, or actually being a person rather than a worker.

Stop letting work seep into every bit of your life (Picture: Getty)

Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of an email thread or I can hear people squabbling about a minor detail of their working world, I feel a desperate need to stand up and proclaim: ‘you know we’re all hurtling towards death, right? You know the earth is dying?’

Not to get too morbid, but one day you will die. Your working hours will make up a rather significant portion of your time on this mortal realm… but why should they take over the grand majority? Why are we so willing to dedicate our entire headspace to a job?

We work for a few reasons. We need money to live (and thus to do things we enjoy… although we’re often working too hard to do those things, so this reason disappears). We might be lucky enough to enjoy our jobs and find them genuinely engaging. We want a sense of fulfillment and pride. If we’re lucky, we’ve found some purpose and meaning in the work we do.

Personally, I do my job because I need money to pay for rent, so I have a comfortable place to store my candles and various skincare, and feed a small cat. I find it fun and interesting, and think if I didn’t show up to work five days a week I would quickly get very, very bored.

Also, I’ve found a purpose in what I do, which is handy because I don’t want to reproduce but I do need to know I have some greater meaning in my general existence. That’s quite important to me, otherwise I lie in bed getting philisophical and wondering why I’m even here on this earth.

For me that purpose is connecting with people and making them feel less weird and alone in the world, or lifting them up for a moment of humour or joy, or sharing the stories of brilliant people doing brilliant things.

That’s not as important as saving sick children or solving world hunger, I’m aware, but it’s what keeps me going.

But I would never sacrifice my mental wellbeing or all the other bits of my life I enjoy for the sake of fulfilling that purpose a bit more. I’m not going to run myself ragged and miss out on actually living. Why are we killing ourselves to work when the whole point of working is being able to live?

Your job might be hugely important and essential. Good for you. You should still be able to complete it within working hours and without spending every waking moment of your life thinking about it. If you can’t, you shouldn’t be contorting your life to fit around work – it’s our entire working culture that needs to change.

We need to all – bosses and CEOs especially – remember that we’re humans trying to fill our moderately short lives with some sort of meaning. We’re not just machines built for the purpose of ticking through a to-do list. We’re all trying to be happy and fulfilled and work is just one part of that – it can’t be our entire existence.

That means actually sticking to working hours rather than encouraging coming in early and staying late.

It means not going absolutely ballistic at someone when they make a mistake.

It means not making someone feel miserable day in, day out the second they turn on their work computer.

It means making flexible working the norm, so it’s easy to actually do other things that give someone’s life meaning, whether that’s raising a child, writing a book, or protesting, or to do things that make us feel good (yes, including actually being able to sleep, thanks to a working schedule that matches up to our personal sleep cycles).

We decide the shape of our lives and what fills them (Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Essentially, it means remembering that whatever piece of work that needs doing can wait, that there are parts of life that are more important than filing that report or replying to an email. There has to be more to life than work, and our culture needs to radically change to make those other bits possible.

When you think about big concepts of the meaning of life and the destruction of our plant, who can truly care about going to a pointless meeting or agonising over the best way to end an email?

Stop letting work seep into every bit of your life. Stop expecting people who work for you to exist only to do whatever you say.

It’s time for humanity. It’s time to stop sticking to rigid structure just because they’re ‘the way things are done’. We decide the shape of our lives and what fills them. We can change things to make them better suit our actual wants and needs.

That might mean scrapping the five-day working week, banning work emails at the weekend, accepting flexible working as the norm, or allowing people to piss off and go travelling for a year to figure out what they want. Change is scary, but when work is so all-consuming that we’re anxious that we’re not able to play catch up during our time off, it’s oh so necessary.

MORE: Workers given four day week at law firm are ‘less stressed and more productive’

MORE: Should you read work emails when you’re on holiday?





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