This blog-post comes after a rather lengthy gap. Changes in roles and vacations tend to do that….but the good news is that there are a bunch of topics that I have stored for the next few months. This blog is spurred by a coffee conversation I had with Samantha Conroy, an outstanding former PhD student who is now a rising research scholar at Colorado State. She described some of her research which transported me back two years to a time when I was dining at a friend’s house. It was a Saturday evening and I should have been having fun. Yet, my focus was on my IPhone – I kept checking it for emails. A lot went on in my job but surely almost anything that came up could have waited till Monday? Yet I felt compelled to repeatedly check my email. I knew for sure then, that something was wrong in the way I was approaching my work. I have since changed my habits but seeing more and more people becoming increasingly powerless under the non-stop barrage of 24 hour emails, I want to start this blog-post by talking about the research that Samamtha and her co-authors (Liuba Beklin at LeHigh University, and William Becker at Virginia Tech) recently completed.
A fundamental question lies in why we feel obliged to look at work related emails after hours? Often times such expectations are not directly spelt out, or even expected, but social norms can create tremendous pressure. We feel obliged to be on email when someone in the hierarchy sends emails after hours and some of the recipients immediately respond. Do we want to be that one person who doesn’t respond till we get back to work? Or an expectation can be created by the sheer volume of emails that are sent after hours or on holidays. Especially when individuals up the ladder in a hierarchy do this, people lower down feel pressurized to respond…and as more individuals fall into this pattern, it becomes harder for others to avoid emails after hours and during holidays. (Truth be told, I am extremely guilty of sending emails after hours personally….though I make it a point to tell people around me that I don’t expect them to respond).
The research by Conroy and her colleagues, builds on a mountain of emerging evidence that attending to emails after hours has the potential to cause long term damage to individuals and to organizations alike. And it is not the amount of time spent answering emails – it is the anticipation that there will be emails that will ‘need’ us to respond. This anticipation and perceived pressure create distractions from quality time that ultimately leads to lower productivity and a host of undesirable effects (lower motivation, increase conflict in personal relationships, absenteeism, and the like). These research results are interesting but do come with several ‘caveats’.
One of these key caveats lies in what exactly do we mean by non-work time? For most people it would mean time spent outside of traditionally specified working hours. That would be OK for a large number people but there is now very strong evidence that we differ from each other in terms of our body’s biorhythms. While a majority of people are at their best in the morning (so called larks) there is a substantially large minority of individuals who are ‘owls’ in that they do their best work at night. If an organization is trying to adjust to these aspects of individuals, and allowing employees to work when they think best, then of course, there will be emails that will arrive at non-work times for some individuals. It would seem that organizations are caught in cross-currents here – one person’s work hours may be another person’s off work hours. Perhaps the solution is in making individuals comfortable responding to email within a reasonable amount of time as opposed to the moment an email is received? Clearly, both individuals and organizations have to work to ensure that the work habits of one group of individuals do not become a compelling pressure for another group of individuals.
And of course, as we try to solve one set of problems, we often create another set. For instance, as organizations recognized that individuals have different biorhythms that make them larks and owls, and offered them flexible schedules it seems to have some unanticipated consequences. For instance, research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows that an individual who uses flex time may make the choice to manage personal and family issues rather than to match her body’s bio rhythms (not necessarily wrong, but it does not obviously match an individual’s biorhythm to the time when they do their most critical work). And even when individuals use flex time to match their body rhythms, there is research that shows that employees who start work later in the day tend to be rated lower on performance evaluations – this is especially true if the supervisor herself is a morning person. Well, no one said it is a simple world out there.