Imagine it’s Friday evening. You’re about to watch a new Netflix drama, trying to unwind after a long week. Suddenly your phone pings with a work email marked “urgent.” Your heart sinks; your stress levels rise. Even if you choose not to respond immediately, the damage is done. Work has again encroached on your personal life.
The intrusion of work into home life, helped along by smartphones and other technologies, might seem like a triumph of efficiency. But this constant connectivity comes at a cost to employees and employers alike, research suggests.
As a professor of communications, I wanted to understand what happens when people feel compelled to dash off work emails after dinner and before breakfast. So a colleague and I conducted a study investigating the effects of after-hours work communication.
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.
The research, conducted through a survey of 315 full-time U.S. employees across various industries, draws upon the “conservation of resources theory” to explain how after-hours communication depletes employees’ mental and emotional reserves.
The data is unequivocal: Engaging in work-related communication after regular business hours leads to emotional exhaustion, which in turn can spill over into counterproductive work behavior.
Why it matters
This scenario is increasingly common: More than half of American employees reported checking work-related messages at least once over the weekend, according to a 2013 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association. The numbers have doubtless only risen since then.
