A new survey conducted by Just Eat for Business shows that workers with access to workplace apps and platforms are more prone to checking them outside of office hours.
According to the Digital Detox survey, 28% of respondents with access to tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams check their notifications once an hour when off the clock, compared to 39% of those who don’t have access checking them less than once every four hours.
Of the workers that did check their notifications hourly, 34% said they struggle to switch out of work mode, indicating that having access to these platforms is impacting the work-life balance of employees.
Additionally, 49% of those who routinely checked their notifications also reported feeling burnout, which has become a prominent issue in today’s workforce.
However, there are ways that business leaders can combat this issue, such as encouraging workers to shut off their work-related devices after hours, respecting boundaries set in place by workers, offering them access to wellbeing or digital detox apps, and emphasizing how important it is to nurture mental health at work.
“Emails outside of work hours should be discouraged to set a clear boundary between working hours and home life. Emails sent outside of working hours could be set to send during working hours,” said Dr. Brad McKenna of the University of East Anglia and Dr. Wenjie Cai. “France has been doing this for a while and more recently Portugal. If someone is working flexible hours outside of regular working hours their email signature could say something like ‘there is no expectation to reply outside of regular working hours.’”
