Tips and Tricks to Take the Stress Out and Avoid Burnout
Just in case you didn’t catch the news, Australia recently passed a law giving its citizens the right to disconnect after work. What’s most interesting–for Americans–about this story is not that Australians working for businesses with under 15 employees and only in fairly specific circumstances have the right to disconnect now, but that zero Americans have any such delineated right. Let me repeat that. If you live in the US, you don’t have the right to ignore your boss after hours when you’re not getting paid.
At a time when everyone is trying to manage work-life balance so that work gets done better and more easily because mental health is stronger and energy levels are higher, this is a huge thumb in the eye for work-life balance. And, it doesn’t help get work done.
Let’s say, for instance, you worked in the US and had a manager that just liked to call you on their commute back from work and talk about non-work-related things (not that this would ever happen). And let’s say their commute was an hour long. And let’s say they called you every single day. And let’s say–again, just for the sake of argument–that they did this for three months straight. That would be 60 hours or 1 and a half standard work weeks of time spent being the unpaid ride-home entertainment for a boss the employee isn’t legally able to hang up on. (Alright, you got me. This wasn’t a hypothetical, this actually happened to me.)
A New Way to Burn Out
Business groups fight tooth and nail in the US to avoid having laws like the Australian one passed here and, frankly, it’s likely the Australian law is as toothless as it is because of business groups as well. One question. Why? Honestly, why?
Having 24/7 access to your employees at the touch of a button was never, ever a “thing” in the entire course of human history. That is, not until the introduction and ubiquitous adoption of the smartphone less than 20 years ago. And, inarguably, businesses were still just as successful if not more successful, business still got done, skyscrapers still got built, and all with people going home every night blissfully disconnected from their jobs.
This 24-hours-on expectation is a whole new way to burn out, unprecedented in human history. And, frankly, it needs to stop.
Re-Orienting Office Culture to Avoid Burnout
We’re all aware of the term “essential workers” from our time in lockdown land, and while it’s a blanket term that borders on offensive in and of itself, it can be useful when thinking about your office culture. Yes, every worker is “essential,” but not every worker is essential all the time. There is really no need to have a mechanic available 24/7 or a software engineer on speed dial.
Frankly, unless your business involves directly keeping people alive, there is no reason it can’t exist and do business during business hours. Nobody really needs that email sent or that Taco Bell order at 4 AM.
If you’re a boss or a manager of a team, it’s easy to reorient your office culture. Set up a meeting and make it clear that, when you work, you work hard but when you’re off, you’re off. People will be beasts for 8 hours a day if they know they get their 16 hours a day free.
If you’re an employee, things are a little more tense. Best advice: delineate, at any job–especially a new job–what your working hours are and what your expectations are for your free time. If the job requires specialty software for communications, refuse to put that software onto any mobile device besides a company-provided laptop. It’s your property, they can’t force you to modify your property. If you’re afraid to do so because you don’t want to lose your job, trust me, it’s better to have a position in which clear communication is appreciated.
The Benefits of Better Work-Life Balance
Productivity–It has been proven, time and again, that good downtime makes good uptime. People that don’t get this, after all this time, don’t deserve to be in management positions.
Retention–A vanishingly small proportion of workers actually rate their job as the #1 passion in their life. If you step on their time for their real passions–family, friends, hobbies, pets–expect that to have real knock-on effects on retention. On the flip side, giving employees their agreed-upon level of work in the agreed-upon timeframe helps you keep better employees longer.
Morale–Short of an actual prison, there is nothing more crushing than a depressing workplace full of burnt-out people. Creating boundaries between the work and home lives can improve morale in the workplace which can make or break any company.
Cards on the table, we all have the right to lives outside of work uninterrupted by that work. If we don’t, we aren’t employees, we’re slaves. And, while some might understandably worry about the work that doesn’t get done when they can’t contact their employees on a moment’s notice, they are missing the much larger picture of all the work that can be done by healthy, happy employees. Let’s take a page out of the book of everyone who built the commanding skylines of every major city in the US and let employees go home to rest so they can come back the next day and build things higher.
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