Millions around the globe made a sudden transition to remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, many employers were concerned about maintaining employee productivity. Later, some became concerned that this unprecedented situation carried a longer-term risk: employee burnout.
The risk of burnout when working from home is substantial. The lines between work and nonwork tend to blur. Employees who are working remotely for the first time are especially likely to struggle to preserve healthy boundaries between their professional and personal lives.
Lots of research suggests that drawing lines between our professional and personal lives is crucial, especially for our mental health. But it’s difficult, even in the best of circumstances. In no small measure, that’s because the knowledge economy has radically transformed what it means to be an “ideal worker.”
Our research has shown that workers often unintentionally make it hard for their supervisors, colleagues, and employees to maintain boundaries. One way they do so is by sending work emails outside office hours. In five studies involving more than 2,000 working adults, we found that senders of after-hours work emails underestimate how compelled receivers feel to respond right away, even when such emails are not urgent.
Covid-19 amplified these pressures. Even for employees who have a natural preference to separate their work and personal lives, circumstances might not allow them to do so. When schools and daycares closed, additional burdens were placed on working parents or low-income workers. Even companies that already encouraged employees to work from home were likely to have some trouble when supporting employees who faced the many challenges of working at home in the presence of their families.
So how can you continue to compartmentalize your work life and nonwork life? How can you “leave your work at the door” if you are no longer going out the door? And what can employers, managers, and coworkers do to help one another cope?
Based on our research and the wider academic literature, here are some recommendations.
In a classic paper, Blake Ashforth of Arizona State University described the ways in which people demarcate the transition from work to nonwork roles via “boundary-crossing activities.”1 Putting on your work clothes, commuting from home to work—these are physical and social indicators that something has changed. You’ve transitioned from “home you” to “work you.”
Try to maintain these boundaries when working remotely. In the short term, it may be a welcome change not to have to catch an early train to work, or to be able to spend all day in your pajamas—but both of those things are boundary-crossing activities that can do you good, so don’t abandon them altogether. Put on your work clothes every morning—casual Friday is fine, of course, but get yourself ready nonetheless. And consider replacing your morning commute with a walk to a nearby park, or even just around your apartment, before sitting down to work.
Maintaining temporal boundaries is critical for wellbeing and work engagement. This is particularly true when so many employees—and/or their colleagues—are facing the challenge of integrating childcare or eldercare responsibilities during regular work hours. It’s challenging even for employees without children or other family responsibilities, thanks to the mobile devices that keep our work with us at all times.
Sticking to a 9-to-5 schedule may prove unrealistic. You need to find work-time budgets that function best for yourself. You also need to be conscious and respectful that others might work at different times than you do. For some, it might be during a child’s nap; for others, it might be when their partner is cooking dinner. Whether or not you have children, you can create intentional work-time budgets by adding an “out of office” reply during certain hours of the day to focus on work. A less-extreme reply might just let others know that you might be slower than usual in responding, decreasing response expectations for others and yourself. If your flexible schedule requires you to work early or late, you can also add a note in your email footer indicating that while you might send messages outside regular office hours, you have no expectation of receiving a response outside their regular office hours.
Creating clear temporal boundaries often depends on your ability to coordinate your time with others. This calls for leaders to aid employees in structuring, coordinating, and managing the pace of work. This might mean regularly holding virtual check-in meetings with employees or providing them with tools to create virtual coffee breaks or workspaces.
While working from home, you may feel compelled to project the appearance of productivity, but this can lead you to work on tasks that are more immediate instead of more important—a tendency that research suggests is counterproductive in the long run, even if it benefits productivity in the short run. Particularly if you are facing an increased workload as you are juggling family and work tasks, you should pay attention to prioritizing important work.
Working all the time, even on your most important tasks, isn’t the answer. According to some estimates, a knowledge worker is only productive three hours every day, on average, and these hours should be free of interruptions or multitasking. Even before Covid-19, employees found it difficult to carve out three continuous hours to focus on their core work tasks. When work and family boundaries are removed, employees’ time is even more fragmented.
If you feel “on” all the time, you are at a higher risk of burnout when working from home than if you were going to the office as usual. In the long term, trying to squeeze in work and email responses whenever you have a few minutes to do so—during nap time, on the weekend, or by pausing a movie in the evening—is not only counterproductive but also detrimental to your well-being. We all need to find new ways—and help others do the same—to carve out nonwork time and mental space.
These are just a few recommendations that can help you maintain boundaries between your work and your personal life and thereby avoid burnout in the long run. Use the flexibility that remote work affords you to experiment with how to make your circumstances work for you.
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Laura M. Giurge is a postdoctoral research associate at London Business School and the Barnes Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on time, happiness, and the future of work. Vanessa K. Bohns is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University.
1. Blake E. Ashforth, Mel Fugate, and Glen E. Kreiner, “All in a Day’s Work: Boundaries and Micro Role Transitions,” Academy of Management Review, July 2000.
Adapted from “3 Tips to Avoid WFH Burnout,” on hbr.org, April 3, 2020 (product #H05IX0).