In 2020, millions of people started working from home for the first time, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Not surprisingly, this has made some employers concerned about maintaining employee productivity. But the bigger risk with our new ways of working is a longer-term one: employee burnout.
The risk is substantial. The lines between work and nonwork time and space have been blurred in new and unusual ways, and many remote employees—especially those who worked from home for the first time during the pandemic—likely struggle to preserve healthy boundaries between their professional and personal lives. To signal their loyalty, devotion, and productivity, they may feel they have to work all the time. Afternoons will blend with evenings; weekdays will blend with weekends; and little sense of time off will remain.
Lots of research suggests that drawing lines between our professional and personal lives is crucial, especially for our mental health.1 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 people 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 regular 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, with negative consequences on their well-being.
So how can employees continue to compartmentalize their work and nonwork lives, given the extraordinary situation that so many of us are in today? How can we “leave our work at the door” if we are no longer going out the door? What can employers, managers, and coworkers do to help one another cope and thrive in the contemporary workplace?
Based on our research and the wider academic literature, here are some recommendations:
In a classic paper,2 Blake Ashforth, of Arizona State University, described the ways in which people demarcate the transition from work to nonwork roles via “boundary-crossing activities.” 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 engagement. This is particularly true for employees—and their colleagues—who face 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. Employees need to find work “time budgets” that function best for them. They also need to be conscious and respectful that others might work at different times than they do. For some it might be a child’s nap; for others it might be when their partner is cooking dinner. Employees with or without children 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 could be to just let others know that you might be slower than usual in responding, decreasing expectations for others and yourself. You could also add a small note in your email footer indicating that while you might reply outside normal office hours, you have no expectation that anyone else will do the same.
Creating clear temporal boundaries often depends on the ability to coordinate one’s time and availability with others’. This calls for leaders to aid employees in structuring and managing the pace of work. That 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, employees often feel compelled to project the appearance of productivity, but this can lead them3 to work on tasks that are more immediate instead of more important—a tendency that research4 suggests is counterproductive in the long run, even if it might benefit productivity in the short run. Employees, particularly those facing increased workloads as they juggle family and work tasks, 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,5 the typical knowledge worker is productive only three hours every day, 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 tasks. With work and family boundaries being removed, employees’ time and attention have never been more fragmented.
Employees who feel “on” all the time are at a higher risk of burnout when working from home than if they were going to the office as usual. In the long term, trying to squeeze in work and email responses whenever we 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 our wellbeing and even the well-being of others. We all need to find new ways to carve out nonwork time and mental space—and help others do the same.
These are just a few recommendations that can help workers maintain boundaries between their work and personal lives and thereby avoid burnout in the long run. Employees, with the support of their managers, will need the flexibility to experiment with how to make their circumstances work for them.
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Laura M. Giurge is a postdoctoral research fellow at London Business School and the Barnes Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. You can read more about her ongoing work at www.lauramgiurge.com.
Vanessa K. Bohns is an associate professor of organizational behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University. You can read more about her research in her forthcoming book, You Have More Influence Than You Think, and at www.ilr.cornell.edu/people/vanessa-bohns.
1. Scott Schieman, “Gender, Dimensions of Work, and Supportive Coworker Relations,” Sociological Quarterly 47, no. 2 (December 2016): 195–214. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1533–8525.2006.00043.x.
2. Blake E. Ashforth, Mel Fugate, and Glen E. Kreiner, “All in a Day’s Work: Boundaries and Micro Role Transitions,” Academy of Management Review 25, no. 3 (July 2000): 472–491. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glen_Kreiner/publication/228079856_All_in_A_Day%27s_Work_Boundaries_and_Micro_Role_Transitions/links/542f1f720cf27e39fa994fa0/All-in-A-Days-Work-Boundaries-and-Micro-Role-Transitions.pdf.
3. Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher K. Hsee, “The Mere Urgency Effect,” Journal of Consumer Research 45, no. 3 (October 2018): 673–690, https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/45/3/673/4847790.
4. Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino, “Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance,” Harvard Business School, working paper 17–112 (June 25, 2017), https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17–112_54fdf950-a08d-4ba8-a718–1150dc8916cb.pdf.
5. “How Many Productive Hours in a Workday? Just 2 Hours, 23 Minutes . . . ,” vouchercloud, https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity.
Adapted from “3 Tips to Avoid WFH Burnout” on hbr.org, April 3, 2020 (product #H05IX0).