The right to disconnect is an important element of quality of life at work. Managing work effectively today requires rethinking work organization, as well as the manager’s role and competencies.
Why is it so difficult to disconnect?
Many employees maintain a more or less significant digital connection with their employer at all times. A hyperconnectivity, sometimes imposed, partly voluntary, that keeps individuals in a permanent mode of immediate demand, hampering perspective-taking and prioritization.
To promote the principle of disconnection, organizations must implement a set of concrete practices.
The keys to achieving genuine disconnection.
-
Challenge the culture of immediacy.
In many organizations, the advent of new communication technologies has created a context of permanent immediate demand. Real-time access, at any time, to incoming requests has significantly impacted response times. Today, it is difficult to distinguish what is urgent from what is not, and many employees complain about having to relegate their substantive tasks to off-peak hours (early morning or end of day), or even during weekends and holidays, as these are the only times when the digital flow calms down enough to dedicate oneself to tasks requiring perspective and concentration. Each individual both suffers from and contributes to this complex situation. Enforcing the right to disconnect first requires opening up this situation for debate: enabling a collective reassessment of how things function.
-
Evolve workflow management.
Few managers adapt their requests and prescriptions to employees’ work cycles, particularly during phases preceding or following their departure on leave. Yet, serene disconnection depends on employees’ ability to calmly complete ongoing tasks on the one hand, and on the other hand, the possibility to smoothly return to work after leave by reviewing information and tasks completed during their absence. Encouraging managers to develop these “buffer periods” is therefore an important area of focus. This involves reducing solicitations and task assignments for a period to be defined based on the nature of the activity.
-
Clarify priorities and deadlines.
In many organizations, most requests no longer come with deadlines. A task is considered assigned to a subordinate from the moment they are notified of it. Few organizations also take the time to categorize whether tasks are urgent or important. In such an environment, it is difficult to properly plan work and defer less important tasks before going on leave, for example. Quality disconnection therefore depends on the clarity of deadlines and priorities, and the decision-making latitude given to employees to organize themselves in the most suitable way.
To this end, several best practices can be encouraged:
- Prioritizing tasks by category within each team
- Defining average response times by task category
- Establishing business continuity plans and handover procedures between employees when taking time off
- Systematically indicating expected deadlines when assigning a task, with the option to renegotiate the deadline if it is not feasible.
-
Lead by example
Disconnection within an organization is only possible if every stakeholder, starting with senior management, commits to respecting practices that preserve employees’ private sphere. Yet it is clear that pressure for immediacy is often dictated by this same senior management, which sometimes acts as if it is not subject to the rules imposed on others.
Once failures in exemplary behavior exist, rules favoring disconnection lose all credibility. Creating more virtuous organizations therefore depends above all on the genuine commitment of senior leaders and clear rules.
Some interesting initiatives on this topic: Rakuten, which organizes a half-day without emails every month to encourage face-to-face communication among employees; Daimler, which automatically deletes emails received during employees’ time off; Orange, which allows its employees to disconnect from digital communication tools for two hours a day to avoid disruptions during their work; Intel, which has implemented silent time every Tuesday morning, during which messaging and mobile phones are turned off; Volkswagen, which blocks access to its servers from 6:15 PM to 7 AM on weekdays and throughout the weekend; Michelin, which monitors remote connections by its employees in the evening and on weekends to ensure they are not working overtime (as soon as an employee connects at least five times a month outside their working hours, an email is sent to their manager, who must then schedule a meeting with the employee), and finally Renault, at its Plessis-Robinson offices, which has made a “calm space” available from 9 AM to 8 PM for employees who want to take a nap or simply take a break to clear their minds.
-
Encourage good individual and collective practices.
Beyond the organizational solutions described above, disconnection also requires new individual work habits.
Several practices deserve to be encouraged:
- Disable notifications during vacation periods.
- Do not respond to incoming requests or demands during periods of absence.
- Reduce sending messages and requests to colleagues on leave to avoid overloading them upon their return, and defer requests whenever possible.
- Take time to transfer all important ongoing tasks and provide useful information to colleagues taking over.
These seemingly simple practices constitute small disciplines that have a real impact on the quality of working life for everyone by promoting the right to disconnect.
Ready to get started?