In one month, we will have spent more time caressing our smartphone screen than our loved one in a lifetime; every week we check our phone 1,050 times versus 25 times eating, and in a lifetime we spend five years on the Internet versus 0.31 years laughing… Does this kind of anecdote make you anxious?
Albert Einstein predicted it: “We have become slaves to our own creation, bound by the invisible chains of hyperconnectivity.”
The consequences of new forms of work.
A new reflection is emerging that intertwines work digitalization, boundaries between life spheres, information overload, and performance. It encourages distinguishing stress caused by work from stress caused by work intruding into personal life. The causes of the former are well known: work organization and the multiplication of distractions (SMS, emails, etc.), as well as all tasks that are rarely coherent with one another. Stress caused by work invading extra-professional life is more complex. It is first caused by professional tasks performed in places and at times that should not be dedicated to them. But the invasion of work into personal life is not just an extension in time and space. Difficulties to resolve and problems without solutions are not automatically forgotten after 35 working hours. They remain in the mind and occupy an important place there. Being on vacation is not enough to compartmentalize life spheres.
Managing boundaries between work and non-work is a skill.
Some individuals know how to manage boundaries between professional and personal life. Effective management strategies exist, and some employees know how to organize a non-polluting permeability between their different life spheres. Managing boundaries between work and non-work in the digital age is therefore a skill. More precisely, it is a skill that serves to manage one’s own skills. It is among the resources necessary to develop, in the same way as the ability to navigate career guidance. It is up to individuals to engage in this learning.
But it is also the responsibility of companies to organize the methods of deployment and use. Because if knowing how to manage one’s boundaries is an aptitude, the assessment of behaviors that result from it falls to organizations and managers. Delaying a response to an email can be a pragmatic and effective behavior. But in a country where the culture of presenteeism permeates minds, where it is taken for granted that managers should not count their time and where everything is an excuse to worry about employee engagement, postponing an email reply is also playing with norms. Managing digital disconnection outside work challenges implicit rules of coordination between employees and managers.
For the right to disconnect to be a true advance for employees.
If the norms governing psychological boundaries between work and non-work do not change, the right to disconnect will paradoxically become a source of stress. It will increase mental burden if employees still feel obliged to know and respond, if managers or clients consider it normal to expect answers outside working hours. The right to disconnect, on the other hand, will be a source of progress if it allows our understanding of real boundaries between work and non-work to evolve.
By “forcing” employees to disconnect professionally, we will not force them to leave their screens completely, but we will at least remove one source of stress. Regardless of the nature of the measures taken and the degree of coercion, provided we allow employees to better recharge. Perhaps it’s time we understood that the much-vaunted flexibility has too high a cost…
And since work, like leisure time (that of culture, hobbies, and private life), are spaces for self-identification and self-construction. This allows us to put things in perspective: it is possible to combat overinvestment in work by not forgetting to do something with your free time – and not just prepare to return to labor. Likewise, through professional engagement, we have the ability to avoid alienating ourselves in “debilitating” leisure activities. Since alienations are multiple, we can try to neutralize them against each other; try to find that balance which is not merely a matter of scheduling, but which is also a fundamental condition for what ancient philosophers called “a life well-lived”.
Time to rest!