To disconnect gains ground as pandemic brings work home

A couple weeks into Italy's first coronavirus lockdown in March this past year, Andrea Pestarino started setting a 5.30 p.m. alarm as a reminder it had been time to carefully turn off his laptop and go play soccer along with his kids in the garden.

The 42-year-old innovation manager said the trick helped him strike an improved work-life balance after his engineering firm's sudden proceed to remote work pushed him to spend longer hours glued to the computer screen.

"In the beginning switching off was difficult, as I felt guilty to be away from any office which prompted me to do more," Pestarino said by phone. "I used to bring forward things that I could have easily done the next day."

He was hardly the only person.

Research in a number of countries has displayed the pandemic-induced shift to remote working has resulted in longer working hours for thousands of people, fanning a long-standing debate on the necessity to grant employees a right to disconnect.

In a British poll released by trade union Prospect earlier this month, 35% of normally office-based personnel said their mental health had degraded given that they started working at home during the pandemic.

Of those, a lot more than 40% link the condition to being struggling to switch off from work.

The study was part of a call to British lawmakers to include the proper to disconnect - giving employees the right to switch faraway from work beyond normal work hours - within an upcoming employment bill expected to be published this season.

"For an incredible number of us, working at home has felt similar to sleeping at work, with remote technology meaning it really is harder to fully switch off," Andrew Pakes, research director at Prospect, said in emailed comments.

Scientific tests have linked long working hours and the lack of weekend rest to a range of ailments including depression, anxiety, sleep impairment and heart disease.

Research also shows that working more will not mean working better, as fatigue blurs judgment and hampers people's ability to communicate and recognize others' emotions.

As businesses increasingly embrace remote work as a long-term solution, with many likely to keep it in place following the pandemic, some governments have moved to modify the right to disconnect.

Ireland introduced a legal right for employees never to respond to emails, telephone calls or other messages during non-work hours from April 1.

The European Union's parliament backed an identical proposal in January and Canada is also mulling right-to-disconnect regulations.'WE NEED NEW RULES'

Some companies are taking their own steps to help employees leave work behind by the end of the day.

In March, Italy's motorway operator Autostrade signed a handle trade unions allowing employees to switch off for 90 minutes through the working day to help children with schooling during lockdown.

Also last month, Italian engineering and qualification services group Rina, where Pestarino works, granted all staff a right to disconnect.

Beneath the deal, remote workers are encouraged to work a maximum of eight hours anytime between 7am and 8pm. Outside this window, employees should turn off their devices, said Rina's head of recruiting Alessandro Galvani.

Late-night emails are discouraged by a pop-up notification asking the writer to think twice before hitting send, he said by phone.

Corralling working hours was vital that you prevent remote-work overall flexibility from sliding into overwork, Galvani added.

"In Italy, people tend to be judged based how long they work, instead of on what they do," he said. "If you want to change that people need new rules, (because) change doesn't happen on its own."

Earlier attempts to legislate the proper to disconnect suggest the new rules usually do not always work out needlessly to say.

France approved a law in 2016 requiring companies with an increase of than 50 employees to set out when workers shouldn't send or answer email and phone calls.

However in a survey this past year by UGICT-CGT, which represents engineers, managers and tech employees within the CGT trade union, almost 80% of remote personnel said during the pandemic they enjoyed no right to disconnect.

This is because organizations often come up with time charts that usually do not fit all staff - some might have to call clients in several time zones, for instance - and tend to put business before compliance with disconnecting policies, said Matthieu Trubert, a CGT representative at Microsoft.

"Companies' principles on disconnecting ... work theoretically, however, not easily in true to life," he said.

Strict enforcement mechanisms, like switching off servers to create it basically impossible to send email after office hours - a strategy adopted nine years ago by automaker Volkswagen in Germany - can even be problematic, say mental health experts.

A 2020 study by the University of Sussex in Britain discovered that email bans could be detrimental to personnel with high degrees of anxiety or who need more flexibility, like carers and part-time employees - and could end up triggering more stress than good. Lead author Emma Russell, who teaches occupational psychology at the university, said it was better for managers to lead by example and take other less invasive measures, like asking staff to list when they are contactable within their email signatures.

Nayla Glaise, a CGT delegate for consultancy firm Accenture, said companies need to question just how their workflow is organized you need to include employees in a discussion about how to change it - for instance, by better defining what can be viewed as as "urgent". "You could have the most beautiful (right-to-disconnect) agreement posted on the wall. But whether it's not alive ... then it's useless," she said.