Batabyal: Is responding to work emails after hours a good or bad idea?

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The difference in work-life balance between the U.S. and European countries is substantial. The European Union, for instance, has a mandated four-week paid vacation period across all 27 of its countries. Some countries also require additional paid days off on top of this required period. Meanwhile, in the U.S., nearly one-third of all employees say they don’t have any access to paid time off (PTO), according to a recent report. And those who do have PTO don’t always use it. The same report found that 765 million vacation days go unused by Americans each year.

In 2022, Americans worked an average of 1,811 hours for the year, while in the U.K people worked 1,532; in France they worked 1,511 hours, and in Germany people worked an annual average of 1,341 hours that year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. These numbers are one key factor that explain why the productivity of American workers is higher than that of their European counterparts. Simply put, Americans work much harder than Europeans.

That said, might Americans work too hard and, on a related note, might they also do a poor job balancing their work and home lives? These questions have come to the forefront because of the recent passage of a new “right to disconnect” rule in Australia. This rule offers relief to Australians who feel forced to take calls or read email and other messages from employers after they finish their day’s work. Similar rules exist in some European nations as well.

This issue of “disconnecting from work” routinely confronts American workers as well, and therefore it makes sense to ask the question in the title of this essay.

On the one hand, responding to emails after work may signal to an employer how serious and dedicated an employee is about his or her work. Such a positive signal, if credible, may bode well for this employee’s future career prospects. On the other, to have some semblance of work-life balance, it is essential to be able to meaningfully unwind from work and spend time with one’s family, friends, and on other non-work activities.

A key question then, is the following: Does responding to work emails after hours pay professionally? Interesting new research sheds light on this question. In this study, researchers focused on what psychologists call “conservation of resources theory” and surveyed 315 full-time U.S. employees across various industries to explain how after-hours communication impacted the mental and emotional well-being of employees.

The results showed a worrisome connection between work-related communication outside of normal business hours and increased employee burnout. Specifically, answering emails after hours was connected to lower worker productivity, to employees badmouthing their employers, and to other kinds of negative behavior. Put differently, responding to work-related emails after normal business hours leads to emotional exhaustion, which in turn can spill over into counterproductive work behavior.

The key point to grasp from this research is that when the boundaries between home and work are corroded, it doesn’t just hurt people’s job and life satisfaction, but it also negatively affects an organization’s performance.

These findings tell us that maybe the Australians and the Belgians have a point with their “right to disconnect” rules. In other words, employers may send emails to employees after hours, but employees have the right to disconnect without any penalty. That said, creating such rules, ideally through legislation, is just addressing half the problem. The serious matter concerns enforcement. If such rules are to become law in the U.S., then they will need to be applied across the board and with non-trivial penalties so that employers who penalize disconnecting employees are themselves penalized.

Otherwise, we would have a collective action problem. This means that even though all employees would benefit from disconnecting after hours, a single employee would have an incentive to deviate and respond to emails after hours—and thereby improve his or her career prospects—if (s)he thinks that the rule or law will not be enforced properly.

Let me conclude by paraphrasing the investigative journalist Ron Brackin who once said that a law without enforced consequences is merely a suggestion.

Amit Batabyal is a distinguished professor, the Arthur J. Gosnell professor of economics, and the interim head of the Sustainability Department, all at RIT, but these views are his own.