It also takes a long time to change an ingrained working culture, and our lived experience of being “always on” has slowly accumulated over decades and will take longer than a year to undo.
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There are ways that workers can help to hurry it up, though. Every employee should politely insist that their workplace has a clear policy on after-work communications, and that everyone knows what that is so the company can be held to account.
Once there’s a clear policy, it’s time to integrate the policy into your teams, with modelling starting from the top. “Managers should lead by example,” Volkova says, “using tools like ‘delay send’ instead of late-night emails, having open conversations with their teams, and setting clear norms around availability.”
It’s also up to individual workers to take responsibility for their own behaviour and what they will accept. “Employees can support this by switching off notifications after hours and communicating their own boundaries, helping to build a healthier balance together,” Volkova says.
The right to disconnect is not going to change our work culture overnight, or even after 12 months. But the next time you reflexively go to fire off an email, tap out a text or call a colleague outside work hours, pause to think whether it can wait until you’re all back online.
Culture shifts on this scale take time, and it’s going to take small actions, repeated over and over again, to slowly effect the change we all desperately want to see.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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