As the Covid-19 lockdown measures have taken effect around the world, large swathes of the workforce have been forced to work from home. Among the numerous challenges this has created, the blurring of boundaries between our professional and personal lives is foremost among them.
Indeed, in a previous article, I pondered whether a blurred boundary between the two is likely to become the “new normal”. Research published last year highlights how the intrusion of work into our personal life can raise our stress levels, and therefore have a significant impact upon our family life.
The key to successful management of the work life balance of participants was the level of control they had over affairs. It’s a finding shared by a recent study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which found that having control over our boundary is sufficient to buffer the spikes in stress so often caused by work life balance issues.
Boundary control
The researchers highlight how before the pandemic, the rise in digital technologies made it easier for workers to be on the clock anywhere and any time, thus creating a significant blurring of our work life boundary. This has been compounded by the lockdown measures that have forced many of us to take our work home with us full-time. What’s more, with many employers using surveillance technologies to monitor what we do when working remotely, the lack of agency can be extreme.
“Most people simply can’t work without a smartphone, tablet or laptop computer,” the researchers explain. “These technologies are so ubiquitous and convenient that it can lead some people to think that employees have to be always on or always available. Clearly, this kind of after-hours intrusion into the home or personal life domain is unhealthy, and our research shows that an always-on mentality has a big downside in the form of increased job stress.”
The research saw several hundred full-time teachers tracked to monitor the intrusion work was making into their personal lives via the technologies we take for granted, such as our phones and tablets. The teachers were tracked for five consecutive weeks.
“We asked about their weekly work intrusion involving technology, specifically their after-hours work—whether they were expected to respond to work-related messages and emails immediately, and whether they were contacted about work-related issues after hours,” the researchers explain.
Maintenance techniques
The analysis revealed that teachers would often adopt a range of boundary maintenance tactics, such as ensuring that email alerts were turned off on their phone over the weekend. These tactics appeared to lower any perceptions of work life imbalance.
With remote working likely to become a more consistent and enduring trend over the coming years, this issue of work life balance is likely to become ever more pressing.
“Managing your work-life balance through boundary control is not only helpful for you and your family, it also could be a benefit for your co-workers, because they also have to potentially read and respond to the back-and-forth messages that people are sending after the workday is done,” the researchers explain. “Setting a good boundary between work and regular life is going to help more people and more stakeholders. Overall, it’s critical that individuals manage their work-life boundaries for their own health and well-being, but also for their own productivity and their colleagues’ productivity.”
What’s more, the effective maintenance of the boundary between our work and personal lives reduced the stress levels felt by the teachers, and indeed, the researchers found that managers should directly play a role in maintaining this divide to ensure the best outcomes in terms of productivity, engagement, and mental wellbeing of staff.
The supervisors who played an active role in cultivating the work life boundary tended to have much less stressed employees than those who insisted on a blurred boundary where employees were expected to be always available.
“A really important point around the sense of boundary control is that stakeholders can influence employees’ control,” the researchers continue. “Our study suggests that school principals can play a positive role in that their support for work-life balance was associated with the teachers’ greater sense of boundary control. When you have supportive leaders who model behaviors for work-life balance and work effectively with employees to creatively solve work-life conflicts, that translates into less stress for teachers through boundary control.”
Autonomy is key
To further emphasize the importance of autonomy in making remote working effective, a third study, from Baylor University, came to the same conclusion, albeit with a slight caveat. The researchers quizzed several hundred working adults to determine things such as their level of autonomy, physical and mental stress levels, and emotional stability.
The analysis found that autonomy was crucial to the wellbeing of remote workers, with those who were the most emotionally stable and most able to function with this level of autonomy best suited to such work. When high levels of job autonomy were paired with low emotional stability however, stress tended to result.
The authors believe their work is important in confounding the perception that autonomy is a gift that benefits all of us, and they hope that this added nuance will help managers better allocate remote work to those best suited for it.
“This lower need for autonomy may explain why less emotionally stable employees don’t do as well when working remotely, even when they have autonomy,” they explain.
In addition, the team came up with a number of practical recommendations for managers to make use of this new knowledge. As you might expect, the core of the advice revolved around understanding the personality of each employee, and using this to determine whether they are well suited to remote working.
“I would suggest managers look at employee behaviors, rather than for personality traits, per se,” the authors say. “For example, if someone does not handle stress well in the office, they are not likely to handle it well at home either. If someone gets overwhelmed easily, or reacts in big ways to requests or issues in the office, they are likely less well positioned to work remotely and handle that responsibility and stress.”
If remote working is to become more commonplace over the year ahead, then it’s important that managers take this into account. I’ve argued previously that this scenario will require managers to take a more active interest in the whole lives of their employees so that the transition to remote work is handled successfully. With many employees juggling home schooling with remote work, the stresses are considerable, and if managers want to get the best from their teams, it’s important that they are considerate of the challenges this places on them.
Remote working can be a huge boon to our productivity and wellbeing, but it’s by no means guaranteed, and will require a fresh approach to management for those dividends to be reaped.
