During this year’s holiday season, if you struggle to put down your phone and switch off from the grind, you may be seriously putting your mental and physical health at risk.

The rise of the digital age has drastically increased expectations placed on employees by employers, creating a generation of workers that are ‘always on’.  

Research from the University of South Australia (UniSA) shows that employees who were more likely to suffer from burnout, psychological distress, and poor physical health were those who respond to digital work communication out of hours.

In the 2021 survey of over 2200 academics and professional staff across 40 universities in Australia, researchers found:

• 26 per cent felt that they had to respond to work-related texts, calls and emails from supervisors during their leisure time
• 57 per cent of employees said that they’d sent work-related digital communications to other colleagues in the evenings
• 50 per cent reported that they often receive work-related texts, calls and emails from colleagues on the weekend
• 36 per cent reported in their organisation it was the norm to respond immediately to digital communication

Higher levels of psychological distress, emotional exhaustion and poor physical health were experienced by those employees who felt they were expected to respond to communication from colleagues over the weekend.

Dr Amy Zadow, a UniSA researcher, said the expectation on Australian employees to be available 24/7 is putting pressure on workers, which will eventually lead to burn out.

“Since Covid-19, the digitalisation of work has really skyrocketed, blurring work boundaries, and paving the path for people to be contactable at all hours. But being available to work both day and night limits the opportunity for people to recover – doing things such as exercise and catching up with friends and family – and when there is no recovery period, you can start to burn out,” Dr Zadow said.

“Our research shows that high levels of out-of-hours work digital communication can have a significant impact on your physical and mental wellbeing, affect work-family relationships, cause psychological distress, and poor physical health. Conversely, workers who kept their work boundaries in check experienced less stress and pressure.”

According to UniSA’s Professor Kurt Lushington, it’s increasingly important to deal with work-related stress, even though it can be challenging to set boundaries.

“Setting up policies, practices and procedures to protect psychological health by developing a strong Psychosocial Safety Climate is likely to limit damaging out-of-hours digital communication. And, on a broader scale, this is already being considered in various Enterprise Bargaining Agreements and National Employment Standards,” Professor Lushington said.

“The starting place is measuring work demand so that an organisation can mitigate the risk in the first place. Once they do this, they can develop protective actions that can prevent the development or continuations of harmful workplace norms.

“At the end of the workday, everyone should have the right to disconnect.”

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