Shai Aharony spends his days responding to e-mails. He runs a small digital marketing company, called ’Reboot Online,’ based in North London. In 2015, Aharony took a vacation to Sri Lanka with his wife and two children. During the 10-day trip, he received more than 200 e-mails. While his family was enjoying the view from a Sri Lankan mountaintop, he was running around with his laptop trying to get a cellular signal, so he could respond to a client’s email.
“It dawned on me that this is ridiculous,” Aharony said.
“That I should be spending my time with my family and children. So I decided to take action.”
When he returned home from vacation, Aharony conducted an audit of his staff’s after-work e-mails.
“We realized that the vast majority of them were completely unnecessary,” he said.
So Aharony made a bold decision. He sent (you guessed it) another e-mail. But this one was addressed to all of his staff and his company’s clients.
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Aharony explained that they should no longer send or respond to any non-urgent emails outside of regular work hours. He says his employees’ jaws hit the floor.
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“It probably cut down the number of after-work e-mails by 95 per cent,” he said with a sigh of relief. “We hardly receive any emails during the weekend at all now. Especially on holidays, it makes a massive difference. This inability to disconnect is encroaching on our lives quite dramatically these days.”
And a growing number of companies, even countries, are beginning to fight back. France is about to become the first country to legally protect an employee’s ‘Right to Disconnect.’ The law, which takes effect in 2017, requires all French companies with more than 50 staff members to create a policy setting-out which hours of the day are off-limits for work-related e-mails.
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Linh Le, a partner at Elia Consulting in Paris, says French companies that don’t abide by the new law are unlikely to face punishment. But the policies could empower employees in other ways, such as labour disputes.
“For example, let’s say an employee gets fired because they repeatedly don’t answer their e-mails on Sundays. This law might be there to protect them from this kind of abuse,” Le said.
Other European companies are taking similar steps voluntarily. Volkswagen turns off its servers after hours. Another German carmaker, Daimler, allows its staff to automatically delete e-mails they receive on vacation. These initiatives aren’t just about being charitable to staff; research shows it can actually pay to unplug.
“The evidence is that people who struggle to ‘switch off’ have got lower personal productivity and they suffer more from ill-health,” Patrick Woodman, head of external affairs at London’s Chartered Management Institute, explained. His firm recently conducted a survey of more than 1,500 managers, who reported spending an average of one hour each day responding to e-mails after work.
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At ‘Reboot Online,’ Aharony says he used to be able to relate to that inundated inbox. But not anymore.
“At first, our clients were apprehensive that we might miss opportunities,” he recalled. “But we made it clear that if anything happens that needs urgent attention, we’re still here, that we’re still reachable.”
Aharony says some of their clients have actually adopted the same e-mail rule for themselves. And he’s received plenty of inquiries from others, just don’t expect him to respond until tomorrow.
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