The Right To Switch Off

It is fairly rare for me to approve of a policy promoted by the Labour Party but  do agree with their recently announced policy to allow employees to opt out of being contacted by their employer outside of normal business hours. I think the need to be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week has done enormous harm to peoples’ well-being and to their productivity.

We sold a business in the Midlands last year for a letting agent in her early sixties who said that ever since she got her first mobile phone 35 years ago she has taken it with her everywhere and never had a proper day off. Christmas Day, holidays abroad, her son’s wedding – every event she has tried to enjoy over more than three decades has been interrupted by someone else’s emergency. She said that her main reason for wanting to sell her business was that she was utterly exhausted.

I think the constant need to be available has caused deep-rooted problems for both employees and business owners. The main problems are stress, resentment, reduced productivity, burnout and increased staff turnover.

A phone call from a tenant with a maintenance issue late in the evening might only take 10 minutes to deal with but it can so easily ruin their evening and leave them feeling cross and resentful. Over a period of time, constant out of hours phone calls can easily cause resentment to build to such a level that it can cause them to resign and look for another job.

Even daytime interruptions can be very harmful. Most people have got into the habit of having Outlook open all day.This means that whatever you are doing you see notifications for other emails coming in incessantly all day and this can be extremely distracting. If you are not very careful the result will be that an important and complex task that you were trying to give your full attention to is done less well than it could and should have been.

So what can be done about all this?  Well, the right to opt out of receiving our of hours phone calls and emails is a good start but it is just the tip of the iceberg. During the working day try to get into the habit of taking a few minutes each morning to write a list of priority jobs for the day then set aside some protected time when you can give them your full attention without interruptions.

Most people find that they are much more productive if they turn off their new email notifications for set periods of time each day so that they can deal with their existing work-in-progress properly before they start dealing with new tasks.  Very few matters are so urgent that they cannot wait for an hour or two.

Finally, every business should consider their out-of-hours arrangements and the true cost of dealing with this. The cost is not just the direct but the longer term cost to the business of reduced morale, reduced productivity and increased staff turnover rates. When these are taken into account fully the conclusion that many business owners reach is to contract out their out-of-hours work to a specialist company that is set up to deal with it properly.

Adam Walker is a business sales broker and management consultant who has worked in the property sector for 42 years.