As part of the job deal published last year by our government, all companies with more than 20 employees need to have a policy in place ensuring that their employees can exercise their right to disconnect. The deadline for this is approaching, your policy should be in place by April 1st.
Often the agreements revolve around centralized and automated measures. I strongly believe that you will see a very positive effect on the well-being of your staff if you accompany those technical measures with campaigns to raise awareness and increase collective and individual accountability.
Everyone is concerned : bosses, employees, team leaders, workers... This aspect of well-being within and outside of the workplace is both an individual and a collective responsibility.
What can you do to help your employees to disconnect from work ?
Make it clear that the leader, the team as a whole and each individual employee have their part to play. This is both a collective and individual responsibility and the very first step is to acknowledge this and to ensure that everyone realizes what role they play.
1. Clarify expectations. Encourage your leaders to have a chat with the team about their own habits.
What happens if they send e-mails or update shared project management tools in their own time? What are their intentions and what do they actually expect (or not) from the team when they do so?
2. Establish clear agreements. Ask every one of your teams to define how long they have to react to an email, to a project management tool, to a text message and to a phone call.
Different reaction time can be link to various communication and reporting tools.
3. Beware of misinterpretations. What if each of your employees took a step back to consider the following:
"Did you see my email from yesterday?" does not mean "This task should be done by now!"
Remember that our brains work very fast and takes some shortcuts. It could be useful to take a minute and review what the question actually is!
4. Identify the real source of stress. Help your employees develop their emotional intelligence. As in the previous point, our brains can be too quick to interpret and send us into panic mode. What actually triggered the stress reaction? Is the reaction appropriate?
5. The one person who decides to connect to work is you!
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