French workers have recently been given the right to disconnect from their e-mail and smartphones after they have left the office – and the youth section of a local union confederation wants that right to be introduced in Malta too.
The ForUM Youths Section has for the past few months been working on a policy document that reflects the needs of workers in today’s digital era.
It is in the process of researching how widespread the problem of being digitally available all the time actually is.
The idea is to try to emulate the “right to disconnect” recently granted by the French government, allowing people to ignore work emails after working hours. The measure is designed to protect free time from job obligations.
The new rule came into force at the beginning of the year and was part of a wide range of labour reforms aimed at making France a more competitive, business-friendly country while still protecting workers’ interests.
Some French companies have already put rules in place to bar employees from using their work devices after hours. Others completely shut down their e-mail systems during the night.
Many believe that workers today suffer from stress, burnout, trouble sleeping and even problems in their personal relationships or marriages when they are expected to work during their off-hours without overtime pay.
A study by the University of British Columbia in Canada found participants who were assigned to check their e-mail only three times a day were found to be less stressed out than those who could check their e-mails continuously.
Another study, by Colorado State University in the US, found the anticipation of e-mails outside of work hours actually had a negative impact on a person’s emotional state and hurt their work-life balance, leading to burnout.
“We took the concept and transferred it to the needs of the Maltese society after listening to over 40 youth groups coming from different backgrounds and political ideologies,” ForUM’s representative Graham Sansone told The Sunday Times of Malta.
“Nowadays it is almost considered sacrilegious to leave work at the end of your workday or on a Friday and simply not check your work e-mail again until you return to the office.
The constant need to check e-mail is the trade-off the modern workforce has made for the ability to work anytime, anywhere, thanks to smartphones and tablets that keep us always connected. So we are conducting an online survey to gather data for this policy document and see how widespread this is in Malta,” he said.
Mr Sansone said that according to preliminary research, it is not just doing a bit of work after normal working hours that causes burnout, but the true culprit is actually the constant worrying about off-hour e-mails or electronic communication.
“A study, Exhausted but Unable to Disconnect, by Lehigh University’s Liuba Belkin, Virginia Tech’s William Becker and Colorado State’s Samantha Conroy, shows employees are growing exhausted by the expectation they will always be available, never knowing what kind of work requests will be asked of them off hours.”
Typically, he said, companies do not mean to stress out employees in that way but in general companies and governments lack formal policies to counter the problem. “This is why we are preparing a policy document based on research that we are currently collecting, to be able to propose a law that would protect workers from this added stress,” Mr Sansone said.
In France, workers do an average of 35 hours a week and have an average of 31 days of vacation leave annually. In comparison, the average Maltese worker works a 40-hour full-time week and has 24 vacation days.
The survey is available through https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/F5XCZKS .