Apparently harmless, this behavior at work increases the risk of burn-out

While there are professions at greater risk of burnout, certain behaviors that we adopt on a daily basis aggravate the risk of exhaustion. This is the case of this unconscious habit, recently highlighted by experts: reading your emails outside of your working hours.

Imagine: it’s 9 p.m., you’re having a quiet dinner with your friends and you decide to take a look at your emails. This unconscious gesture makes you discover a new message from your colleague with an “urgent” subject. Whether you respond to it or not, the simple fact of having read this email would not be without risk for your mental health, according to the conclusions of a recent American study.

The theory of conservation of resources

This recurring behavior has not escaped Myoung-Gi Chon, professor of communications at Auburn University in the United States. To understand why work insidiously intrudes into the personal lives of employers and employees, Myoung-Gi Chon and her team conducted the survey among 315 full-time American employees in different sectors.

What is unique about this study is that it relied on “resource conservation theory,” according to which people strive to protect themselves against alteration and loss to establish new resources. Introduced by the American psychologist Stevan E. Hobfoll in 1989, this theory emphasizes stress which, caused by the threat of loss of resources (one’s job), the actual loss of resources or the absence of gain of resources, allows us to face life situations. In other words, work more to protect your job.

Counterproductive behavior

What if working after a day at the office isn’t such a good idea in reality? In a article published in The ConversationMyoung-Gi Chon explains why communicating outside of “normal” work hours depletes our mental and emotional reserves. “As a communications professor, I wanted to understand what happens when people feel obligated to send work emails after dinner and before breakfast,” says the researcher. And to conclude: “We discovered a worrying link between work-related communication outside of normal hours and increased employee burnout. »

If we tend to believe that reading our emails outside the office can save us time, it’s actually quite the opposite! The findings of his study are clear: the simple fact of opening emails outside of opening hours was linked to lower productivity of the employees analyzed. Worse still, this bad habit would lead to emotional exhaustion, which in turn can turn into counterproductive work behavior.

Watch out for the “crucial warning sign”

“The intrusion of work into family life, aided by smartphones and other technologies, can seem like a triumph of efficiency. But this constant connectivity comes at a cost for both employees and employers, research suggests,” warns Myoung-Gi Chon

Although the authors were unable to see the long-term impact of the blurred boundaries between professional and personal life, this study would nevertheless be a “crucial alarm signal, highlighting the need for clear boundaries that prevent employees’ personal time to become a simple extension of their working day,” argues the researcher. This behavior is an increasingly common trend in the world of work, thus becoming a major problem for the mental health of employees.