Happy Wednesday, everyone. I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist. I’m fascinated by three questions: Why does this happen? What can we do about it? And when should we act? Join me down the rabbit hole. With any luck, we’ll find Wonderland.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
Meetings starting after 8 pm rose 16% year on year in Microsoft’s 2025 data. Someone’s working day is still expanding.
In Eurofound’s 2023 report, 75% cited expectations as a reason for answering out-of-hours messages; 50% cited hopes of better career progression.
👉 “Right to disconnect: Implementation and impact at company level”.37% of workers surveyed by Eurofound worked extra hours to finish tasks left incomplete during contractual hours. Switching off also requires a workload that fits.
👉 “Right to disconnect: Implementation and impact at company level”.
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Wednesday reflections
In 2009, long before working from home became commonplace, circumstances beyond my control meant I was leading a project implementation from home. I was a fresh graduate and a new hire, working in a culture where being seen mattered. The model employee arrived at 7 am and left at 7 pm. “Be more like Jeff”.
Without a desk anyone could walk past, I felt I had to prove I was working. My phone stayed on loud. My laptop came to dinner, the cinema, even the grocery shop. Guilt followed me from early morning until late at night. If management could not see me, surely they needed to be able to reach me. I had made availability my evidence of commitment.
That experience is why I find the promise of flexible working worth examining. A routine message arriving at 9:30 pm on a Thursday may need no answer until morning. Yet leaving it unanswered can feel like a statement about how seriously you take your job. Nobody has to demand an immediate reply for you to feel that one is expected.
Which leads me to the question: have organisations given employees the freedom to choose when they work, while quietly expanding the hours in which they are expected to be available?
When your working day ends, do you feel free to leave work messages unanswered?
🧠The organisational psychology lens
There is a name for the feeling that had me taking my laptop to the cinema: workplace telepressure. It describes the preoccupation with work messages and the urge to reply quickly. A message can wait in an inbox while the perceived obligation to answer occupies someone’s evening. Barber and Santuzzi’s research links telepressure with poorer recovery outcomes, including sleep quality and burnout.
That pressure doesn’t require a manager to announce that everyone is now on call. Consider a manager clearing emails after dinner, a colleague replying before breakfast, and another checking messages between family commitments. Each may be exercising flexibility. Together, their behaviour can make continual responsiveness look like the standard. Nobody has extended the working day officially. Over time, these individual choices can extend the hours in which others feel expected to respond.
This is the tension explored in Mazmanian and colleagues’ “autonomy paradox”. Mobile email gave professionals greater freedom over where and when they worked, while their use of it helped reinforce collective expectations of connectivity. The organisational difficulty is that individually convenient habits can become obligations others feel compelled to accommodate.
Control over those expectations matters. Piszczek’s research found that experiences of work-related technology differed according to employees’ preferences for combining or separating work and personal life. Organisational expectations for after-hours communication could encourage its use regardless of those preferences. Choosing to finish a report at nine is different from keeping nine o’clock available because someone else might need you.
Responsiveness has genuine value. Clients need support, emergencies happen and international teams operate across different clocks. The distinction is between deliberately organising that coverage and allowing it to depend on whoever keeps answering. A business may need to operate continuously. How that requirement is distributed across its employees is an organisational choice.
What this means for leaders
An organisation can offer flexible hours while leaving employees to guess when they must be reachable. Leaders need to make those expectations explicit and examine whether everyday practices support them. Three decisions matter.
Define when responsiveness is part of the job.
Some roles genuinely require rapid replies. Specify when, for which requests and within what timeframe. In performance reviews, assess the quality and reliability of someone’s contribution, including collaboration where relevant. An evening reply should not automatically count as evidence of greater commitment.Separate sending a message from expecting an answer.
Agree response windows, a channel for genuine emergencies and who provides cover across time zones. Managers working late can use scheduled delivery or state when a reply is needed. These arrangements preserve individual flexibility while reducing the need for colleagues to interpret every notification as a summons.Check whether the workload fits the hours.
Permission to disconnect means little when delivery depends on routinely working late. Examine recurring evening work alongside deadlines, staffing, meeting demands and handovers. Where the same problem repeatedly requires extra availability, change the conditions producing it rather than treating each late finish as an individual choice.
Final thoughts
Looking back, taking my laptop to the cinema said more about my uncertainty over what was expected than it did about my contribution. That is the ambiguity leaders need to resolve. Flexible working becomes a questionable bargain when employees can choose their hours but must remain available around everyone else’s. The working week may have become more flexible. Its limits still need to mean something.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Shaida
P.S. I never did find out whether Jeff got more done. We just knew he was always there.
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