Always available for work and stressed about it? How to keep your balance

It seems so wonderful: your employer embraces the new way of working and from now on you can perform a number of tasks from home. No traffic jams, no rush, just relax in your pajamas behind your PC with your cup of coffee, writing that policy document undisturbed….Super! But is that actually good for you? Always available to your employer?

It seems so easy: your employer bans landlines and gives employees a company smartphone. Now you can handle some calls in traffic jams, you don’t have to wait for emails or call appointments at work, and you can combine work and home a little easier…. That’s awesome!

And yes, this way of working has given a lot of freedom, and no one wants to go back to “square one.” But there appears to be another side to this coin.

A certain piece didn’t get finished on Friday because your child came home sick from school, so Saturday morning then….

At ten o’clock at night, you see another email pop up from a colleague and you can’t resist opening it… turns out to be an email with a message you’re balking at, resulting in an inability to fall asleep….

Officially, you don’t work on Wednesdays, but an important client has been trying to reach you for a while, so just call on Wednesdays anyway. Small effort right? Turns out the call is not as easy as you thought and before you know it you just log on to work and handle a few things….

During a dinner with good friends, your attention is not quite there: you have seen with a slanting eye that your superior is trying to reach you, and actually you are very curious what it is about….

You are always reachable ….. Recognizable? And not so bad, right?

Research on stress

People who are always on call build up stress without even realizing it. Now a little stress is ok. Chronic stress is very harmful in the long run. Research shows that:

It turns out that many people find it difficult to direct their accessibility; their phones no longer go off, resulting in them reading and answering their emails at night and on weekends.

When the separation between work and your private life increasingly disappears and employees are permanently accessible via their smart-phones, stress is around the corner, referred to as techno-stress in a report by Dutch unions. It seems that workers’ productive hours are going up, but in practice, productivity actually decreases, and there may even be a risk of burnout.

Always accessible … What to do?

Dealing with being “accessible everywhere and all the time” requires discipline, being able to set boundaries, clarity to colleagues, agreements with your supervisor and putting structure in your (work) week.

In summary, it takes assertiveness!

5 helpful tips:

1. Research what is a good work rhythm for you, what in it are your productive hours and what are not, and arrange your day accordingly. Tell that to your supervisor and colleagues.
2. Install an app that helps you regulate your accessibility
3. Make arrangements at home for times when your work phone is off.
4. If you work from home, arrange to actually work that day without being disturbed.
5. And very important: If you make sure you consciously plan and monitor the focus areas below, you will automatically have less time to be endlessly reachable!

Maintaining an adequate work-life balance requires compensation on three fronts:

• movement;
• healthy diet
• relaxation/social contacts

Want to work on your own balance and become more assertive in it? This is possible with our 1-on-1 assertiveness training ‘in 40 days more assertive.

Compensation means that you (consciously) spend two hours per day on each area of attention, in which, of course, a combination is also possible: for example, going to sports together, cooking/dining together or doing something fun.