Council Post: How To Stop Remote Employees From Working Too Much

Sean Higgins, CEO of BetterYou

We all have had a taste of working remotely. Whether you have your own desk and office space or you are putting time in at the dining room table, work from home changed more than just our seating arrangements. It changed everything. And while our context changed, so did the number of hours we work each week. A Microsoft study of team behavior showed a lift of four hours of work time per week per employee. This is actually bad news. Whatever marginal productivity gains there are in the short term can come with deeper costs of stress, anxiety and burnout. So why is your team working more? And what can you do about it?

Presence is not work.

If you’ve ever looked at your internal chat app for whose dots are green (available) and whose aren’t (offline), you’ve contributed to something called the “presence prison.” The presence prison is a feeling of needing to be on the majority of the time. In this context, “on” means you are available to be interrupted. Someone calls you, and you answer immediately. When someone messages you, it’s the same response. While a physical workplace creates a natural presence, working from home adds some strange incentives.

Because your team cannot physically see you, there is a strong incentive to not be perceived as lazy or shirking your responsibilities. This creates a game with you and your co-workers. 

Imagine you have the option to stop working at 5 p.m. or to keep working for 15 minutes. If you stop at 5 p.m., you can go do other things that matter to you (family time, exercise, etc.), but at the cost of having your green light turn off and being perceived as less hardworking than a co-worker who you know stays on a bit later. You might consider the decision like this, using numbers to represent your utility in each situation (the gain of an extra 15 minutes of leisure time and the loss of being perceived as less hardworking than your peers):

• Leave at 5 p.m.: Plus one for extra family time; minus two for being perceived as less hardworking than peers.

• Keep working 15 minutes: Plus two for being perceived as more hardworking; minus one for missing out on extra family time.

So, the incentive is set for you to work the extra 15 minutes. However, this isn’t a scenario you only encounter once. This is something that happens every day. Now your co-worker knows that you are working until 5:15 p.m., and they don’t want to be perceived as less hardworking than you. We have here a multishot game, straight out of your econ textbook on game theory, except instead of looking at if you should send someone to jail, the only one in prison is you. This is because when we map out the decision for you and your co-worker, you each have a dominant strategy to work slightly longer than the other.

And this is exactly what we have seen play out with after-hours email usage in a report of 2,000 employees: It was up 28% from February to June 2020. Our teams aren’t working longer because they can handle the burnout risk; they’re just playing the game we put them in.

Don’t hate the player; change the game.

We, as managers, have put our people in unrealistic situations in which they need to adapt to work from home and don’t have the normal stopping cues for unplugging from work (a car ride home, visibly seeing leadership head out). This has created a scenario in which we don’t want to be seen as less than our peers, so we keep going, even past the point when we should stop. So what can we do to help our people through this?

1. Show people that presence doesn’t matter. Disable availability in chat apps. By setting the entire team to “away,” you send a message that you don’t have to be on all the time. If you are worried that your team is going to slack off during times when you need them, you don’t have a remote work problem. You have a people problem. If you have a culture that provides autonomy, give your teams the work, and let them go to work. 

2. Lead by example. If you are constantly emailing and messaging people late at night, your team will feel pressured into staying and working on demand. Instead, focus on leaving on time and sending a message to your team to let them know about the awesome job they did today and that you’re heading out. When people aren’t at risk of being perceived as less hardworking, they will tend to not err on the side of burnout. 

3. Build in stopping cues. When you get to the end of an article, you know. The text stops, and maybe you see links to other content, but there’s a clear sign to stop reading. Encourage your teams to build those same stopping cues into their day. Maybe it’s working in a set room, at a certain table or even from a specific chair. When you leave that environment, you have a natural signal that it’s time to stop working.

Seeing your team online at off-hours, burning the midnight oil, might give you an initial feeling of progress, but progress at all costs will leave you with a burned-out team and drained company culture. Take the long-term perspective, and remember that what’s bad for your people is bad for business.

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