The growing movement to help workers achieve digital balance

If Carly Taylor was going back to in-person work, she had some ground rules. There would be no more after-work responses to her Slack and email. She was willing to go “above and beyond” in the digital days, but now she believed in her right to log off.

“One of the things I don’t like about [virtual work] is the lack of healthy boundaries for when the workday is over,” Taylor says. “But I felt like that was a worthwhile trade off for the freedom I get from being able to work from wherever I want.”

Remote work has blurred the digital boundary between work and life. A 2023 Buffer survey found that 81% of remote workers checked their email outside of work hours. 63% checked their email on weekends, and 48% completed work outside of traditional work hours.

Meanwhile, burnout rates are spiking. Employees are desperately in need of some digital balance, taking time away from their screens for both a professional and digital detox. That balance, it turns out, is hard to come by.

What is digital balance?

For many employees, the workplace is always a tap away. They can open and respond to emails on their phone; a quick ping from their Apple Watch can alert them to a Slack notification. The tethers of work have extended to everyday tech, disrupting the workplace balance.

Taylor has seen work apps invade her and her friend’s lives. She describes some friends who will use Slack’s “do not disturb” function, typically reserved for vacation time, to signal that they wouldn’t receive weekend messages. “That’s the new way of pushing back, making it very clear that you’re not around,” she says.

Reacting to experiences like Taylor’s, Tyler Rice cofounded the Digital Wellness Institute, for which he now serves as the CEO. Rice believes that digital balance is not just an employee aspiration; it should be treated like a health issue by employers across the world.

“While many employee wellbeing strategies include things like mental health, financial help, [and] physical health, none of them account for the impact that technology has on the employee experience,” Rice says.

Virtual work boomed during the pandemic, blurring the lines between work and down time. Given all-time high levels of flexibility, many employees were initially happy to answer messages as needed. These days Taylor waxes poetic about the era where she could leave her computer at the office, completely disconnecting outside the building.

The right to disconnect

Archana Tedone, a professor at Fairfield University’s Dolan School of Business, keeps her research brief simple: “How to make the life of an employee better.” She’s been studying the rates of off-hour email responses in the wake of the pandemic. Her results are worrisome.

“When you have [work apps] on your phone, or when you take your laptop with you places, you have this mental feeling of always being on,” Tedone says. “That is pretty much a fast track to burnout.”

Some countries have already tamped down on digital imbalances. Australia recently joined many countries in Europe and South America in passing a “right to disconnect” law, which protects employees who refuse to monitor work messages after-hours.

In the United States, though, the burden of maintaining balance has been put on the workers and their employers. Some firms have taken up the charge, writing digital balance policies into their HR codes. DailyPay, a payroll services company, allows their workers to take unlimited PTO. Better yet, they encourage their workers to actually use it, getting off their devices in the process.

“If you’re new to an organization and it’s not defined, there’s a real reluctance to be like, ‘I want to go to my kids soccer game, or there’s a concert that I want to go to,” says Jon Lowe, DailyPay’s chief people officer. “We’re deliberate about not only having the tools, but permissioning around those tools.”

Workhuman, an employee recognition software company, has two hubs in Boston and Dublin. The time zone difference could quickly push workers towards technological overuse; while one’s work hours may have lapsed, their international counterparts are still online. The key, then, is to push for company-wide mindfulness of time.

Committing to boundaries

“There’s an appropriate time to schedule engagement or meetings or connections,” says David Burke, Workhuman’s global head of talent acquisition and employer brand. “You often see a visible message of that in people’s email signatures. [There’s] a statement that this email was sent at a time that’s convenient for me, and there’s no obligation to reply to it outside of normal working hours.”

But managerial pushes towards balance are rare, leaving most employees to fend for themselves amongst growing digital work. Dr. Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist at Qualtrics, recognizes that asking for time away from email and Slack can be difficult. Still, he provides some affirming words.

“You have to commit to the boundaries,” Dr. Granger says. “Your company wants you to be at your best. To do that, you need a break.”