Health, relationships and productivity bear brunt of connectivity 'epidemic'
January 25, 2020
Brisbane Times
When management consultant Francis Baldinu started work in another city, he would return to his hotel room, order takeaway and switch on his laptop again.
The sterility of his Canberra hotel and a lack of nearby cafes or other activities meant there was little to distract him.
Management consultant Francis Baldinu ensures he does not have to work at home.
While technology promises more freedom, it has also wired us to constantly check emails, social media and complete work tasks 24/7. We come to work early, eat lunch at our desks, leave late and then work from home into the night and on weekends.
The latest research shows Australians now do an average of 4.6 hours of unpaid work every week, adding up to more than six weeks over the course of a year. Across the workforce, Australians put in an estimated 2.4 billion hours of unpaid overtime in 2019, worth a total of $81.5 billion, according to the Australia Institute think tank's Centre for Future Work.
This trend not only challenges work-life balance, the centre's research says it can reduce family incomes and weaken consumer spending in an era of wage stagnation, underemployment and higher cost-of-living pressures. It is now 35 years since the standard working week was reduced to 38 hours in Australia, but the historic progress made during the postwar era "has ground to a halt in the last generation," the report said.
To end what he describes as an epidemic of "time theft", Centre for Future Work researcher Bill Browne says regulators need to enforce rules on maximum work hours and allow people more choice to refuse overtime and to work shorter hours. Individual workers also have a role to play in demanding respect for their right to leisure time.
Which is what Mr Baldinu, 38, did after he realised he was starting to fall into an unhealthy pattern of working on his laptop after hours.
His employer, Ernst and Young, had introduced a new policy that gave him the option of moving out of his hotel and into a more relaxed home setting to encourage a better work-life balance.
He found a place with a kitchen on Airbnb, so he was able to cook his own meals. It was also close to cafes, bars, shops and a gym.
"Because it felt like I was actually living in Canberra, it shifted my mindset to engage more with the city to do more things outside of work. It helped being in a more homely environment. It was a way to mentally switch off," he says.
"That helped me a lot with work-life balance. When I was sitting in my hotel room and working at night and not doing anything else, I was not engaging in life outside work."
After Mr Baldinu made friends in Canberra and started going out at night, he noticed his colleagues kept working at night and ordering takeaway meals in their hotel rooms.
"I had a colleague who would constantly be working into the night and checking emails," he says.
"The nature of corporate jobs is that there will always be something to do. So everybody from the most junior staff to the highest partner could work 24/7."
Since returning home to Sydney last year, he has set strict boundaries and refuses to work from home.
"I try not to associate my home with work. I would rather keep working in the office until midnight if I have a deadline to meet, so I don't open my laptop at home," he says.
"It stops work filtering into my personal life and I feel more productive when I'm [in the office]."
Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic from the University of NSW Business School has conducted research on constant connectivity and describes it as an "epidemic" that is causing burnout and mental health problems in the workforce.
"We have seen many cases of people who are burning out and some having a complete nervous breakdown," she says.
Her research paper documents workers who say they are emailing work colleagues at 2am or 3am and who say they no longer feel like they have a private life. They take their mobile phone everywhere and accept calls "whenever".
Some workers say they are emailing work colleagues at 2am or 3am in the morning and that they no longer feel like they have a private life.