The Endless Digital Workday

The shift to remote work ended the traditional 9–5 workday: employees work in bursts, at night, between caregiving tasks, and whenever they can find time between the endless distractions of messages, calls, and emails. New research, however, shows that for many teams, this means people are quite literally working at all hours of the day, which also means that they’re almost never all working at the same time. Is this bad though? Researchers found that it depends on the task. For some tasks, being on at the same time improved productivity; for others, the distractions created by coworkers made it harder to finish the tasks, and productivity went up in what used to be considered off hours. Importantly, employees proved to be good judges of how to manage their time to be most productive. There are still lessons for managers. As a first step, write a team charter to establish norms and expectations, which should include specific times when the majority of the team is on together. That said, don’t force overlap or micromanage people. Finally, make it okay for people to be offline.