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Constant connectivity harms employees' work-life balance and mental health. Better labor policy and remote-work legislation can help meet the needs of people and organizations.
Disconnection policy can be effective only if it is consistent with the prevailing organiza-tional culture and implicit expectations about availability and performance.
If an organization's norms expect constant availability and connectivity and employees are rewardedfor adhering to these behaviors, the culture will fail to encourage disconnection.
For some years now, remote and hybrid work have had paradoxical outcomes for knowledge workers' auton-omy and work-life balance. Constant connectivity gives them greater control over where and when they work, but it blurs the boundaries between work and life. They may end up spending many more hours than they would have at the office and experience increased stress due to an inability to detach from work. This paradox has become salient since the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote work and total hours worked increased globally, lead-ing to the deterioration of workers' mental health.1
A growing number of countries such as Canada, France, and the Netherlands have begun to address the potential downsides of con-stant connectivity both during and after work hours.2 What can policy makers do to support people's mental health and work-life balance? What kind of social improvement could stem from responses to these challenges and provide enduring benefits to individual workers and organizations, as well as their dependents, community stakeholders, and society?
Some work-life measures target individuals, while others focus on organizations or populations. At the individual level, "flexibility I-deals," or "idiosyncratic deals," draw on individualized negotiation instead of collective action to determine work-life balance and con-nectivity for each worker. Such agreements are often the prevailing approach in organizations. But research shows that "I-deals" present potential risks, such as coworker dissatisfaction and team coordination difficulties. They might also undermine equitable flexibility measures, because only the most privileged workers can secure them.
At the organizational level, some companies impose restrictions on work communication to ensure that people disconnect from work. In 2011, Volkswagen's management and union representatives signed a history-making, company-level agreement that blocked access to emails on smartphones between 6:15 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. This prac-tice, however, was limited to employees working in Germany under trade-union-negotiated contracts and did not apply to...