E-mail is a useful technology that allows you to stay in touch anytime, anywhere, but it can be a urge to respond to important e-mails right away. A joint study between London Business School in the UK and Cornell University in the US found that stress from work emails is reduced by just saying the answer is always okay because it’s not an urgent matter.
It is known that it is important to switch jobs without gaps in order to strike a balance between work and life. Email outside of working hours blurs the lines between work and personal. Recently, research results have also been reported that emails outside working hours are surprisingly harmful to the body and mind.
The research team conducted several experiments in which 4,004 subjects were randomly divided into two groups, senders and recipients, and asked to exchange emails during off-hours virtually. Regarding the exchanged work e-mail, we asked the sender how fast they expected a reply and how fast the recipient thought they were expecting a reply.
As a result, it turned out that the reply time that the sender thought was required was 36% shorter than the reply time expected by the sender. In the continuous experiment, when sending and receiving work emails, the family situation and other factors are added, so in the second experiment, there is a tendency to think that an email should be received quickly even with an email that is known to be non-urgency. It turns out that they tend to be treated almost the same with or without them. In the fourth experiment, it was found that the recipients tend to treat emails sent during working hours as well as emails sent outside of working hours.
In the final experiment designed based on these results, it was confirmed that it was stressful by evoking the need to respond to emails outside of working hours immediately, but at the same time, it was found that stress can be reduced by clearly writing what and when you want it.
From these results, the researchers argued that they could put pressure on work emails sent outside of working hours by indicating that if there is no urgency, you do not need to respond right away. It helps to curb harmful workplace cultures, such as feeling pressured to respond outside of work despite the unexpected findings of the study. Related information can be found here.