Here's news many have been waiting for. A study by the University of West England has shown that wider, almost constant access to the Internet including on work commutes and on holidays means that the boundaries between work and life have blurred dramatically. As a result, a work-life balance, which many corporations and employers have included in their vision documents, is now almost a mockery for most employees.
It is against this backdrop that employees cutting across sectors are demanding that work-related emails and/or other forms of communication outside of work hours should also count as work. Nobody, of course, is suggesting that the meter starts ticking every time a work email lands in an employee's inbox. But if the email is accessed, replied to and/or an interaction or decision is taken as a result, it should count as work and be compensated as such.
Given we longer live in a 9 to 5 corporate world, these are issues corporates and organisations will have to engage with in the 21st century workplace to enable not just employee satisfaction but for their own bottom-lines.
