Messages from Work Often Disrupt Life at Home
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iStock/Thinkstock(ARLINGTON, Texas) — No one can escape electronic communications but it’s not as though people are really making much of an effort these days to do so.
Nonetheless, receiving an email or text from work while at home does seem to bug most Americans, according to a study by University of Texas at Arlington management researcher Marcus Butts, who surveyed 340 people over a week to measure their feelings about just such a circumstance.
The degree of displeasure about getting a message from work during downtime has a lot to do whether people consider themselves a segmentor or an integrator.
For instance, segmentors prefer a strict delineation between home and the workplace and therefore, get more upset with e-communications from the job, which interferes with their private lives.
On the other hand, integrators, who also expressed unhappiness with emails or texts from the boss or co-workers, aren’t quite as bothered when they get interrupted at home because they actually want to keep abreast of things at work.
Either way, Butts and his team came up with a list of do’s and don’ts for supervisors about how to best word e-communications, when the best time is to send them and which messages are most suitable for face-to-face meetings.
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