Helping the e-mail checking addicts: Duty of care to safeguard employees’ work-life balance
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to review the demands employees face when communicating through information and communication technologies (ICTs), and relevant interventions are suggested to provide a set of evidence-based recommendations to help protect work-life balance.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews the following demands associated with ICTs: response expectations, constant availability, increased workload and poor communication. The authors draw upon empirical research to highlight outcomes and intervention strategies, before discussing implications for research and practice.
Findings
The paper, which reviews four demands employees face when communicating through ICT (response expectations, constant availability, increased workload and poor communication), finds that there are diverse outcomes associated with each. The outcomes were not inherently negative, as evidence suggests that positive performance outcomes can arise from response expectations and constant availability, although there may be health and wellbeing costs.
Originality/value
Four interrelated demands that employees can face when communicating through technology are integrated and possible interventions are analyzed.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Retraction notice
The Publisher wishes to retract the precis article “Helping the e-mail checking addicts: Duty of care to safeguard employees’ work-life balance”, published in Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 24 No. 3, 2016. It has come to the attention of Emerald Publishing that this precis article contains large sections of unattributed text taken from the original research article “Information and communication technology demands: outcomes and interventions”, by Jean-François Stich, Samuel Farley, Cary Cooper, Monideepa Tarafdar, published in Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol. 2 No. 4, 2015.
Precis articles are intended to summarise original academic research articles for a different audience, and should not include verbatim passages from the original articles. This error occurred due to a miscommunication in the commissioning process.
To avoid any repeated incidents of this nature, Emerald has fully revised its guidelines and briefed its Commissioning Editors. Human Resource Management International Digest sincerely apologises to the original authors and its readers for this error. The original article can be viewed here: https://doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-09-2015-0031.
Citation
Beal, B. (2016), "Helping the e-mail checking addicts: Duty of care to safeguard employees’ work-life balance", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 14-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-01-2016-0009
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited