It’s 10:00 p.m. and, trying to adhere to your New Year’s resolution to get more sleep (likely inspired by Arianna Huffington’s book, Thrive), you’re getting into bed with the intention of going to sleep.
You set the alarm on your smart phone for 5:30 a.m. so you can adhere to your other New Year’s resolution to exercise each morning before starting work. Just as you reach from your bed to place your phone on the nightstand, you hear that “ding” or “dong” or some other sound that lets you know you’ve got an e-mail.
You know you’re expected to respond to work e-mails as quickly as possible so you check to see if it’s from work. It is. And, it’s annoying.
You calm down a bit, apply the necessary thought work to reply appropriately and hit “reply all.” For the next one and one-half hours you hear lots of “dings” and “dongs” as the conversation grows in intensity and finally winds down close to midnight. By the time you settle down from thinking about the conversation and getting over how annoyed you feel, it’s almost 1:00 in the morning.
Has something like this ever happened to you?
If you have a management role, have you ever created such a situation for team members?
As leaders, a simple way to show team members that we care about them is to allow their time away from work to actually be time away from work. We should allow people to have social lives and family lives that are made more rich by being free from having to do, or even think about, work.
This is actually a win-win for both team members and the organization. There is a large body of research suggesting that allowing people to relax when they’re away from work boosts productivity during working hours.
Those of us who realize that effectively serving and caring for team members is essential for long-term, sustainable performance certainly want to allow team members to completely unplug while they’re away from work. However, actually doing this can be very challenging.
This article was originally published in the Huffington Post. To continue reading, please click here.
______
Did you like what you read?
You can sign up here to get all my posts via our free eZine, which is full of great articles on personal and leadership development. You’ll also get a $15 eBook for free.
Image credit: https://www.livingfuel.com