Mental Health | Remote Work | Productivity
The Consequence of “Always-On” Culture: A Failing Remote Work Policy
By Sophie Bryant
I watched in impressed silence as my roommate doctored an intricate contraption to manipulate her company’s “always-on” remote work policy. Beside her desk stood a rotating fan, and every time time the fan turned left or right, a string tied to its cage pulled her computer mouse—mimicking human movement.
The goal was to keep her Slack icon green, and she certainly wasn’t the first to coin the idea. She took the concept from a Tik Tok published early into the Covid-19 pandemic. A trick designed to look like you were at your desk, idly shifting your mouse back and forth as you clicked between tabs.
That viral Tik Tok was one of many published nearly 4 years ago, and yet here we were in 2024—remote work models still not modern enough to recognize the implicit value of a flexible schedule.
Ironically, she was the hardest working person I knew. An immigrant who left her parents behind, now a newly minted Canadian citizen fighting her way through foreign working politics. She was a self-taught marketer who attending a shocking number of networking sessions. She started her day at 6am religiously, dedicating time to self improvement and financial literacy podcasts. She worked two jobs to better her situation, cared intrinsically about the success of her company’s marketing strategy, and somehow found time to nurture her thriving social life. She was the pinnacle of an internally motivated employee; a needle in a haystack of unicorn self-starters that so many employers sought.
And yet, like all of us with human needs and flaws, she required a mid-day doctor’s appointment. Despite her exemplary performance, she was required to use a small number of allotted PTO to attend said appointment. Most of us would agree two hours spent in a walk-in clinic is a far cry from a vacation, and yet, they shared the same time-off allowance.
As a result, the rotating-fan-mouse-mover-3000 was born. With it, a seed of frustration grew within my roommate; her previously rose-coloured outlook on the company she loved shattered.
Their blatant disrespect for her health permanently marred her motivation to care about their success.
What should have been a two-hour appointment became two plus the aforementioned arts and crafts time, and her frustration at the outdated policy eliminated any guilt to return the hours stolen from her employer. Simply allowing her to take the time off she needed, and make up the work within her perfectly self-managed schedule on her own, could have prevented this whole ordeal.
The only true victim of this policy was their own bottom line.
What is ‘Always-On’ Culture in Remote Work?
Always-on remote work culture requires employees to be at their desk during designated hours. Time spent moving your mouse is tracked, while the number of Teams or Slack ‘online’ hours determines productivity. Timesheets are often used to measure 15-minute increments, ensuring every coffee refill or bathroom break riddles employees with guilt.
Largely, always-on culture operate on the premise that hours worked equals job accomplished. We have long known this to be untrue, and yet, old school organizations continue to lobby for Henry Ford’s original 9-5 working model. It’s been proven time and again that employees typically work 3 good hours in an 8 hour work day, but the always-on model ignores the studied proof and cites they’ve “always done it this way”.
Typically, always-on policies stem from insecure employers—those who lack trust in their employees. The need to vehemently control employee movements is a top contributor of burnout, and ultimately, job dissatisfaction. Higher rates of turnover, mixed with lower rates of productivity are rampant in always-on cultures—a problem that can easily be fixed with just a little trust.
‘Always-On’ Culture and Productivity: For Better or Worse?
The largest advocates of always-on policies tend to unknowingly adopt a trio of characteristics driven by mistrust. Excessive meetings, constant interruptions, and timesheets are common extensions of always-on policies that build toxic workplaces. Always-on culture tends to encourage micro-management, unhealthy working relationships, and workplace politics—traits that are objectively consequential to business growth.
The easiest consequence to measure is the cost of turnover from dissatisfied employees (which costs companies an average of $60k per employee). What’s harder to measure is the collective hours lost to employees spacing out (another symptom of burnout); employees trying to keep up with bosses nagging for updates; and employees trying to refocus the mind after a meeting. Not to mention the incessant meeting prep required to report on what they’ve accomplished on a daily basis.
Altogether, the result of excessively dictating the way employees work (both in terms of hours worked and how those hours are allocated) is a cost that always-on businesses pay for dearly.
Minutes Saved or Hours Wasted?
The irony here lies in the stress that ‘always-on’ culture creates: in an attempt to desperately control up-to-the-minute productivity of staff, employers unintentionally build stressful work environments that lead to hundreds of hours lost to that stress.
Employees who are expected to make the most of 15 minutes between meetings, accounted for in a timesheet, are liars.
This is not a reflection on the nature of those employees—it’s the reality of their situation that breeds this behaviour. Much the same way that punishment-driven parenting teaches children to lie, unfair work policies teach employees to guard the truth of their whereabouts and behaviour.
Meanwhile, taking breaks or making yourself deliberately unavailable can often produce the best work. Victims of the always-on remote policy worry that their computer will go to sleep for a particularly long bathroom break, but they equally fear that their little green dot has shut off during a period of deep work.
How many minutes are wasted opening the Teams tab to ensure their status stays active? Probably an inconsequential number individually, but on a collective basis of 100+ employees, over several months, or years? It certainly doesn’t add up to an inconsequential number of hours paid.
Similarly, the blatant mistrust that existed at my roommate’s company did nothing but damage their own bottom line. They were paying for her time to MacGyver a contraption, while a little trust in her ability to manage her own hours would have saved them dividends.
The real questions was how many employees they paid to do the same thing.
Impact of Micromanagement on Productivity
The argument for always-on claims the policy drives productivity by ensuring employees are consistently working during work hours. But time spent at a desk does not equal high quality deliverables.
Some companies require employees to maintain a live stream while they work, but this has only been seen in extreme cases (and have gone viral for their absurdity). Nonetheless, these are all forms of micro management, and all impact the bottom line.
The connection between trust, respect, and employee productivity should be clear; yet organizations consistently struggle to apply best practice. (Hint: a respectful workplace leads to happy, productive employees, or a recipe for higher revenue).
More so, employees today struggle to disconnect from work to do work. The barrage of pings from internal messaging apps are no better than a mobile phone at your cubicle; yet always-on culture pushes for constant availability. Micromanaged employees become too busy relaying the work they’re doing, listening to meetings that don’t pertain to them, and reading through endless Slack channels to actually get the work done.
Yes, internal communication is important. But the speed at which employees reply shouldn’t be a KPI of performance.
Always-On Culture and Mental Health
A happy employee is a productive one, and the stress derived from micro-management, toxic culture, and workplace politics is very real. Work stress that festers from maintaining unrealistic standards of productivity leads to burnout, which is an unproductive state for anyone to operate in. Ultimately, burnout leads to quiet quitting (or real quitting) both of which are costly for any organization.
At the end of the day, your workforce is a group of people. People are messy, and emotionally-driven, and build emotional ties based on mutual respect and empathy.
People are driven by what’s fair; they sign contracts to deliver services in exchange for a fair monetary compensation. The fair exchange of attending a doctor’s appointment is making up the hours later. A fair return for micromanagement, or mistrust, or disrespect, is lying and manipulation. Sometimes, it’s attaching a computer mouse to a rotating fan.
If you insist on acting unfairly, it’s naïve to expect your employees to show up consistently as the bigger person. Eventually, something has to give.
Improving the Employer-Employee Relationship
Organizations looking to improve their management practices and increase employee productivity should look to small, actionable steps that make employees feel trusted. Employers who are struggling to get started should consider some of the steps below.
Hire an HR Consultant
Unfortunately, sometimes change can be difficult to enact from within. Often, organizations steeped in micromanagement employ human resource departments who also believe in ‘always-on’ policies, or feel powerless to enact change. Sometimes an outside point of view, and a willingness from current managers to change their management styles, is a necessary step to identify habits that build toxic cultures. An HR consultant can listen in to meetings, monitor slack channels, and draw patterns in the ways employees interact to identify areas for improvement. Not sure where to get started? Browse top-rated HR consultant firms here.
Plan Ahead
Typically, micro-management is driven by stress to accomplish tasks in a short or unrealistic timeline. Businesses with clear, KPI-driven, long-term and short-term goals will see much more success from their employees, as their employees understand what is expected of them. Using high-quality project management software with detailed task breakdowns allow employees to track and report on deliverables, rather than reporting on non-helpful metrics like ‘checking emails’. This brings the focus back to what got done, rather than how time was spent.
Check in Regularly
Managers should make use of weekly 1:1 meetings with their team, and focus on understanding how employees handle their workload. Employers who are keen for employees to make the most of an 8 hour workday can use these meetings to understand if employees have significant amounts of down-time, yet accomplish all their tasks, or if they’re struggling to meet the quantity of work. From there, employers should adjust workloads, and their own expectations, accordingly.
These small check-ins, while still a form of monitoring employee activity, give employees the responsibility and autonomy to keep track of their own time.
Delegate and Communicate Well
Finally, managers who feel constant pressure to meet deadlines in a short period of time, or who feel employee work is not quite meeting quality expectations, should look to their own communication systems. Are employees not meeting standards, or have they met the low standards a manager has unintentionally set?
Managers should assess whether they regularly communicate clear, detailed expectations to employees, and whether the timelines for those expectations are realistic. Ideally, managers should be able to plan required deliverables at least two weeks’ out, to allow employees to prioritize their own tasks. From there, this allows managers to obtain a clearer picture of employee productivity, how employees are using their time, and whether employees can reasonably take on more.
Closing Thoughts: ‘Always-On’ is Overdue for Change
Employers who leverage an always-on approach to remote work should reconsider their reasoning behind doing so. Employers who claim that tracking employee activity is necessary to employee productivity are, unfortunately, vastly out of touch with modern understandings of the way people work. Typically, these micromanagement practices stem from deeper issues such as more communication, toxic workplace culture, and poor planning skills. In turn, these policies have actually shown to reductions in productivity, increased mental health concerns, and higher rates of turnover.
Rather than place the onus of productivity on employees, employers should look inward at their own shortcomings, and approach the modern way of remote work with an open mind. You may be pleasantly surprised at the long-term benefits.