There was a time when you could walk out of your office and that would be the end of your working day. But now, that does not seem to be the case.

Our craving to be connected and the rise of the 24-hour society means thousands spend hours of leisure time on phones and tablets, checking work emails, browsing through our firm’s social media, answering texts from the boss, researching and sending the reply to a query, finishing off that report...

Many of us take work home with us through choice – or at least have been conditioned to do so, fearing switching off will put us out of the loop, or worse, feeling pressure to always be available to our employer. Colleagues who send us emails late at night must be working, so we should respond to show we are too, right?

The ability to do our work any time, anywhere, is not a bad thing. In fact, a recent study of figures from the Office for National Statistics projects that half of British employees will be working remotely within the next two years. And the suggestion is that we, and our employers, will thrive because of it. Homeworkers claim to be nearly 20% more productive than their office counterparts, take about half as many days off sick and are generally more loyal employees, according to a survey for Canada Life. And, with the commute not being an issue, firms who encourage home working have a wider pool from which to choose their talent.

But with your work in your home – or at least always on your phone in your pocket – the line between work and life is becoming increasingly blurred. “Smart devices, the cloud, email and social media all make it so tempting to slip into work mode, especially if colleagues are sending you messages ‘out-of-hours’,” says Chris Chapman, founder of Numitas.

Chapman started the Cambridge-based finance consultancy to focus on portfolio work – with the aim of improving his own work-life balance. “I found I was spending my whole life in front of a laptop, when I should have been watching my lad play football on a Saturday,” he says. “I needed to change.”

He’s also encouraging his peers to follow suit. Numitas’s CFO Club boasts 5,000 finance professionals who, he says, are especially vulnerable to blurring work-life lines: “Particularly if you’re in a more operational role, where almost all of your work is done on a screen, that potential for work to spill over into your life is more present now than it’s ever been.”

The average Briton’s work-life balance has certainly skewed in the past 10 years. When it comes to managing that balance we’re only the 13th best in Europe. Danes top the list, working 32.9 hours per week and enjoying 15.9 hours of leisure. In contrast, British employees work four more hours and enjoy just six of leisure says a study by TotallyMoney. Additionally, British employees earn an average of €1,888 per month compared with Denmark’s €3,270.

Much of this – perhaps too much – is through necessity for the demands of the job, according to another survey. Three in five work an average of four hours’ unpaid overtime per week. That’s 24 days per year – and it takes its toll. This overtime makes about 62% of people sacrifice social plans at least once a week, while 22% regularly work in the evenings just to keep on top of their workload. Soberingly, and unsurprisingly, 69% of those surveyed for bed specialist Dreams claim their long hours “create tension in their household”.

But those lines between work and life are particularly fuzzy for FDs and CFOs. The average UK finance officer spends 63% of their waking hours (10-11 hours) working. But this is not just a British issue – German FDs work 75% of their waking hours and a further 10 nations’ FDs over 70% (see diagram overleaf).

“The role of the CFO has widened over the past two decades,” says John Graham, professor of finance at Duke University in North Carolina. Along with Philippe Dupuy from Grenoble École de Management, he questioned 800 CFOs around the world. “They are accountable for the bottom line as well as helping shape corporate strategy. We hope finance chiefs are not overworking themselves to the point of jeopardising their health, which in turn could put the financial health of the company at risk,” Graham explains.

But should the rules around when work stops and life starts be set in stone – and is that practical, or even desirable, anyway? Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently said he found the phrase ‘work-life balance’ debilitating, claiming that people should see work and life as complementary halves of a circle rather than a balance.

But not everyone has such an enthusiastic approach – many blur the lines through necessity. “I was aware on the train into work this morning that everyone around me was on a laptop, tablet or a phone,” says Chapman. “I imagine that most of them were working, and I certainly use that time to catch up on admin or write emails. It’s become a valuable part of my wrapping up of the working day, but only so I can then hopefully switch off completely when I get home, without feeling I need to do anything.”

So has the commute become an extension of the working day? Many see it as a sort of buffer in the morning and evening between home and work, a kind of hinterland where you’re sort of doing your job, but not having to follow all the rules and mores of working life. Not only do thousands use it as such, but many of them, like Chapman, actively welcome it.

In research by the University of the West of England (UWE), 5,000 rail commuters were quizzed on their commute. Responses included: “I rely on that time”, “It’s really important to my sanity” and “It enables me to clear the decks at the end of the day”.

The researchers concluded that so many commuters are using increased and improved free WiFi for work purposes during their journey that the time should count as part of the working day. “If this were the case, there would be many social and economic impacts,” says UWE senior research fellow Dr Juliet Jain. “It could ease commuter pressure on peak hours and allow for more comfort and flexibility around working times.”

Commuting does actually already count as work in a minority of cases, according to a law passed two years ago by the European Union Court of Justice. When Spanish security installation company Tyco closed its offices and told its employees they had to work from home, it then refused to recognise their day started until they were with their first client – which might be as much as two hours’ unpaid travelling time from home. The Court of Justice ruled this was unfair and introduced the law to protect workers – but it only applies to those who have no fixed office or place of work and travel to different remote sites every day.

In Norway some workers are also allowed to claim their commute as part of their working day, but introducing such legislation carries a raft of implications, says Siobhan Howard-Palmer, associate solicitor at Manchester employment specialists HRC Law. “This would be a further step following recent European laws around sickness and holiday pay, overtime and travel time, which have moved to protect an employee’s work-life balance.

“If legislation does count commuting as work, what do we call it, overtime? If so, are employees paid for this and how is it monitored? If it does count as work, how does it fit with an employee’s entitlement to rest periods?”

And the implications aren’t just financial, says Chapman. “If you have your laptop out on the train, there are sensitivities about the material you’re working with, in terms of privacy, confidentiality, data protection.”

But how much legal responsibility – to employers, clients and the public – lies with the employee for protecting this information, even if they are not technically at work? And how much with their employer, who might be insisting work is done on the commute?

Furthermore, the law states that employees’ bad behaviour outside work, including those resulting in criminal offences, are not grounds for dismissal unless they affect workers’ abilities to do their job or potentially affect a worker’s relations with colleagues, customers or suppliers and thereby bring the firm into disrepute. If you happen to behave inappropriately during your commute, should your rights be affected dependent on whether you happen to simultaneously be sending a work email, or writing a report, even though this is outside your normal paid hours? There is no definitive answer.

“This increasing flexibility around the working day has great potential to radically shift the work-life balance for the better,” says Jamie Kerr, head of external affairs for the Institute of Directors. “With the concept of clocking on and clocking off no longer straightforward, defining where leisure begins and work ends will be vital for employers and individuals, as well as a complex task for regulators.

Of course, for every employee who can’t resist sending an email or taking a call in their supposed leisure time, there will be another who wants a very clear demarcation between work and life. And there is support for this idea – if you’re in the right part of the world. France, Germany and Italy give their workers a legal right to disconnect and negotiate with employers their online availability outside working hours.

In March, New York City councillor Rafael Espinal proposed a bill banning companies with 10 or more employees from requiring their staff to respond to out-of-hours communications. And last month, Lidl’s Belgian operation not only banned its staff from sending internal emails after 6pm, but blocked its servers to ensure compliance, following similar stances from German car giants Daimler and Volkswagen.

And you are even made to disconnect if you work for one of a handful of UK companies. Booking website Snaptrip has not banned sending out-of-hours emails, but makes it crystal clear to employees there is no obligation to respond. “People would come to work having missed an email conversation the previous evening and think: ‘Am I meant to read my emails outside work?’” says Snaptrip’s head of marketing Sean Thompson. “We took the step of clarifying that there is no expectation.”

An employee should have the right to keep their home life sacrosanct, says Chapman. “You should be able to manage the company’s expectations about your out-of-hours availability,” he adds. “There will be some companies with managing directors where it will be difficult, but there will be places where you can set your stall out – especially if you are new in a job. It doesn’t have to be a big issue – either clarify during an interview or, on the evening of your first day, ignore those work emails and apologise the next day if they were expecting a response but clarify you were doing things with your family and you don’t respond to emails in the evening. You might even change the culture of the organisation – or help to come up with a solution that protects people’s rights to choose whether or not to work outside office hours.”

As we get ever more connected, UK business culture does seem to be blurring those work-life lines more regularly, adds Chapman – but says those lines haven’t quite disappeared altogether. “I used to work for General Electric – I was in the UK but it’s an American company. After my working day there was an expectation that I would join conference calls in the middle of the evening with American colleagues to tie in with US time zones. That’s not specific to General Electric, I think it’s actually more about the expectations of US corporate culture. I don’t think there would be quite that expectation for an American employee working in the States for a British company. We haven’t quite got to that stage yet.”

• Achieving work life balance
  Business & Management Magazine, Issue 269, November 2018

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