Imagine you’ve just poured yourself a warm cup of coffee and snuggled up to binge watch that new show and your laptop dings with an ‘important’ email from your manager. It’s one of the more vexing interruptions in modern life. 

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The overlapping of professional and personal life has never been more obvious — and has been exacerbated for many by the work from home guidelines — resulting in more of us replying to emails during what should be our downtime.

Some are now advocating for a ban on employers’ out-of-office emails to prevent off-duty employees from feeling compelled to peruse their inboxes at all times.

According to the BBC, the union Prospect, which represents over 150,000 employees in the UK, is urging the government to introduce a “right to disconnect”.

Prospect, whose members include engineers, scientists, managers, and government employees, contends that the measure is necessary to “protect employees’ health” after a poll indicated that one in three individuals had difficulty “switching off” since migrating to working remotely.

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Outside of regular working hours, managers would be prohibited from “routinely emailing or calling” their employees.

To discourage off-duty employees from obsessively checking their inboxes, any emails sent during these periods could be immediately erased.

Prospect’s deputy general secretary, Andrew Pakes told BBC, “While digital technology has kept us safe during the pandemic, for millions of people, working from home has felt more like sleeping in the office, making it harder to fully switch off.”

According to the Office for National Statistics, 35.9% of salaried people in the UK worked from home at least some of the time last year, BBC has reported.

While reducing costs on travel, this group worked an average of six hours of unpaid overtime each week, it added.

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In France, where companies are required to provide agreed-upon “specific hours” for teleworkers, the option to disconnect has been legal for four years.

The initiative arrives after the Republic of Ireland enacted new legislation in April that allows workers the right to refuse to respond to texts, calls, or emails received outside of working hours.

While responding to the occasional email isn’t the end of the world, we all know it can quickly spiral into a situation where coworkers want you to be reachable at all times of the day. It has the capacity to cause tension, worry, and even burnout.

However, businesses and attorneys have questioned if the right to disconnect is viable at a moment when several workers are requesting flexible work schedules.

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Prospect’s suggestion would be “very challenging” to work through, according to Peter Cheese, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, as quoted by BBC.

Currently, the official recommendation in the United Kingdom is encouraging individuals to work from home wherever feasible.

The Mental Health Foundation suggests that organizations communicate with their staff on a regular basis to maintain their mental wellness.

They must, however, “respect the boundaries people have between work and personal life,” according to the foundation.

The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has reassembled a Flexible Working Taskforce to help comprehend “the substantial changes in working styles that are arising as a result of the epidemic,” according to a spokeswoman who spoke to BBC.

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This task force would also look at the employees’ right to disconnect.