The Association Blog

Most employees deal with overwhelming cognitive and emotional loads both at work and home — and it’s crushing us

A recent article in Harvard Business Review, The Invisible Work Draining Your Best Employees, explores the concept of mental load: the ongoing, overwhelming “continuous cognitive and emotional work of planning, organizing and managing the details that keep work and life running.”

At work, it goes way past meeting deadlines. As HBR describes it, “It is also the emotional aspect of collaboratively brainstorming solutions, managing office relationships, handling employee interpersonal conflicts, and ensuring that output meets standards.” At home, it means caring for loved ones, managing day-to-day logistics, and offering emotional support. Most employees deal with mental loads of both work and home and, says HBR, it’s crushing us.

The article offers multiple steps that leaders can take to help mitigate some of this mental load. Here’s one example to consider:

Be flexible—for real

While companies claim to offer flexible work schedules, says HBR, they still “expect real-time responsiveness across all working hours”—resulting in guilt for employees if they’re, say, making time for a wellness appointment and a text comes in, or feel they have to respond if a manager emails at midnight.

HBR recommends that leadership clearly define “core collaboration hours” (e.g., 10 AM–3 PM) as well as offline hours. “If employees have emergencies that require them to be fully offline,” writes HBR, “establish protocols and processes to ensure contact is limited—or even restricted—during these periods. This includes encouraging employees to mute all workplace correspondence at these times.”

Have you set expectations for responding during offline hours? Have you clearly named your offline hours? Feel free to share your flexible work policy.

More Tips

Tip of the Week: Chew On This
Tip of the Week: New Study on Parents Who Work Full Time
Tip of the Week: How You Feelin’?
Tip of the Week: On a Scale of One to Five…

Photo: Unsplash