Culture Club: Unboundried communication outside of work hours
By Merly Kammerling and Michelle Moreno
THE QUESTION
“I’m happy our company communicates so openly, but sometimes it never seems to switch off. WhatsApp messages on my days off, ideas dropped into group chats at midnight, and a sense that I should always reply, even when I’m off. How do we set healthier boundaries without losing the benefit of communication?”
Merly:
“Always-on culture” refers to a workplace environment where employees feel pressured to be constantly available and responsive, even outside their scheduled working hours. This expectation of immediate availability, often enabled by technology, can blur the boundaries between work and personal life, leading to negative consequences for employees’ well-being and work-life balance.
Not fully disconnecting from work can reduce focus and productivity during actual work hours, due to lingering distractions from previous or upcoming tasks persisting. Over time, it can significantly impact one’s stamina, performance and work quality. It can also lead to feelings of being overworked or trapped, which affect one’s sense of freedom and autonomy in life outside of work.
A study conducted by researchers from the University of Hamburg on the impact of extended work availability found that the amount of psychological detachment influences a negative effect on mood at the start of the next day, experienced the previous evening, and the degree of control the person felt they had over out-of-work activities.
These factors are also linked to:
- Feeling more tired throughout the day
- Less relaxed overall
- Less content the next day
- Higher than normal cortisol levels in the morning
In addition, Tom Jackson, Professor of Information & Knowledge Management from Loughborough University, said: “Many of these work messages and emails will prompt an injection of cortisol (stress hormone) into your bloodstream. Over half of all people who check work emails and messages outside of work exhibit high-stress levels.”
Having separation from work is sacred. If you want the best from your team, then it’s your responsibility to create provisions to protect their time off, so they can recover and return with fresh energy and capacity for what’s to come.
What you can do as a business
Set standards
- Establish clear policies regarding professional communication channels and consider using dedicated communication platforms solely for work purposes. While using WhatsApp may seem easy and effective, it can be invasive and blur the lines between personal and professional phone time, ultimately leaving your team feeling like they can never have a proper break from work.
- Discuss with your employees their availability and communicate the business’s expectations.
Lead by example
- Our work habits, good or bad, are learned behaviour. Encourage the importance of time off, rest, and boundaries by demonstrating this in real-life situations. Such as leaving devices outside of meetings with your team, allowing your team to navigate appropriate challenges on their own without relying on WhatsApp, and taking time away from the business yourself.
Be respectful and compromise
- One size may not fit all. If you are a small team that can’t operate without contacting specific individuals who are not on shift or have a business that requires round-the-clock operations, then consider small compromises that increase the respect for your employees’ time away from work. For example, agree on a ‘contact hours’ schedule instead of the whole team being notified through group chats.
Michelle:
One of the biggest shifts in hospitality over the past few years has been the increased communication. Group chats, quick updates, and ideas are flying around at all hours of the day and night. For the most part, this has been a positive change. Open communication connects teams faster, spreads information wider, and builds stronger bonds, especially across departments and locations.
However, not everything that feels good and efficient at first is healthy in the long run. Many teams are now finding that communication has not just increased; it has lost its shape and is quietly exhausting people.
Where the problem really lies
Over-communication is not the enemy. Done well, it is a cultural superpower. The real issue is ineffective, unconscious communication. It is the updates fired off the moment you think of them. It is the assumption that if you can send something, you should.
Nobody officially said, “You must always be on,” but behaviour sets the expectation. Every late-night reply or WhatsApp message on a day off reinforces a silent contract: we are always reachable. Once a behaviour becomes normal, it becomes 300% harder to reverse, according to Harvard Business Review research.
Adam Grant’s studies show that more communication usually builds trust, but this only works when it is clear, conscious, and considerate of the audience and in hospitality, where days blur into nights, that erosion happens fast.
How you fix it
You do not need less communication. You need conscious communication.
It is audience-aware, not sender-driven. It is timed with respect, not urgency addiction. Most importantly, it relies on changing behaviours, not just changing platforms.
No new tool or policy will work if the behaviour underneath stays the same. If you want communication to energise rather than exhaust your team, it must be intentional and disciplined.
The Conscious Communication Check
To support better habits, we’ve created a simple check, shown in the visual below. Before you send a message, take a moment to run it through four filters: Timing, Urgency, Audience, and Method.
If the answer is yes to all four, send it. If not, schedule it, or hold it until later.
A final warning
Even with new agreements, it is easy to slip back into old habits, especially with WhatsApp. It is fast, open to everyone, and feels like the quickest way to reach someone when impatience creeps in.
But speed does not equal fairness. True communication respects timing, not convenience. If new habits are not as accessible and easy as WhatsApp, people will quietly return to what feels easier.
Conclusion
We often find ourselves in a love-hate relationship with our devices and work, neglecting our loved ones and ourselves, and perpetuating a societal message that our work is never truly done for the day; despite knowing that we have a fundamental human requirement that needs to be fulfilled: some time to disconnect from the noise.
If you want to build a thriving team, you must be deliberate about how you communicate. It is not the volume of messages that exhausts people; it is messages sent without thought. Protecting your team’s time and energy is not about reducing communication, it is about making it conscious, consistent, and effective. A company that values connection in communication must also value boundaries….that’s where culture is built.