A manager’s weekend activity is sometimes presented as evidence of responsibility. More often, however, it is a manual workaround for a flawed management system. When decisions, escalations and the flow of information depend on a single person, their constant presence does not increase the company’s resilience. It merely masks its lack.
Digital overload encourages this model. An analysis of aggregated Microsoft 365 data shows that the average user receives 117 emails and 153 messages on Teams on working days. The number of messages is rising, and the boundaries of the working day are shifting into the early mornings and late evenings. Meetings starting after 8 pm have increased by 16 per cent over the past year.
These figures are not representative of the labour market as a whole, but they provide an accurate picture of an environment in which information has become cheap and attention has become expensive. The easier it is to send a message, tag a recipient and add another person to a meeting, the more time an organisation spends managing its own communications. In such cases, a manager is not managing the company, but a queue of incoming messages.
The weekend reveals the scale of this dependency. If a team cannot make a reversible decision without the director’s approval, the problem lies in poorly defined responsibilities. If every alert goes to the CIO, incident classification is failing. If senior management has to monitor several messaging platforms, the company lacks a reliable information hub. A leader’s availability keeps operations running, but at the same time delays the improvement of processes.
Regulations do not override a culture of constant availability
A formal right to disconnect is not enough. In a Eurofound survey, eight out of ten people regularly received work-related messages outside working hours, both in organisations with an appropriate policy and in companies without such rules. Almost nine out of ten employees responded to at least some of these communications.
The policy does not change behaviour when managers continue to send instructions in the evening, a quick response is informally rewarded, and being overworked is seen as a sign of ambition. A ‘disconnection’ policy only begins to work once the root causes of excessive communication have been addressed: unclear priorities, too many meetings, a lack of cover and poorly designed escalation procedures.
Eurofound also noted a better work-life balance in companies with such policies: 92 per cent positive ratings compared with 80 per cent in other organisations. However, the difference was not due to the policy itself. Manager training, workload monitoring and a genuine reduction in out-of-hours contact all played a significant role.
Rest protects decision-making ability
Mentally disconnecting from work is no guarantee of creativity, nor is it an automatic route to higher productivity. However, a meta-analysis involving over 38,000 employees revealed a link between disconnection and lower levels of exhaustion, better sleep, greater well-being and a moderate improvement in task performance.
In managerial work, the key resource is not the number of hours spent online, but the quality of judgement. A weekend filled with minor decisions depletes one’s attention before the start of the next week. This does not necessarily result in an obvious mistake. More often, it leads to an overly cautious approach, a shortening of the analysis process, and a preference for immediate solutions over meaningful ones.
Long working hours also have a measurable cost to health. The WHO and the International Labour Organisation have linked working at least 55 hours a week with a 35 per cent higher risk of stroke and a 17 per cent higher risk of ischaemic heart disease compared with a 35–40-hour week. For a company, this means a risk of staff absenteeism and the loss of expertise concentrated in individuals whom the organisation considers irreplaceable.
Technology should reduce the need for intervention
An effective digital detox does not require cutting the company off from management. It requires on-call arrangements rather than constant availability, decision-making thresholds rather than approval on every occasion, and a single channel for critical incidents. Other information can wait for an automated summary on Monday.
AI can filter communications, organise changes to projects and prepare summary reports. Used without changing working practices, it will merely speed up the production of messages and increase the scale of disruption.
An operationally mature company does not need a manager to be online throughout the weekend. It can recognise the moment when the manager’s intervention actually makes a difference. A switched-off phone does not create a risk. It reveals the risk that was previously masked by constant availability.
