Manage Boundaries Better With Your Team

Just how much do employees resent it when leaders cross work-life boundaries? Our research found that employees consider being contacted during off-hours an unwelcome intrusion into their personal lives 76% of the time.1 Additionally, 83% of people reported experiencing interruptions at least twice a week, and 41% reported an increase in interruptions compared with pre-COVID times.2 Work-life boundaries are blurrier than ever, creating significant challenges for both employees and leaders. Today’s managers need to learn how to manage these boundaries — for themselves and for their teams.

Leaders face a workforce flexibility paradox: People require both flexibility and boundaries. While 96% of U.S. professionals say they need some degree of flexibility in where and when they get their work done, they also say that unwarranted off-hours interruptions affect their ability to detach and recharge.3 That can compromise career satisfaction, which is bad news both for employees and the leaders trying to retain them.4 Against this backdrop, California recently considered a “right to disconnect” bill that was ultimately shelved — with those opposing it arguing that a one-size-fits-all approach is rarely optimal. But the proposed legislation highlighted the zeitgeist of grappling with boundaries in a flexible work environment.

The upside of certain off-hours interruptions may be obvious: For example, your company may sometimes need to provide clients with an immediate response. But our research revealed that when leaders underestimate the employee costs, this hurts employee satisfaction and engagement and, ultimately, risks attrition. What’s more, because each employee is unique, and hybrid work is now commonplace, people’s definitions of “off-work time” and “justifiable interruption” vary greatly.5

So managers must become masters at intentionally navigating boundaries for — and with — their employees.

Three Strategies for Managing Boundaries

What is an off-hours interruption? It’s not as easy to define as you might think. Our research found that 44% of the time, employees disagree on whether an off-hours interruption is a violation of their personal boundaries. These experiences are highly subjective and variable: Even for an individual employee, there is a 1 in 3 chance that they will react differently from one interruption to the next.6

It’s difficult for leaders to make standardized, rules-based decisions regarding interruptions, given that it’s challenging to predict whether an employee will judge any given off-hours contact to be acceptable.

Leaders themselves are also the recipients of many off-hours interruptions; they face high pressure to respond and struggle to mentally detach after intrusions from work, our research shows.7 Here, we offer evidence-based strategies managers can apply to successfully navigate modern work-life permeability.

1. Draw better lines, using boundary dialogue.

Most people think they know when it is acceptable (or not) to interrupt other people based on their own personal standards. Yet, managers need to make the implicit explicit to better align people’s boundaries. You should have a boundary dialogue — a bidirectional discourse with members of your team — to better understand where the line is for each employee. These conversations will enable you to better manage expectations, accommodate individual needs (when and where possible), and facilitate off-hours recovery. Likewise, you should engage in upward boundary dialogue with your leadership to help protect your own boundaries and those of your teams.

When you have conversations with employees about boundaries, consider your role as both someone who can be interrupted and be the interrupter. Get curious. Ask your team members about their working hours and when, if at all, they consider it appropriate, necessary, or reasonable for you to contact them outside of that period. Likewise, explicitly set expectations for gaining access to your personal time and attention.

Boundary dialogue is most effective when it occurs early in a working relationship, such as when a new employee is onboarded or a new manager joins a team. Still, such dialogue can happen later; in fact, this can be a good way to signal cultural shifts or reinforce team agreement on norms. Regardless of the work relationship stage, have everyone on your team (including you) create and share a “communication manual” outlining working hours, preferred modes of communication, and when and what types of off-hour interruptions are acceptable.

You should also send the right signals, keeping in mind that how and when you work is not necessarily how and when others work. For instance, if you send an email to an employee at 2 a.m. just because you can’t sleep, you may unwittingly signal that they are expected to be available at all hours of the day. Making use of available email features can help. Subject lines can specify that the task is not urgent or does not require an immediate response. A line in your email signature can also help. (For example, “Note: I sometimes send emails after hours to facilitate my work-life balance. Please do not feel pressured to respond outside the work hours that facilitate your work-life balance.”) Or schedule a nonurgent email to be sent the next business day.

2. Stick to boundaries to protect your time and attention.

After engaging in a boundary dialogue, stick firmly to your boundaries to stop interruptions before they happen. Doing so can be challenging, but pick and choose from these tactics (depending on your role and work culture):

• Adopt an end-of-workday ritual. Take 15-20 minutes toward the end of the workday to touch base with others who may need you during off-hours. If they have quick questions, deal with them during this time. Or write an end-of-day plan for how you will tackle incomplete tasks the next day to stop unfinished work from lingering in your mind after hours.
• Make better use of calendars. Set “working hours” and “personal time” on your calendar as a deterrent to others who may try to schedule meetings at all hours. Also, don’t ignore shared team-availability calendars that indicate when others have upcoming important personal events or vacation time, and plan accordingly.
• Designate a second lieutenant. Require each employee, including you, to designate a backup person for high-profile work projects — someone who, while not the lead on that project, is knowledgeable enough to answer questions or complete basic tasks when the lead person is unavailable. This decreases the need for off-hours interruptions and also creates a smoother transition in the event of sudden personnel changes, such as turnover, illness, or a leave of absence.
• Craft an off-hours email auto-reply. For 24-7 organizations and those spread across time zones, information must be constantly accessible. An informative off-hours auto-reply can accommodate this by specifying resources or redirects for common queries, such as an administrative assistant, another department, or a particular document or static source of information that is available but perhaps hard to find.
• Control access. When possible, eliminate sources of distraction. This includes minimizing distractions from external sources (for example, by turning off notifications or switching devices to “focus time”), as well as self-distractibility (such as by putting your work phone in another room).
• Rotate off-hours availability. In cases where off-hours interruptions are common (such as client-based roles or 24-7 organizations), organize a rotation of individuals who are on call during off-hours. This gives employees and clients consistent access while making interruptions more predictable.
• Lean into time zones. If you work for an organization with multiple offices in various time zones, join forces with a peer colleague based internationally and serve as each other’s off-hours point of contact for queries. For this to work, knowledge must be infused throughout the team rather than concentrated within individual team members.

3. Manage intentional boundary violations.

In reality, sometimes boundaries will be misaligned, and off-hours interruptions are unavoidable.

If you’re in the position of needing to intrude:

• Use framing. If you must interrupt others during protected off-hours, use context framing: Acknowledge the boundary and the violation, and provide an explanation for why it needed to be an exception. Violating someone’s boundary can signal disrespect, so repairing injury to the relationship is also critical.8 Boundary violation framing — intentionally framing the interrupting behavior by explaining the context, importance, and benefits — can mitigate this.

Though a small shift, this context-setting can have enormous benefits for the way someone experiences an interruption, reducing their negative emotions around the intrusion by as much as 35%.9 Interestingly, managers themselves are more likely to receive such explanations for interruptions than to provide them, suggesting that they have a blind spot — and an opportunity to make this a practice at all levels.

• Reflect. After an intrusion, consider how it could be avoided in the future. Is there a single point of failure in the system? Communicating with your direct report on how you can minimize these situations can be constructive.

If you’re in the position of being interrupted during protected off-hours:

• Delay. Evaluate the urgency of the request. Does the interruption truly warrant immediate attention? When possible, respond by committing future time to it (“Let’s meet about this at 9 a.m. Monday”). This can relieve your burden in the moment while you’re still being responsive. Other good questions to ask: “If I don’t respond to this right now, what are the implications?” or “Can I suggest [someone who is currently working] to cover this?”
• Set a secondary boundary. If you must respond, you can set another boundary, such as “I can spend 30 minutes on this right now, and then I will have to attend to other things.” Depending on the circumstance, you might want to set a timer to prevent yourself from inadvertently allowing the task to consume your personal time. Visualizing and communicating a hard stop can help minimize time creep.
• Develop attentional agility. Our research found that individuals with attentional agility — the ability to quickly refocus attention on the task at hand after an interruption — were better able to manage off-hours intrusions and refocus. They were also less exhausted and more engaged at both work and home.10 Mindfulness techniques can help individuals build attentional agility.

How can you train yourself to redirect your attention to life outside of work after an off-hours interruption? Some small but powerful practices can cultivate this skill, such as tuning in to your body, your environment, and your thoughts and feelings about your pre-interruption activity. You might ask focused questions, take deep breaths, or state your intentions out loud for actively reengaging in the task at hand.

As we navigate hybrid and dispersed work models, the organizations that will thrive are those that are able to recognize work-life integration as a strategic imperative. When organizations create an environment of support and empowerment for work-life integration, engagement and productivity rise.11 Moreover, such companies often see improvements in talent attraction and retention because work-life policies have become a key differentiator in a competitive job market.12

In essence, work-life integration strategies are not just about accommodating employees’ personal lives. They’re about recognizing the changes to the very nature of work itself and strategically driving success within this new era. That success requires boundaries and healthy dynamics — which leaders have significant power to shape.

“The MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management.”

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