Your manager sends you an email at 9:47pm. The subject line is routine. The content is routine. At the bottom, a single line: "No need to respond tonight."

You respond at 10:04pm.

So does everyone else on the team. Every single time.

That line at the bottom does something very specific. It tells you your manager knows they are contacting you outside work hours. It tells you they consider this acceptable. And it hands you a decision that should never be yours to make: whether to protect your own boundaries against the person who controls your career.

The phrase does not reduce pressure. It creates it. And the research on what happens next is far worse than most people realise.

The 36 Percent Problem

Laura Giurge at London Business School and Vanessa Bohns at Cornell wanted to understand why people reply to non-urgent emails at 10pm when no one actually asked them to.

They ran eight pre-registered experiments with 4,004 working adults and uncovered a gap between what senders expect and what receivers assume. They named it the "email urgency bias." Every time someone receives an after-hours work email, their brain treats it as more urgent than the sender intended. As they wrote in The Wall Street Journal (as reported by Inc.com), receivers assumed they needed to respond 36 percent faster than senders actually expected. This held true whether the email was urgent or not. Even when the content was clearly routine, receivers still felt the pull to reply fast.

The stress this created went beyond wasted time. Receivers reported lower wellbeing. The effect hit hardest outside normal work hours.

And here is the part that should make every manager pause before hitting send: Giurge and Bohns found that modern workplaces treat response speed as a proxy for work ethic. Reply fast, you look committed. Wait until morning, you risk looking disengaged. The quality of your work becomes secondary to how quickly you acknowledge the email.

This is not paranoia on the part of employees. This is the system working exactly as designed.

The Phrases Everyone Uses (and Why They All Do the Same Thing)

"No need to respond tonight" is the most recognised offender, but it has company:

"Just flagging this for when you're back."

"Not urgent, but when you get a chance..."

"Wanted to get this off my desk so I don't forget."

"No rush on this."

"Just thinking out loud here..."

Every one of these phrases performs the same trick. It says, I know the timing is wrong, while doing nothing to change the timing. It moves the responsibility for boundary-setting from the sender (who holds the power) to the receiver (who does not).

When a senior leader sends a message at 10pm with the caveat "no rush," they put the receiver in an impossible position. Respond now and confirm that your personal time is flexible. Or wait until morning and spend the next eight hours wondering whether your manager noticed you did not reply.

Most people respond now. The email urgency bias guarantees it.

Your Boss Says "You Don't Have to Reply." Your Brain Says Otherwise.

A manager controls your performance reviews, your project assignments, your promotions, and in many cases, whether you keep your job. When that person contacts you at night, no five-word disclaimer at the bottom of the email can undo the weight of that power imbalance.

A team of researchers at Virginia Tech, Lehigh University, and Colorado State University set out to measure exactly what this dynamic does to people. William Becker, Liuba Belkin, Samantha Conroy, and Sarah Tuskey ran three separate studies and published them under the title "Killing Me Softly." In one study, they tracked 108 working adults through daily experience sampling. In another, they recruited 142 employee-partner pairs to see whether the damage spilled into relationships.

It did. Workers who felt pressure to monitor emails at home reported higher anxiety, worse health, and lower relationship satisfaction. Their partners reported the same.

But the most important finding was this: employees did not need to spend actual time working after hours to experience harm. The expectation alone produced the damage. After-hours emails force employees to juggle competing demands from work and personal lives at the same time. As ScienceDaily reported, these competing demands "present a dilemma for employees, which triggers feelings of anxiety and endangers work and personal lives."

Belkin called the expectation of after-hours availability "an insidious stressor" that increases anxiety, harms health, decreases relationship satisfaction, and damages partner wellbeing too. Becker went further. He told ScienceDaily that the impact of "always on" culture "is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit." Companies sell constant connectivity as flexibility and autonomy. His research showed the opposite: "flexible work boundaries" often become "work without boundaries."

This is not a culture problem. It is a psychosocial hazard, and under Australian WHS law, employers have a duty to identify and control it just like any physical risk.

It Is Not the Email. It Is the Waiting.

In a related study presented at the Academy of Management in 2016, Belkin, Becker, and Conroy surveyed 365 working adults and found something that reframes the entire conversation. Yes, time spent on after-hours emails led to emotional exhaustion. But the organisational expectation to remain available caused the most significant damage, independent of how much email time people actually logged.

Read that again. Even during stretches when no emails arrived at all, the norm of availability and the anticipation of work created a constant stressor that stopped employees from mentally leaving their jobs. As Becker put it, "such expectations cause more problems, including burnout and work-life balance problems, than the actual time it takes to read and respond to after-hours emails."

The problem is not that your team spends twenty minutes answering your 10pm email. The problem is that your team spends the entire evening waiting for it.

The numbers tell the same story. In an earlier study by the same team, 65 percent of participants believed their company expected them to monitor after-hours work emails. Fifty-five percent reported difficulty detaching from work. Only 8 percent said they had no problem disconnecting.

And the damage is not spread evenly. Employees who strongly prefer to keep work and home life separate suffered the most. Belkin wrote that "anticipatory stress caused by organizational email-related norms" hits hardest for "people who prefer highly segmented schedules." But even employees with looser boundaries eventually broke down the same way.

The Compulsion Has a Name

If you have ever stared at a work notification at 9pm knowing you should ignore it and physically could not, psychologists Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi can tell you what happened. In 2015, they published research in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology that gave the compulsion a name: workplace telepressure.

Telepressure is a preoccupation with and urge to respond quickly to work messages, paired with a fixation on fast response times. It is not the same as dedication or work ethic. It operates as a psychological state that workers struggle to override through willpower alone. Barber and Santuzzi found that telepressure predicted burnout, absenteeism, and poor sleep beyond what general workload explained. It was not about how much work people had. It was about the pull they felt toward their inbox.

This is why "you don't have to respond" never lands. The urge to respond does not come from a rational assessment of your manager's expectations. It comes from an internal compulsion that workplace culture builds and reinforces, one email at a time. Every after-hours message, every rapid reply from a colleague, every "thanks for the quick response" from a manager strengthens the telepressure response.

In 2023, Barber, Santuzzi, and Hu published a follow-up in Group & Organization Management that tested the obvious fix: do formal disconnect policies reduce telepressure? They surveyed employees across two separate samples and found that having a company disconnection policy showed no association with lower telepressure. None. Workers who had a written policy experienced the same compulsive pull to respond as workers without one.

What did predict telepressure? The unwritten rules. Employees who perceived high after-hours expectations and worked in environments that offered little support for their personal time reported the highest telepressure. Workers ignored the written policy and followed the culture they could see.

That distinction matters for any organisation serious about managing this risk. You cannot control a hazard you cannot see. The unwritten norms that drive telepressure do not show up in policy documents or employee handbooks. They show up in behaviour patterns, communication data, and the gap between what an organisation says it values and what it actually rewards. Detecting those patterns requires more than a once-a-year engagement survey.

What One Email Does to Your Evening

You sit at dinner with your family. You glance at your phone. There is a work email from your manager. You decide not to respond.

It does not matter. Your brain has already started processing it. Part of your cognitive attention now sits with that email, that problem, that implied request. You are physically at dinner but mentally back at work.

Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington Bothell gave this phenomenon a name in 2009: "attention residue." When you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays behind. As she explains: "As we switch between tasks, part of our attention often stays with the prior task instead of fully transferring to the next one." The residue gets worse when the first task feels unfinished or when you know you will have to return to it.

An email from your boss at 9pm is both.

Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine found that after an interruption, a person takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully refocus. At work, that means lost productivity. At home, during what should be recovery time, it means your brain never fully leaves the office.

This connects to something Sabine Sonnentag at the University of Mannheim has spent more than two decades studying: how people recover from work. Her stressor-detachment model, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, shows that psychological detachment from work during non-work time is essential for health, motivation, and next-day performance. When job stressors block this mental disengagement, workers experience impaired sleep, elevated fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and reduced performance the following day.

An after-hours email, even one that says "no rush," interrupts this recovery. The moment you read it, you process work content. Your brain shifts into problem-solving mode. The recovery period resets.

This is not about toughness or resilience. It is how the brain recovers from sustained cognitive effort. Your brain needs extended periods of disengagement from work to replenish the resources you used up during the day. Every interruption restarts the clock.

How Big Is This Problem?

The Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute found in its 2023 annual survey that Australian employees worked an average of 5.4 hours of unpaid overtime per week. That adds up to 281 hours per year: more than seven standard 38-hour work weeks spent working for free. A 2022 survey by the same organisation found that seven out of ten Australians worked outside their scheduled hours. Many reported physical tiredness, stress, and anxiety as a result.

By 2024, unpaid overtime dropped to 3.6 hours per week, the equivalent of almost five standard work weeks per year. Dr Fiona Macdonald, author of the 2024 report and Policy Director at the Centre for Future Work, observed that the numbers fell below both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic levels. But she cautioned against complacency. She told HRM Online: "We kid ourselves with the idea that we're the land of the long weekend and that we take it easy and go home on time." Casuals, part-timers, and lower-paid workers all reported unpaid overtime too. The most common forms: arriving early, staying late, working through breaks, and answering calls or emails outside working hours.

The after-hours email is not an isolated event. It is the most visible symptom of a culture where the workday never actually ends.

The Race Nobody Wants to Win

After-hours emails also create a problem that rarely gets talked about: competitive pressure between colleagues.

Your manager sends a team-wide email at 9pm. One person responds at 9:12pm. Now every other team member faces a choice. Wait until morning and look less committed. Or respond immediately and reinforce the norm that after-hours availability is expected.

The first responder sets the pace. Over time, the fastest responder becomes the benchmark. The team collectively races toward earlier response times, not because anyone demanded it, but because everyone watches what everyone else does. Giurge and Bohns spotted this in their research. Workplaces increasingly treat response speed as a signal of commitment, and the email urgency bias amplifies the pressure because every receiver assumes the sender expects a faster reply than they actually do.

The result: a team where nobody wants to reply last, and where the disconnect policy on the intranet carries no weight against the social proof of three colleagues who already hit send.

Governments Are Starting to Notice

Lawmakers in a growing number of countries now view after-hours contact not as a cultural annoyance but as a workplace health and safety hazard.

Australia led the way in the English-speaking world. The Fair Work Act now includes a statutory right to disconnect (Section 333M) that took effect in August 2024 for businesses with more than 15 employees. The law allows employees to refuse to monitor, read, or respond to work-related contact outside their working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable. This right sits alongside existing obligations on employers to manage psychosocial risks, including workload and workplace communications. Workplace lawyer Madeleine Stebbing told the Law Society Journal that employers have a positive duty to remove psychosocial hazards, and that includes not expecting people to remain "on" at all times.

But Stebbing also named the gap at the heart of this problem. She said that if legislative rights go unenforced, they offer no more protection than the paper they sit on.

France introduced right to disconnect legislation in 2017 for companies with more than 50 employees. Roughly two dozen countries across Europe, Latin America, and beyond have followed. In the United States, California introduced Assembly Bill 2751 in 2024, which would have required employers to establish disconnect policies. The bill stalled in committee that same year. New Jersey introduced a similar bill (A4852) in September 2024, which also stalled. As of late 2025, no US federal, state, or local law protects an employee's right to disconnect.

The regulatory direction is clear, and organisations that wait for legislation to force their hand will find themselves building compliance systems under pressure. The ones that build psychosocial risk frameworks now, aligned with ISO 45003 and SafeWork Australia requirements, will already have the audit-ready documentation regulators expect when enforcement catches up to legislation.

Why Policies and Disclaimers Fail

Plenty of organisations have tried to fix this. Some add email footers:

"I work flexibly. Please do not feel obligated to respond outside your own working hours."

"This email reflects my schedule, not my expectations."

These disclaimers carry good intentions. They carry almost no weight.

Giurge and Bohns found that a brief note clarifying response expectations did reduce the email urgency bias in controlled experiments. But controlled experiments strip away the variable that matters most in real life: power. In a study, a neutral researcher tells participants "the sender does not expect a fast reply," and participants adjust. In the real world, your boss sends you an email at 10pm with a footer that says the same thing, and you reply anyway, because your boss controls your career.

The Barber, Santuzzi, and Hu study confirmed this at the policy level. Formal disconnect policies showed no relationship with lower telepressure. The policies changed the rules on paper. They changed nothing in people's heads.

This does not mean policies are pointless. A 2023 Eurofound report surveyed employees and HR managers across Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain. Workers in companies with a right to disconnect policy reported better work-life balance than those without (92 percent compared to 80 percent). But there is a gap between rating your work-life balance in a survey and processing a 10pm email from your boss in real time. Policies set the right tone. They do not rewire the compulsion.

What predicted telepressure was the culture people could see: whether managers actually sent after-hours emails, whether colleagues got praised for fast replies, whether the organisation genuinely protected employees' time away from work. Workers follow behaviour, not policies. If the leadership team sends emails after hours regularly, the organisational norm says after-hours communication is acceptable. No footer changes that.

This is the gap that most organisations never close. They write a policy. They may even mean it. But they have no way to measure whether the policy changed anything, no way to detect whether after-hours contact expectations are rising or falling across teams, and no way to assess which parts of the organisation carry the highest risk. Without that visibility, the policy sits on the intranet and the 10pm emails keep landing.

What Actually Works

The research points in one direction. The sender must change their behaviour, not just their language.

Giurge and Bohns wrote that placing the emphasis on the receiver to decide whether to respond is itself a source of stress. The responsibility sits with the sender, especially when the sender holds authority. In practice, this means:

Schedule it for morning. If you write emails at 10pm, use delayed send and schedule them for 8am. You still clear your mental to-do list. But the receiver never faces a decision about whether to respond at night. This removes the hazard at the source. It is the single most effective change a leader can make.

Go further: stop writing at 10pm. Scheduling the email still signals to yourself that after-hours work is normal. Sonnentag's research on psychological detachment applies to senders too. Your own recovery suffers when you spend your evening in work mode, even if no one else sees the email until morning.

Drop the qualifier. If you must send an after-hours message in a genuine emergency, send it without "no rush." The caveat forces the receiver to decode your real intent. If the matter is urgent, say so plainly. If it is not urgent, do not send it.

Audit your sent folder. Open it. Filter by time. Count how many messages you sent after 6pm in the past month. Then ask your team, honestly, whether they feel pressure to respond. The gap between your intention and their experience will tell you everything a policy cannot.

Name the dynamic out loud. Talk to your team about the competitive pressure after-hours emails create. Say it plainly: one person responds, others feel they must follow. Make it clear that response time carries zero weight in performance evaluations. Then prove it by never rewarding fast responders and never penalising those who wait.

Model the behaviour yourself. Barber, Santuzzi, and Hu showed that formal policies fail when the unwritten norms contradict them. If you want your team to disconnect, you must disconnect first. Every email you do not send after hours builds a stronger norm than any policy you publish.

Measure whether it is working. Behaviour change is only the first step. You also need to know whether the controls you put in place actually reduced the risk, or whether after-hours contact simply moved from email to Slack to text. Tracking psychosocial risk across teams and over time turns good intentions into evidence that the intervention worked, and gives you the documentation to prove it when a regulator, insurer, or board asks what you have done.

Your Sent Folder Is Your Disconnect Policy

Many organisations now have a right to disconnect policy. Some adopted it because legislation requires it. Others adopted it because HR recommended it. Very few adopted it because their leadership team actually disconnects.

A policy that says "employees are not expected to respond to emails outside work hours" means nothing if the CEO sends emails at 11pm every Tuesday. Workers do not read policies to understand culture. They watch what leaders do.

And when what leaders do contradicts what the policy says, the policy becomes something worse than useless. It becomes evidence that the organisation identified the hazard and chose not to control it.

If you lead a team, your sent folder is your disconnect policy. Everything else is documentation. And if you lead an organisation, the question is no longer whether after-hours email culture is a psychosocial hazard. The research settled that years ago. The question is whether you can detect it, assess it, control it, and prove you did.

You can only manage what you measure. Start measuring.

Disclaimer: This article is published by ReFresh and is intended for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, medical, or professional advice. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the research cited and the sources linked, information may have changed since the time of writing. Readers should consult qualified professionals for advice specific to their circumstances. The views expressed are the author's own and do not represent the position of any institution, researcher, or organisation cited in this article.