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Martha Stortz mostly stuck to her normal working hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. before the pandemic. That changed when she started working from home.
“It’s so easy to allow work to drift into lunchtime or later at night,” says Ms. Stortz. “When the pandemic struck, I was so bored that I relished the opportunity to feel useful and even a work e-mail was better than doomscrolling.”
The Toronto legal research manager found herself subtly extending her hours later into the evening, worked while sick and maintained a “just one more task” mentality.
Ms. Stortz’s experience highlights a subtle and ongoing trend known as “quiet overworking,” which emerges from blurred lines between work and personal life. A recent Angus Reid survey found 46 per cent of Canadian workers reported a lack of separation between the two.
Quiet overworking is “the unrecognized extra time employees put in to keep up, checking e-mails first thing in the morning, responding to Slack messages after dinner or working late because the day ran out of hours,” says Mike Daser, founder of Hearth HR in Toronto.
“Companies don’t always encourage it outright, but they rarely discourage it either,” Mr. Daser says. “If anything, companies often celebrate the people who quietly overwork, which makes it feel like an expectation.”
In 2022, the Province of Ontario introduced the right to disconnect legislation, which requires employers with more than 25 staff members to have a policy that allows employees to detach from work-related communications after hours.
Mr. Daser says this type legislation is often ineffective because workers are always connected, which creates a certain expectation of availability and a culture of immediacy.
“E-mails, Slack, Teams, texts, there’s no pause button,” he says. “Colleagues and managers expect instant answers and employees feel pressure to comply.”
The productivity paradox
Many employers are now forcing their workers back to the office in the name of productivity. However, Angus Reid research suggests that workers consider themselves more productive at home.
“Pushing everyone back to the office risks undoing the conditions that made people quietly more productive at home,” Mr. Daser says. “Without commutes or constant distractions, they had the freedom to focus.”
Still, he acknowledges the value of being at the office, noting that is “where collaboration sparks, culture builds and new hires learn by osmosis.”
Greg Hussey, president of Impact HR in Edmonton and Calgary, says the shift to hybrid/remote work made it easier for work to spill across the day.
He points to research showing that time saved from the commute was often added back into the workday, “which can quietly extend work time at home.”
He cites a new report from Microsoft that shows employees are now experiencing an “infinite workday.” Microsoft’s research found 40 per cent of workers are checking their e-mail before 6 a.m. and evening meetings after 8 p.m. are up 16 per cent year-over-year.
Mr. Hussey notes that quiet overworking is different from working overtime.
“Overtime is tracked and compensated, but quiet overworking is not,” he says. “It happens because calendars are full, messages never stop and expectations are murky.”
The ‘just one more task’ trap
Even before the pandemic, John Loeppky, now a freelance journalist in Saskatoon, had several remote jobs where he would find himself working beyond his regular hours, whether to catch up on e-mails or succumbing to the “just one more task” trap, similar to Ms. Stortz.
“I think remote work creates an environment – even when employers and employees have the best of intentions – where it can be really easy to overwork,” Mr. Loeppky says.
“Some folks feel on-call when they work from home in a way they didn’t feel when they were primarily in office,” he says, adding that they feel the need to always be available and respond quickly in a way they don’t feel at the office.
Kayla Baum, a former marketing manager, describes herself as a former quiet overworker who stayed online well past the point where the workday ended.
“My anxious, overachiever personality type fed right into it,” Ms. Baum says. “It led to a clinical nervous breakdown at the office, a month-long hospital stay and a year off of work.”
Although this was during pre-remote or hybrid working times, Ms. Baum believes that the trend of quiet overworking has become increasingly more problematic in hybrid and remote settings.
“Without the natural stop of physically leaving an office, combined with [workers being in different time zones], meetings are starting earlier and ending later,” says Ms. Baum, who has since founded the Toronto-based workplace wellness company Twello.
In the case of Ms. Baum, “it led to a clinical nervous breakdown at the office, a month-long hospital stay and a year off of work,” she says.
Employers need to ‘set the tone’
HR experts say it’s up to employers to set a tone that discourages quiet overworking.
“It’s not enough to mention work-life boundaries once and hope for the best,” Ms. Baum says. “Leaders need to hammer this message home until it drowns out old-school hustle culture. If you want people to feel safe disconnecting, you have to break the cycle of glorifying burnout and stop rewarding people for always being ‘on.’ No mixed signals, no subtle penalties for logging off, just relentless, clear support for shutting down when the day is over.”
If you’re an employee, Mr. Loeppky recommends creating a routine, having an open dialogue about work expectations and sinking into “the fact that you’re not getting to be your full self if you’re working all the time.”
Mr. Loeppky says it took becoming a full-time freelancer to confront his propensity to overwork.
“Back then, it felt like a badge of honour to be working so much, a sort of ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ internal philosophy. Now I look back on those hours and wonder why I glorified it so much to myself,” he says.