Always On Doesn’t Mean High Commitment

Somewhere along the way, availability got confused with commitment.

Executives started reading late night responses as “ownership.”

Managers started reading green dots as “engagement.”

People Ops started tracking participation in one more initiative instead of asking a basic question.

Do our people ever get to be completely off?

Here is what the research keeps telling us.

Studies on “telepressure” show that when employees feel they should respond quickly to work messages after hours, their emotional exhaustion and work family conflict jump, even when the actual message volume is not insane. The expectation alone eats into their headspace. Barber & Santuzzi, 2015.

Other work on the same pattern links that pressure to poor sleep and more health complaints. People who feel they must always be ready to respond sleep worse and report more physical strain. Barber, Conlin, & Santuzzi, 2019.

Think about what that means in your world.

Your most committed people are not just tired. They are never fully off. Their brains never drop into a low gear where deep thinking and recovery happen. Then you act surprised when strategic work crawls and decisions get sloppy.

Commitment is not a green dot. Commitment is showing up sharp, present, and effective when it matters.

Always on destroys that.

The Real Cost Of Never Powering Down

Burnout research has been boringly consistent for decades. Exhaustion, cynicism, and that creeping feeling that your effort no longer matters grow when there is a chronic mismatch between what people give and what they get back in control, clarity, and fairness.

Always on cultures crank that mismatch up every quarter.

Your people give constant responsiveness. In return they get shifting priorities, vague “ASAP” deadlines, and leaders who toss new work on the pile without touching anything else.

In your tools, it looks like this.

Late night messages graduate from exception to routine.

Replies get shorter and colder.

Humor dries up.

Hedge language pops up more often. “Should be fine.” “Probably ok.”

Workplace’s data across companies shows these micro patterns in timing and tone show up long before attrition or engagement numbers move. They are early fingerprints of fatigue and execution risk.

On the surface, people are still “engaged.” They answer surveys. They say they believe in the mission. They show up to yet another all hands. Underneath, their attention is shredded. Their patience is gone. Their trust that leaders will protect them from chaos is fading fast.

This is the cost of never powering down. Not just burnout, but a slow downgrade of your company’s thinking ability.

Which brings us to the part nobody wants to talk about.

Leaders Are Manufacturing The Exhaustion They Complain About

Most executives don’t wake up and say “let’s crush our people today.”

They say things like “we just need to move faster” and “this next quarter is critical” and “ping me anytime.”

Then they fire off approvals at 11:47 p.m.

They drop “quick asks” into three teams’ channels on Saturday morning.

They use the word “urgent” ten times more often than they use the phrase “here’s what we’ll stop to make room.”

You can see the ripple effect in your digital exhaust.

When senior leaders send more after hours messages, entire reporting lines follow. When they overuse urgency language, teams stop trusting any deadline. When they answer every question in minutes, everybody learns that fast response beats thoughtful response.

Managers make it worse without meaning to. They think shielding their team means personally catching every last minute request. So they say yes to everything from above, then work late to hide the cost. The team sees the pattern and copies it. “This is what good looks like here.”

Congratulations. You just trained your best people to quietly trade their sleep, their focus, and their family time for your planning problems.

If you’re a CPO or CEO, this is your mess to clean up. Not HR’s alone. Not some “resilience” program. This sits in how you design work and how you behave when nobody is watching.

So how do you unwind it without killing performance?

Turn Always On Into Precisely On

You don’t fix this by telling people to “set better boundaries” while you keep blowing past your own.

You fix it by redesigning how availability works in your company.

1. Draw A Hard Line Around Off Hours

Decide what “off” actually means in your company. Not conceptually. Specifically.

Pick the default quiet hours for the organization or at least by region. Name them out loud. Put them in onboarding. Put them in manager training. Put them in executive routines.

Then enforce one rule.

If leaders send messages outside those hours, they say explicitly whether this is truly time sensitive or just when they happened to type it.

Better yet, they use scheduled send as the norm.

Most of the pressure your people feel around after hours work is anticipatory. They are waiting for the ping. So take away the guesswork. Make “off” a structural expectation, not an individual act of courage.

2. Make Responsiveness A Design Choice, Not A Personality Trait

Stop treating fast replies as a sign of character.

Start treating them as an operating parameter.

For each core workflow, define response norms. Customer support during business hours. Internal approvals within one business day. Escalations on a clear path with a clear definition.

Then track where those norms get violated.

Workplace already picks up after hours spikes and urgency clusters. Use that. When one org or one leader generates a disproportionate share of late messages and “need this now” pings, that isn’t passion. That is poor capacity planning with a name attached.

Talk about it at the executive table next to revenue and churn, not as some side note for HR.

3. Build Real Focus Zones Into The Calendar

Always on is the enemy of deep work. Your company says it wants strategy, innovation, and creativity. Your calendar says it wants frantic multitasking.

Pick focus blocks where messages are expected to be slower and meetings are off limits unless something is truly on fire.

Start simple. Two mornings a week per team. Protect them for at least eight weeks. See what happens to cycle time and output quality.

You don’t need a big transformation here. You just need to give people a few hours where their brains are not in interrupt mode.

4. Measure Energy And Load, Not Just Sentiment

Your surveys are not catching this. By the time a person clicks “disagree” on a burnout question, the damage is old news.

Instead, treat your communication data like a cultural dashboard.

Track late night and weekend messages by team.

Watch for tone flattening, shorter replies, and rising hedge language.

Look for more “urgent” and less appreciation or constructive debate.

Tools like Workplace already surface these signals in real time across burnout, psychological safety, alignment, and execution health. You can see where teams are running hot before it shows up in turnover. You can see where leaders are quietly pushing people beyond what the system can support.

Once it is visible, it is manageable. Until then, you’re guessing.

5. Change Who Gets Treated As A Hero

As long as your heroes are the people who reply fastest and are online the most, your culture will keep drifting back to always on.

Start praising something different.

Highlight the manager who shipped a big release without weekend work.

Call out the leader who negotiated scope instead of pushing the same five people beyond any reasonable limit.

Celebrate the team that hit targets while their after hours messages trended down.

People watch what you reward. If you keep spotlighting sacrifice, you will keep getting self sacrifice. If you spotlight clear planning and healthy pacing, your best people will adjust faster than you think.

The Test Every CPO And CEO Has To Pass

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

If your people feel they have to be always on, that is not an employee weakness. That is leadership design.

You built the system that equates green dots with dedication.

You taught managers that saying yes without pushback is “good partnership.”

You let urgency and last minute workarounds become normal instead of naming them as defects.

The good news is you can unbuild it.

You can make off hours real. You can make focus real. You can stop rewarding adrenaline and start rewarding clean execution. You can treat attention as a strategic asset instead of something you strip mine to hit the next board slide.

If you’re a CPO, your job is to walk into the next executive meeting with more than a burnout slide. Walk in with a map of where always on is concentrated, which leaders drive it, and what rules you want to change.

If you’re a CEO, your job is simpler and harder at the same time.

Change how you communicate.

Change what you celebrate.

Change what you tolerate when it comes to manufactured urgency.

Your people do not need another mindfulness workshop. They need a system that lets them be fully on when it counts and confidently off when it does not.

The companies that figure that out will not just have healthier employees. They will have sharper strategies, cleaner execution, and leaders whose judgment is not dulled by constant noise.

You get to decide which kind of company you want to run.

Always on.

Or fully alive when it matters.