If work only counts when you’re at the office, why should you spend even a minute working while you’re out?

Not that long ago, in an era when cell phones didn’t exist and you couldn’t reach out to other people at a moment’s notice, there was a clear separation between your work life and your personal life. As long as you were not physically at the office, it was really tough to contact you and have you work after hours. The job stayed at the office, and once you were out, you were free to pursue your personal life without being bothered with work. Everything could wait until 9 AM on your next workday.

These days, however, availability is much more accessible and therefore is expected. Since your boss, coworkers, and clients often have access to your personal phone number, and your smartphone is conveniently connected to your email, Slack, and any other work channel, getting in touch with you even after you leave work at 5 PM is not a problem. This means that it has become an expectation for employees to be available for work-related issues even after they have clocked out for the day, which also directly leads to an incredibly uneven work-life balance.

The employees in the story below were used to this balance, mainly because they were only expected to be at the office for two days a week. When you can work from anywhere, you accept the blurred lines of work hours in favor of the flexibility in your work location. However, when a new CTO decided to remove that flexibility and demand a strict 9-to-5 schedule from the office only, employees decided to bring the good ol’ days’ style back into fashion: If they are expected to only work from the office for five days a week, they will no longer make themselves available for work issues after they leave the office at the end of each day. Any problem that might arise after 5 PM can wait until the next morning.

So, when a major crisis with a client arose after 5 PM on a Friday, there was not a single employee ready to tackle the issue until Monday at 9 AM. When the CTO heard what (didn’t) go down over the weekend, he had to face the repercussions of his own rules…