Employees have been bombarded with out-of-hours

Employees have been bombarded with out-of-hours 

Emplemails ever since the introduction of the BlackBerry in the late Nineties and early Noughties, giving users access to their emails remotely

 

The overuse of digital devices has been blamed for people becoming over-worked, stressed and sleep deprived.

Late last year, the French government pledged to tackle the problem formally, by introducing a new law which obliges employers to guarantee their employees the "right to disconnect" out of hours. On January 1 2017, the employment law came into force, forcing organisations with more than 50 workers to start negotiations to define the rights of employees who want to ignore their phones.

Some large firms, such as Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler in Germany, and Areva and Axa in France, have taken matters into their own hands and introduced steps to limit out-of-hours messaging to reduce burnout among workers – although some more reluctantly than others.