Monster’s 2026 State of the Workweek report found that 38% of full-time U.S. workers feel “very or extremely” pressured to be available outside scheduled hours, and 47% cite employer expectations or company culture as the top reason they overwork.
Separately, Eagle Hill Consulting’s November 2025 Workforce Burnout Survey of more than 1,400 full-time employees found that 55% of the U.S. workforce is currently experiencing burnout.
The pattern points to a quiet truth: the policy conversation around boundaries has moved faster than workplace culture.
Fineas Tatar, a leadership expert and co-founder of Viva Talent, says the issue is a signaling problem, not a willpower one.
“Employees don’t read the handbook to figure out what’s actually rewarded. They read who gets promoted, who gets praised, and who’s online at 9 p.m.,” says Tatar. “When availability is quietly treated as commitment, unplugging may start to feel like you’re missing out.”
Tatar points to three reasons the gap between policy and practice keeps widening:
- Visibility has replaced performance: When outcomes are hard to measure, being seen becomes a proxy for being valuable. Employees respond to that signal, regardless of what the policy says.
- Leaders model the behavior they claim to discourage: A manager who sends a “no pressure to respond” message at 10 p.m. is still sending the message that 10 p.m. is a working hour. High performers calibrate to what their leaders do, not what they say.
- Recovery is framed as a personal project: Most wellness programs put the responsibility for unplugging on the individual, which means the employees most at risk are the ones expected to solve it alone.
To close the gap between stated values and lived experience, Tatar recommends three operational shifts leaders can make this quarter:
- Audit the after-hours signal, not just the after-hours policy: Look at the last 30 days of messages sent after 7 p.m. by leadership. If the pattern contradicts the policy, the policy is decorative. Scheduled-send features exist for a reason.
- Protect recovery time at the calendar level: Block the first and last 30 minutes of every workday as no-meeting time across the team. Unplugging starts with having a finish line employees can actually see.
- Redesign the manager’s workload before asking them to model balance: A manager drowning in tactical work cannot demonstrate healthy boundaries. Remove low-leverage tasks from their plate first, then expect the culture to follow.
“Most cultures don’t need another wellness initiative. They need fewer decisions landing on the same handful of people after 6 p.m.,” Tatar adds. “When a senior leader is the bottleneck for every approval, every escalation, every late-breaking request, unplugging becomes a structural impossibility. Fix the workflow, and the behavior follows. Leave the workflow broken, and no amount of messaging about balance will change what people actually do.”
Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash
Sign in to get access to this free resource, and all of our whitepapers and reports.
Download this content today!
Register Now Already registered? Click here to Log In
