Research 2025-12-26 Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager Lausanne

Replying to your manager outside working hours: what needs clarifying?

In a relationship with a manager, availability can become an implicit obligation that neither person has properly defined. The useful question is specific: how can expectations about replies outside working hours be clarified without equating effective cooperation with constant connectivity?

What the literature establishes

Larissa K. Barber and Alecia M. Santuzzi (2015, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology) examine workplace telepressure: the preoccupation with and urge to respond quickly to work-related messages. Their findings associate telepressure with difficulties in recovery, including sleep and psychological detachment. They encourage us to look beyond message volume: the feeling that a reply is required deserves attention in its own right.

The mechanism to consider: psychological detachment

Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz (2007, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology) distinguish four recovery experiences: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery experiences and control over leisure time. Their validation work shows that recovery involves more than simply stopping work activities. For the relationship with a manager, this suggests a useful distinction: no longer working and no longer feeling on call are not necessarily the same thing.

Replying to your manager outside working hours: what needs clarifying? — SHR, Lausanne — Vaud

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that managers should never send messages outside working hours. These studies, however, test neither that universal rule nor the specific effect of messages from a direct supervisor. Someone may send a message when it suits them without expecting an immediate reply; the relational problem arises when the recipient has to guess whether that is the case. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the evidence cannot settle

These studies draw in part on self-report measures and do not demonstrate that an agreement on response times is sufficient to improve recovery. Nor do they establish an optimal response time that applies across occupations. An availability agreement therefore needs to account for agreed working hours, on-call duties and genuine emergencies, rather than treating every request as an exception.

A practical check in Lausanne

As part of SHR's programme on building an effective relationship with your manager, an exercise applicable in Lausanne is to agree in writing on ordinary response times and a dedicated emergency channel, taking account of the constraints specific to medtech, higher education institutions, international sport and scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region. For two weeks, the manager and employee record only the sending time and expected response time for each managerial request received outside agreed working hours, then count the cases in which their interpretations differ. The indicator is the proportion of requests involving disagreement over the expected response time: a measure of relational clarity, not individual performance. Repeating the exercise after clarification makes it possible to check whether ambiguity decreases, without claiming to demonstrate a health effect. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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