Checking the company’s mail outside working hours or looking for the next holiday flights from the workplace has a name: Blurring. This term, born from the combination of the verb To Blur and the initials of Business and Leisure, gives a name to one of the most recent effects of the new technologies: the progressive fading of the space and time frontier between the personal and professional fields.

Checking the company’s mail outside working hours or looking for the next holiday flights from the workplace has a name: Blurring. This term, born from the combination of the verb To Blur and the initials of Business and Leisure, gives a name to one of the most recent effects of the new technologies: the progressive fading of the space and time frontier between the personal and professional fields.

This trend, which is fully integrated into our daily routines, is caused by the technology of mobility, which makes it possible to be connected from practically any point on the globe 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

On the positive side, the break with the traditional concept of the workplace has opened the doors to one of the measures for reconciliation with the greatest power to influence the results of the working climate in organisations: teleworking. Meanwhile, among the negative effects of the new habits, the decrease in productivity due to the new “time thieves”, the risk of loss or theft of corporate information or work stress derived from the lack of disconnection stand out.

Like any change in model, the evolution of work habits involves a period of adjustment and new regulation. In this sense, one of the first European countries to tackle blurring has been France, which from January 1, 2017 recognised the right of workers to “disconnect” outside working hours.  The aim of the measure, which is part of a broader Employment reform, is to end the stress generated by the inability to disconnect after working hours.

It should be remembered that our neighbouring country was already a pioneer in this area when in 2014 the unions reached an agreement with the consultancies and companies in the technology sector in which employees were forced to turn off their mobile phones, while at the same time being prohibited from accessing email outside their working hours.

In Spain, there are no regulations on this matter but several political parties have raised in Congress the need to reach an agreement with the social agents on regulation in this area. Months ago the Ministry of Labour announced that it was studying the possibility of introducing new regulations, so it is foreseeable that this will be one of the challenges faced by the new incumbent Magdalena Valerio.