The most desired change that both employees and leaders want to see in the HR sphere? They want their boundaries to be respected.

Adam Weber, SVP of community at 15Five, a performance-management platform, explained the findings of his surveys of thousands of HR employees during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One's September virtual conference on “Stress, Anxiety and the Modern Company’s Role in Promoting Well-Being.”

“We live in an always-on, phone-addicted, response-compulsive society where the lines of work and home have been blurred more than ever before,” Weber said. “And I think this data is showing us that something needs to change.”

In a world of “quiet quitting” and changing tides in favor of job seekers, 15Five conducted a survey to see what leaders and employees wanted from their jobs. In addition to better-defined boundaries, employees desired more kindness in the workplace, more opportunities to learn new skills through experience, and better management to help shape their career paths. Leaders, meanwhile, desired the opportunity to learn and become better managers and mentors, but also wished for more opportunities to share their opinions and have them taken seriously.

All of these desires speak to a growing demand in the HR sphere: that we treat one another like humans, said Weber, who has written a book on the subject, Lead Like a Human: Practical Steps to Building Highly Engaged Teams.

Respecting boundaries, which was of the utmost importance to both groups, includes respecting log-off times, evenings, vacations, time off and sick days, among other things, said Weber. But the habit of setting–and respecting–boundaries does not fall on just one party. Both leadership teams and employees have to practice doing so in order to change the landscape. 

Starting with Self-Reflection

Weber encouraged employees to take a look at their own behavior first. “Maybe there are some bad habits of responding to a Slack at 11 p.m., or checking an email first thing in the morning. Or maybe it’s that you have a full plate and yet you’re still saying yes when you’re already overworked and overloaded,” Weber said.

The No. 1 thing teams can do to promote boundary setting is prioritize. This includes deciding and agreeing on what the most important thing is for team members to accomplish each day. Prioritizing prevents team members from feeling like they have an endless list of things to get done all at the same time.

Another key to setting boundaries is learning how to say no and, more importantly, being willing to do so. Weber says team members should set expectations for how much work they can reasonably take on, in addition to when they will log off of work and be unresponsive. Turning off push notifications and not checking Slack on the weekends should be totally acceptable, Weber said.

“We log out of chat and email when we're finished for the day,” Weber said. “When we do things like that, we add disciplines to our lives that allow us to actually increase our performance, not decrease our performance.”

Many people might feel daunted by the idea of setting boundaries, or think that it would never work in their company. But, according to Weber, these are the people who need to set boundaries the most and can help their companies return to a more compassionate and understanding vision. 

How Leaders Can Set an Example

The onus, however, is also on higher-level team members to set a company-level strategy. Weber says that leadership teams can help make unplugging acceptable–or even celebrated. To do so, they can highlight what they do on their weekends or vacations in a Slack channel to show that they, too, are turning off and enjoying life outside of work.

Setting the expectation that team members will log off at home or when they need to be with their family will help everybody in the long run. In most companies, not everybody can work at the same exact times every day. 

“There’s something dramatically powerful when the C-suite is willing to take breaks and share about those breaks,” Weber said, “When C-suite is willing to put up boundaries and share about those boundaries, when they create a culture of permission that says, hey, we all work at different times.”

When companies don’t honor boundaries, it leads to burnout. Across industries, many managers are over their capacity, often handling over a dozen direct reports. Weber leaned into the point that managers who are over capacity will “wreak havoc” on companies. To end this cycle, it’s imperative to set more realistic goals for managers.

“Over-capacity managers create psychologically unsafe work environments where people keep their thoughts to themselves until the day they quit, and they perform at a much lower rate,” Weber said.

Leading Like a Human in Hard Times

Experts estimate that as the nation faces a recession, about 20% of companies will have to lay off team members. Off-boarding is another place where companies can add more compassion and understanding. 

Creating an off-boarding strategy can help both the employees being laid off and the managers who have to make tough decisions and deliver the bad news. This strategy can include helping them transition to the next phase with generous support and transparent communication. Weber suggests making a Google doc that can be passed around the company for each laid-off employee so team members can provide positive references, endorse their skills, and share new job openings. 

At the heart of all these strategies are compassion and empathy. Weber doesn’t accept that employees are really “quietly quitting.” He sees employees trying to set boundaries and change the way we think about work–and life.

“The concept of, ‘All I’m trying to get out of you is your everything. And I don’t know what I want you to accomplish, I just want you to work until you’re exhausted,’ that concept is dead,” Weber said. “That is over. But focused work, focused on outcomes and output, that is something that you can hold people to, and that you can motivate people toward.”

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, 15Five, who sponsored this thought leadership spotlight.

Erika Riley is a Maryland-based freelance writer.