Work-Life Balance in the School of Medicine

Work-Life balance is critical to fostering and maintaining a healthy and productive community of staff in the School of Medicine. Below are some resources and policies which aim to support our staff to achieve a healthy and sustainable balance:

Email Practices

Constant receipt of work requests and information via email can be distracting, prevent deep work and prevent disengagement from work outside of working hours. Making the following adjustments to your emailing practices will help to avoid excessive email communication and expectations for communication outside of an individual’s working hours:

Emailing hours: Send emails during working hours and limit emails on Friday afternoons to those that are critically time sensitive. In most cases, emails being sent on Friday afternoon do not need to be addressed until Monday morning or later. By contrast, receiving unnecessary or non-time sensitive emails at the end of the working week can make it difficult to “switch off” when logging off for the weekend. Here are some tips which can help:

• Use Schedule Send: To avoid forgetting to send emails, or for those who prefer to respond to work emails outside of working hours, please use the Schedule Send option as much as possible. This will allow emails to be sent at a time convenient to the sender but only received at the start of working hours by the recipient. “Schedule send” is very easy to implement. For more information see here.
• Include Working Hours in Email Signatures: Those in our School have diverse working tasks and personal commitments, such that monitoring emails throughout the working day is not possible or limits focus. Many staff and students prefer to address and respond to emails outside of working hours, or at specific times. A great way to manage response time expectations of those who are sending emails to you, and receiving emails from you is to incorporate this information in your email signature. It is also a great way to let others know that you do not expect others to monitor their emails at the same time as you. For guidance on how to amend your email signature, please see here for Gmail accounts and here for Outlook accounts.

Here is a template you can use to add this to your email signature:

My working hours are typically:

[day] to [day] approx. __am-__pm

If you contact me outside my working hours, I am unlikely to respond until my working hours. If I email you outside of your working hours, please do not feel obliged to respond immediately.

I assign time to opening new emails between __pm and ___pm on [insert day(s)]. 

I aim to respond to student queries within __ working days.  

 Email brevity: Emails should be as brief as possible, while maintaining appropriate tone and email etiquette. If your email is lengthy, or requires numerous responses between sender and recipient(s), consider the following:

• Could a Teams call or meeting be organised to address the issue or topic of discussion? A brief conversation by phone, video or in person can often substantially reduce the amount of emails required to address a query. In some cases this may not be possible, in which case longer emails or discussion via email may be required.
• Am I being repetitive or including unnecessary details? Revising your email and removal of such information can help to communicate key information more effectively and efficiently

Limited “Reply All” use: Reply All is an important tool for avoiding exclusion of individuals from relevant email communications. However, default use of Reply All can result in excessive receipt of emails which are distracting and unnecessary. When replying to an email, consider if all individuals CCed on the prior email need the information included in your response. Consider responding only to the individual who sent the email, or a subset of those originally CCed, where appropriate.

Supports for staff wellbeing

Human Resources provide a detailed list of supports, facilities, classes, courses and services to support staff mental and physical health and facilitate pursuit of hobbies and social events here.