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The Hidden Cost of Work-Life Balance: A Q&A with Eva Buechel

The Hidden Cost of Work-Life Balance: A Q&A with Eva Buechel

While companies understand that work-life balance increases worker productivity, Buechel’s research shows that managers may penalize employees who unplug during off hours.

by: Alexander Bernard
07.15.25
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Eva Buechel’s research explores the potential cost of work-life balance.

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The emergence and spread of remote work has, quite literally, blurred the lines between workers’ professional and personal lives. With this new landscape has come a renewed emphasis on work-life balance, which benefits workers well-being and, studies show, increases their productivity at work. Yet, according to new research from Eva Buechel, assistant professor of marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business, companies may be counterintuitively penalizing employees for unplugging during non-work hours.

The study, “The detachment paradox: Employers recognize the benefits of detachment for employee well-being and performance, yet penalize it in employee evaluations,” was published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Buechel and her co-author Elisa Solinas (IE University in Spain) investigated the phenomenon they call “the detachment paradox.” Although most managers recognize work-life balance increases employees productivity, the same managers may penalize employees when assessing their promotability.

Buechel and Solinas conducted interviews with over 7,800 subjects across 16 studies to analyze the perceptions of workers who unplug against those who do not. In this Marshall News Q&A, Buechel spoke about the pair’s findings, the motivation behind the paradox, and what companies can do to reduce bias against employees who unplug during off hours.

Interviewer: Could you provide a summary of your research and your findings?

Eva Buechel: Our research shows what we call the “detachment paradox.”

People intuit that we need breaks from work. That is something that we see in everyday life. Specifically, when people psychologically detach from work, which means that they’re not doing any work and not thinking about work, it leads to recovery and increased productivity longer term.

Managers intuit this. [Managers recognize] that people are not only better in terms of their well-being, but a worker is going to be more productive when they return from work if they detach during non-working hours.

But those same managers also penalize that worker for detaching or at least for intending to detach. That’s a contradiction. If we penalize a behavior that we think is positive, then it’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the individual workers, but it’s also importantly not good for the organizations.

What methods did you use to observe this contradiction?

EB: We asked multiple different questions to managers. We would describe a hypothetical worker who we said had a break in the work week. The way that we manipulated this was to say that the worker put out an “out of office” reply or that they didn’t take devices with them or that they shut off their computer or that they went on a vacation.

Then we asked how productive, recharged, and mentally well the worker was going to be upon return. And we asked how likely the managers would be to give that person a promotion, a pay raise, a recommendation letter.

Why would a manager who values work-life balance penalize their employees for that very same thing?

EB: The reason why this penalty occurs is because people perceive that the worker isn’t as committed to work. We overvalue commitment over productivity. It seems that people care more that somebody is committed to their job than whether they do their job well or whether they’re the best version of themselves at the job. We overvalue the fact that people make work their first priority and we feel like that should be rewarded.

Are managers aware of this contradiction?

EB: I don’t think that managers are aware that they’re penalizing them at all because they only evaluate one participant at a time in our studies. They’re not consciously penalizing one worker over the other. We’re just looking at their average ratings compared between subjects.

I don’t think that managers recognize that they’re doing it because a lot of them talked about how important it is that people detach.

What is the impact of this paradox for companies and for employees?

EB: Ultimately, nobody wins here.

It’s bad for the worker because if they do detach, then they’re penalized. But if they don’t detach, it’s more likely that they’re going to burn out. They’re put in a bind because they either have to prioritize their wellbeing or they have to prioritize their financial health and their promotability.

It’s bad for the company because people are not going to be as productive during work hours. There’s a huge amount of literature on the fact that if people psychologically detach from work, that increases productivity. [But without this balance], people are going to be less productive during work hours, which is bad for the company.

What can companies do to address this issue?

EB: If people have a clear policy about what employees should be doing over the weekend — if they have a “no email” policy — that works in terms of mitigating the penalty.

There is a little bit of a caveat though. Even if there is a policy, it’s not clear to what extent people would pay attention to it while evaluating the workers. Therefore, anytime a worker is evaluated formally, the policy would have to be highlighted

Having a change in culture in the long term could also help. Let’s say you detach and I don’t detach, then people might penalize you for detaching compared to me. But if there’s a shift in culture where everybody detaches, then we can’t compare people against each other.

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