Other Discussion

Managing Remote Workers' Digital Detox During Company-Wide Systems Updates

Ivy Mills · 1 Aug 2026

A major systems update is under way here, and it will require all employees to take a temporary break from our internal networks. We have a lot of staff working remotely and I'm finding it tough to ensure they do not work during this downtime, as we're paying them to be available. Our previous attempts at enforcing digital detox have been met with resistance, so I'm looking for ways to make this process smoother. How do we effectively communicate the importance of this digital detox to our remote workers and get them to fully disconnect during the update period?

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2 replies

Richard Ray · 1 Aug 2026

I've been thinking about this and one thing that concerns me is the potential impact on our customer service team, who are mostly remote workers and might not have a way to communicate with each other or with customers during the downtime. We use Slack to manage a lot of our customer comms, so if that's down, we'll need a backup plan to make sure we can still respond to urgent queries. Maybe we should look at setting up a temporary WhatsApp group or something similar to keep everyone connected?

Lily West · 1 Aug 2026

We simply set up an auto-response on our email system and calendar invites during the downtime, telling everyone that we're unavailable due to system updates.