In October 2007, Research In Motion passed ten million BlackBerry subscribers and briefly became the most valuable company in Canada by market capitalisation. Four months earlier, Apple had shipped the first iPhone. The device that would eventually destroy RIM and the device that had just redefined executive working hours were on the market at the same time. Only one of them changed how organizations behaved that year. BlackBerry enterprise email did not just make mail portable. It quietly rewrote the expectation of when a colleague owes you an answer — and no organization ever formally decided to make that change.
What Made BlackBerry Different
Mobile email existed before 2007. What RIM built was the first version that worked without thinking about it. Push delivery meant messages arrived rather than waiting to be collected. Battery life was measured in days. The keyboard allowed real replies rather than acknowledgements. And crucially for IT, BlackBerry Enterprise Server gave administrators centralised control: policy enforcement, encryption, application restrictions and remote wipe of a lost handset. It was enterprise mobile device management before the category had a name, and it is why CIOs approved a consumer-shaped device at all. The company had come close to losing all of it. A long-running US patent dispute was settled in March 2006 for a reported $612.5 million, ending the genuine possibility that BlackBerry service in the United States would be switched off by court order. Corporate customers had spent months contemplating what would happen to their executives if it were. The answer — open panic — told everyone how quickly the device had become load-bearing.
The Norm Nobody Voted For
The cultural shift happened faster than any policy could have. Once senior people could read email at 10pm, some did. Once some did, replying at 10pm became evidence of commitment. Once it was evidence of commitment, not replying became evidence of something else. Within roughly two years, response-time expectations in many organizations compressed from "next business day" to "within the hour, including evenings." Nobody circulated a memo announcing this. It propagated by imitation, downward, from whoever was most senior and most responsive. Dictionaries had already given the phenomenon a name — "CrackBerry" was named a word of the year in 2006 — and treating compulsive email checking as a joke was how a generation of managers avoided examining it. The effects were structural rather than merely personal:
- Decision quality dropped on issues that were answered from a handset in a restaurant rather than considered at a desk.
- Written communication degraded into terse fragments, because the input method rewarded brevity over clarity.
- Escalation became cheap. Copying an executive in the evening produced a response, so people did it, and the exception path became the default path.
- Recovery time disappeared for exactly the people whose judgement the organization most depended on.
- Deep work became a scheduling problem rather than a normal part of the working day.
Each event links to its supporting source. This is a selective chronology, not a performance comparison.
What the Regulators Eventually Said
Almost a decade later, governments began legislating what corporate culture had failed to self-regulate. France introduced a right-to-disconnect obligation requiring larger employers to negotiate the terms of after-hours digital contact. Portugal went further, restricting employers from contacting staff outside working hours in most circumstances. Ontario required larger employers to maintain a written disconnecting-from-work policy. Australia introduced a right for employees to refuse unreasonable out-of-hours contact. None of these laws banned evening email. They did something more interesting: they forced organizations to state their expectation in writing. That requirement alone exposes how many companies have an always-on culture that nobody would defend if they had to put it on paper. Meanwhile the research has been consistent. Anticipating after-hours messages produces measurable strain even when no message arrives — the expectation of availability is itself the stressor. The cost is not the twelve minutes spent replying. It is that the working day never formally ends.
Why This Is Worse in 2026, Not Better
BlackBerry lost the device war, and the problem it created scaled. Email at least had an implicit unit of work: a message, a reply, done. Persistent chat removed the boundary entirely. A green presence dot is an availability claim broadcast continuously. Notifications arrive from six applications instead of one. Distributed teams across time zones mean somebody is always starting their day. And the phone that carries all of it is the same phone people use for everything else in their lives, which makes the boundary a matter of individual willpower rather than organizational design. The 2007 question — what response time do we actually require, from whom, for what — was never answered. It has simply been asked of more channels.
Setting Communication Norms That Hold
This is an operating decision, not a wellbeing initiative. Treat it that way.
- Define response-time expectations by channel and by urgency. If chat is four hours and email is one business day, say so, and route genuine emergencies to a channel that is explicitly for emergencies.
- Name a real escalation path. A rota with a phone number beats an unwritten assumption that the operations director reads messages at midnight.
- Have leaders schedule-send. Executives who draft at 11pm and deliver at 8am remove the signal without changing their own habits.
- Separate urgency from importance in writing. Most "urgent" requests are important requests sent by someone anxious about a deadline.
- Apply the rule to coverage, not to individuals. If a function genuinely needs evening availability, staff it and pay for it. Do not obtain it informally from whoever feels most responsible.
- Write it down, then check whether it is true. A published norm that everyone ignores is worse than no norm, because it signals which written rules can be ignored.
Questions Operators Ask
Did BlackBerry really create always-on work culture?
It made it technically effortless and socially visible at the top of the organization. The behaviour spread by imitation from senior leadership, which is why it embedded so quickly and why it is so hard to reverse without leaders changing first.
What is the right to disconnect?
A set of employment-law measures, adopted in various forms across Europe, Canada and Australia, requiring employers either to negotiate or publish rules on out-of-hours digital contact, or granting employees a right to refuse unreasonable contact outside working time.
Does after-hours email actually harm performance?
Research consistently associates expected after-hours availability with higher strain and impaired recovery, and the anticipation of contact matters as much as the contact itself. The operational risks — rushed decisions and degraded written communication — are separate and equally real.
How do we change the norm without losing responsiveness?
Make the expectation explicit and channel-specific, provide a genuine escalation route for real emergencies, and have senior leaders model the boundary. Responsiveness that depends on everyone monitoring everything constantly is not a service level; it is an unmanaged risk.
Communication Norms Review — Outpace audits how your teams actually communicate across email, chat and mobile, defines response-time expectations by channel, and builds escalation paths that work without requiring anyone to be permanently available.