Your Team Doesn’t Need Slack at 11PM: The Simple Fix That Gave Everyone Their Evenings Back, a #straightfromcait episode

A whole team kept Slack on their phones 24/7. The real emergencies? Four in three months. A time autonomy mismatch, and the simple fix.

How many times did you check Slack last night? During bath time, at dinner, in bed?

One event planner at TeamOut did exactly that, until she asked the co-founder and CTO if she could delete Slack from her phone. In a job where clients have emergencies at 11pm, he almost said no on the spot. He didn't. Instead, TeamOut turned Slack off phones by default and created one paid, rotating on-call planner per night. In three months, that person got four actual calls. Four.

In this episode, I break down his LinkedIn post because it's the cleanest example I've seen of a time autonomy mismatch, and of a company fixing one. Being half on all the time costs you mentally, emotionally and physically. It isn't a personal failure or a resilience problem. It's a signal that the way the work is designed doesn't match what the work actually needs.

In this episode, I cover:

• Why event planning keeps landing on the list of the most stressful jobs, and why event pros are the unsung heroes of every event
• The planner who checked Slack during her kid's bath, at dinner and in bed, and found 95% of it could have waited until morning
• What time autonomy is, and how a company can mess it up without even trying
• Why asking to stop being "one foot in" all day is not the same as asking to be unreachable
• The fix: Slack off phones by default, plus one paid, rotating on-call planner per night
• The kicker: four real emergency calls in three months
• The hidden cost of a whole team staying half on to cover a few rare emergencies
• Why so many teams keep doing things that no longer serve them, and what the data has to do with it
• The first question in my resentment journal: does this thing even have to be done?
• How one employee speaking up about her needs changed the way a whole company works
• How to send me your own mismatch stories, and your fixes

Quotes:

"Event professionals are the unsung heroes every single time. They do not get the glory or recognition that they deserve." (01:56 | Cait Donovan)

"Think about how much that costs mentally, emotionally, and physically to be half on all the time, all because four emergency calls happen every three months." (04:56 | Cait Donovan)

"Oftentimes, we are doing things a certain way because we've been doing it that way for a long time, because we haven't actually looked at the data to see if the data supports the thing that we're still doing." (05:35 | Cait Donovan)

"Over time, we've seen that 10 to 20% of the things that people are resentful about don't actually ever need to be done." (06:12 | Cait Donovan)

In this episode, we mentioned...

The Resentment Journal: https://caitdonovan.com/resentment-journal

Why Giving Your Best Employees More Autonomy Sometimes Backfires (And What to Do Instead) A #straightfromcait Episode (FRIED #345): https://fried.caitdonovan.com/345

Your Quiet Quitter Isn't Lazy: Three Mismatches Behind the Same Disengagement, a #straightfromcait episode (FRIED #369): https://fried.caitdonovan.com/369

Burnout Is Not Your Fault, It's a Mismatch: An Early Look at My New Book, a #straightfromcait episode (FRIED #365): https://fried.caitdonovan.com/365

#straightfromcait: Quiet Quitting, Loud Quitting, and Resentment (FRIED #170): https://fried.caitdonovan.com/170

Got a mismatch at work, or a fix that worked? Email me at cait@caitdonovan.com. If your company got this right and wants a shout-out, I'll shout you out from the rooftops.

Connect with Cait:

If you work in HR, People and Culture, or you book speakers on burnout, this is for you.

Book Cait to speak: https://bit.ly/bookcait

Watch the 3-min sizzle reel: https://bit.ly/caitdreel2025

Order Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations for your team (bulk copies: annick@caitdonovan.com)

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/caitdonovanspeaks

Instagram: https://instagram.com/caitdonovanspeaks

About the Host:

Cait Donovan is a burnout expert, keynote speaker, and the host of FRIED. The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% global podcast with over 1 million downloads, ending burnout culture since 2019. With a background in biobehavioral sciences and Traditional Chinese Medicine, she helps leaders and organizations find the mismatches that burn good people out. She is the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations.

XOXO, C

#straightfromcait #friedfam #endburnoutculture