Meanwhile, the move sparked change in Germany, too, although it depends which sector you’re working in. Employee unions have pushed some German firms to take action. Auto maker Volkswagen was one of the earliest adopters of a ban on out-of-work emails, configuring servers so that emails would only be sent to employees’ phones for half an hour before the start and after the end of the working day – and not during weekends. The policy was introduced because of lobbying by the company’s works council, or employee representatives. Car maker Daimler also introduced a policy that switches off employee access to emails during holidays.

Samantha Ruppel works two part-time jobs in Germany – one at a university and one at a charity. She was given a work laptop that she appreciated, but also felt could be a millstone, chaining her to her desk remotely. “It’s good to have the flexibility to do two different jobs and be able to check your email at the weekend,” she admits, “but sometimes people can try to rush you because they know you’re accessible at all times.”

Ruppel says her employers make sure that whenever she works on weekends, she’s able to recoup those days as holiday during the working week – but worries that in higher-stress jobs without an outright ban on email access at weekends, the temptation would be to simply work all day. Many of her friends work in Germany’s banking and financial sectors, and much of the chat at weekend parties is about work. “They don’t have access to their emails at the weekend and find it frustrating,” she says. “But I think it’s good: they could work 24 hours-a-day.”

During the week, she says “they come home, eat their dinner then check their emails again. If they had the chance, they’d do it at weekends: it’s a competitive world, where they’re always trying to be faster and better than their competition.”

Her experience backs up research taken from all over Europe, which has some worrying implications. In a survey of 2,000 UK workers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), two-fifths of workers said they checked their emails outside of working hours at least five times a day. A third said they couldn’t mentally switch off at home, with work always looming over them.

According to Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Manchester Business School and president of the CIPD, the recent trend even spills into the way we access our work communications and projects.

Today, says Cooper, work emails are just a tap of a smartphone away. “You don’t carry your laptop around when you’re out to dinner, but you do carry your mobile phone,” he says. “The smartphone changed everything.”

“The higher the expectation for monitoring organisational email, the less people can detach, the more time they spend on work-related email after hours and the more they are emotionally exhausted,” says Liuba Belkin, associate professor in the department of management at Lehigh University.