Ending the workday no longer means stopping work. You leave the office, turn off the computer, and yet you remain attentive to emails, respond to messages, and review tasks during dinner, on weekends, or during holidays. When this permanent connection invades rest, leisure, and personal life, what has been dubbed the bubble worker phenomenon appears: the boundaries between work and personal life blur until they disappear.
The data describes a widespread phenomenon, not an exception. According to the Cigna International Health Study, most people in Spain work very long weeks. The World Economic Forum estimates that a significant share of workers constantly check their corporate email, and a similar share do so at least once an hour. And the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work indicates that a large majority of people have difficulty disconnecting outside working hours. Summer, far from alleviating it, aggravates it: holidays should be the great moment for physical and mental recovery, but responding to an email from the beach or taking a call during a trip keeps the brain partially connected and prevents rest from fulfilling its function.
The real problem, however, is not in the hours. It's that these behaviors are not perceived as a problem, but rather are rewarded. Responding in the early hours, always being available, or constantly thinking about work are interpreted as a demonstration of involvement and dedication. When this stops being the exception and becomes the norm, it becomes almost impossible to detect that this dynamic is eroding a person's wellbeing. As experts warn, organizations not only need to promote disconnection: they need to identify which behaviors their own culture is reinforcing, directly or indirectly.
And this is where something uncomfortable needs to be said: the bubble worker is usually not the least committed, but the one we have measured most poorly. Behind the inability to disconnect, there is rarely just an overload of tasks. Many times there is self-demand: the need to review everything again and again, the fear of making mistakes, the difficulty in considering a project finished. This self-demand is precisely what we confuse with commitment. And as long as we measure commitment by availability—by who answers first and at what time—we will continue to reward those who are wearing themselves out the most.
From Perception to Data: Measuring What We Only Sense Today
The original reference article leaves the interpretation in the realm of sensation: "it is not usually perceived as such." The leap that Human Resources can make is to convert that intuition into data.
Self-demand has a measurable signature. Through the Hartman Value Profile (HVP) integrated by Focus Values System, it is possible to observe the relationship between how a person values themselves and the level of demand they place on themselves. When self-demand is very high and self-valuation does not accompany it, the pattern emerges that pushes for constant availability as a form of compensation. It is not an invisible trait or a subjective judgment by the boss: it is an imbalance that can be detected before it leads to exhaustion or absence.
This allows us to do what was previously left to guesswork: distinguish healthy commitment—the professional who contributes and fits their role—from self-demand disguised as commitment, which, sustained over time, leads to wear. With this information, the conversation with the person ceases to be generic advice like "disconnect more" and becomes a concrete plan about their way of working and valuing themselves.
Commitment Is Measured by Fit, Not by Hours
Focus Values System starts by first defining what success means in each role—what results and what fit define it—rather than how many hours or how much availability the person in that role demonstrates. This change in metric addresses the root of the problem: if success is defined by contribution and not by permanent presence, we stop rewarding the bubble worker.
This same approach helps to better distribute responsibilities. When certain decisions always fall on the same people, the feeling that they must be available at any time increases. The role-person fit map allows us to see who can take on what, break that dependency, and ensure that a team's rest does not depend on the constant presence of a single professional. And in the leader's role, empathy and self-control competencies—those that define someone truly capable of fostering their team's disconnection—can also be measured and developed instead of being left to chance of character.
The Decision Space: Giving Control Back to the Person
Measuring is of little use if the result remains in a department report. That is why the interpretation is transferred to the Decision Space, the environment where each professional accesses their own value interpretation and uses it to make decisions about how they work: where they are placing an undue demand, what they are confusing with commitment, and what they can prioritize, delegate, or let go of.
This change of ownership is key. The bubble worker phenomenon is sustained, in large part, because the person does not perceive that it is happening to them. Giving them an objective mirror of their own self-demand—and the ability to decide about it—is probably the most effective way for disconnection to stop being a corporate slogan and become their own decision.
In Summary
The bubble worker is not a problem of willpower or lack of holidays. It is a problem of measurement: for years we have been rewarding availability as if it were commitment, and thus we have reinforced precisely the behavior that causes wear. The solution is not to ask people to disconnect more, but to properly measure what real commitment is, detect self-demand disguised as dedication in time, and give each professional control over their way of working. What is not measured becomes normalized. And what becomes normalized eventually takes its toll.
Data References: Cigna International Health Study, World Economic Forum, European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Measurement and development tools cited: Hartman Value Profile (HVP) and Focus Values System, with individual access through the Decision Space.