I just did a couple of work emails at 11 p.m. on a Friday night (an unusual time for me to check.) I’m curious about a few questions:
Do you check your work email after or before “working hours?”
If so, is this something that is required because of your job? Or because of the “work culture” where you work?
Do you have personal or office rules about when you check your emails or which emails you reply to after hours?
My replies:
I usually check mine in the morning before work and about an hour after I get home. I also check on Sunday afternoons and sometimes, on my day off. I find that checking emails outside of work hours makes me more efficient when in the office - I can cut the chaff. Since I also have the options to sometimes work from home, doing email checks outside of working hours supports the fact that I CAN do work without actually sitting at my desk.
Checking emails outside of working hours is not required and is not the norm. But, for a few of us in my division, it has become the practice. Personally, it’s nice to know that if my boss of bosses is 2000 miles away, I can expect a reply in 24 hours. My supervisor, however, barely even responds to any emails, no matter what the time of day.
There is a corporate culture of checking your emails at least daily when you are on the road. (Each of us are out of the office about seven days a month) I have one cow orker who doesn’t check email when traveling and only checks his voice mail in the evening. The secretaries hate him for that. The rest of us have told him, “You snooze, you lose. If we make a decision through email and you don’t check for a week, you can’t complain or change the decision.”
The only emails I reply to outside of working hours are those that:
a. Don’t require any research. I can’t access my hard drive from the road, so I can’t always qoute chapter and verse on a reply.
b. Require discussion with other staff to arrive at an answer. Unless I can plan on waiting a day or two to reply and have the discussion with fellow staff on email.
c. Take more than 5 minutes to answer. It’s perfectly acceptable to forward those to a cow orker and say, “Can you answer this since you are in the office?” or tell the respondent that they can wait till I get back or call the office and ask to speak to someone.
And the number one rule: DPWD. “Don’t Post While Drunk.” I haven’t seen anyone post something exceptionally stupid, but I have seen some late night replies from someone at a conference that make me go, “Uh, DPWD.”
Do you check your work email after or before “working hours?”
Yes. I have Thunderbird set up to all 3 of my emails and the 3 RSS feeds I get, so every time I open the email client, I click “get mail” for everything. I wouldn’t go out of my way to check it, but since I can check it that way, I do.
If so, is this something that is required because of your job? Or because of the “work culture” where you work?
It’s not specifically required, but I am in charge of another worker. He works on all my days off, but I have to be able to help him if he needs it (usually nothing serious, just a “this has never come up” question or two) - I tell him that if he needs to tell a guest right that minute, and he doesn’t know, call me. Then I tell him if he tells the guest/customer to call back in the morning or that he will find out for them, email it to me and I’ll get back to him by calling (in case he doesn’t check email before the guest gets here) and since I work nights, I am often up at 3 am anyways. It helps him out and since I volunteered for it, it makes me look rather good - thus potential for raise/promotion.
Do you have personal or office rules about when you check your emails or which emails you reply to after hours?
I reply to most any email I get as long as it isn’t just something dumb. If you email me anything, I’ll respond - honest - unless it’s a 300000 word forward about how the ghost of Jim Jenkins is in your house and I have to forward it to thirty people or he will come to mine. Jerks that email me that stuff…
Do you check your work email after or before “working hours?”
Yep, pretty much every day.
If so, is this something that is required because of your job? Or because of the “work culture” where you work?
Both. I work in a global team and interact with people daily in both Europe and North America. The speed of getting things done would drop dramatically if I limited myself to 8 hours in my time zone. For example, my HQ is on the US West Coast, and if I do email and send queries to them at 6:00 am, it’s still early afternoon and I usually get replies quite quickly. If I send an email that waits overnight and is in the 100 unread emails when someone comes in in the morning, it’s often “missed” or ignored. Europe’s okay because we have overlapping work hours.
Do you have personal or office rules about when you check your emails or which emails you reply to after hours? I do a lot of read and delete type checking, and very little else. But that allows me to budget time for the important ones I know are in there. I also tend to only check emails from my windows mobile device at home - it’s a lot less intrusive, and because it’s slow to reply on, then I tend not to. If I whip out the laptop, then the tendancy is to fall into the email black hole and an hour or two passes in a twinkling. I prefer not to do that at home.
My work group sometimes tries to have an email free holiday weekend. I’m a little cynical on that because while I work in a global group, these holiday free emails are during US holidays. That’s the only time it’s potentially mandated not to get on emails.
My company is a very email culture and vast majority of us carry smart phones or smart pda’s.
1. Do you check your work email after or before "working hours?"
Depends… During non-crisis-mode times I’ll check e-mail perhaps once over the weekend, maybe not even that. During “crisis-mode” I’ll sometimes need to log into VPN and work from home.
**2. If so, is this something that is required because of your job? Or because of the “work culture” where you work?**Not required, but sometimes we (as a team) feel it’s necessary in order to solve ad-hoc problems. Then weeks can go by that I don’t check mail from home.
**3. Do you have personal or office rules about when you check your emails or which emails you reply to after hours?**Office – no. Personal – unless something’s on fire, I’m not going to answer anything I can’t respond to off the top of my head. If something is on fire… well, then I’m logged in through VPN anyway…
I don’t because I can’t. What happens at work, stays at work. Plus, except for very mundane inanity on an internet account (which I’m not sure we can access anyway) all of our email is on our internal net. There is, literally, a physical gap between the intraweb and our work network.
But even if I could, it would be very rare for me to even consider work when I’m at home. I learned years ago to turn of my “work brain” when I leave my desk and not bring work home with me. Wish I could teach my spousal unit to do the same - poor man makes himself crazy sometimes.
It’s different now I’m self-employed and work from home, but when I was employed as an administrator, I’d occasionally check the work email from here if there was something I was urgently waiting on, or to deal with stuff like the time we got spam-stormed by someone spoofing the work email’s addy on junk mail.
But usually – no. What went on at work, stayed at work.
When I’m on vacation I’ll go through my e-mail when I get back to clean it up…get rid of the stuff that was resolved while I was gone, read the few personal e-mails I get, that sort of thing. That way when I get back to work I don’t have to wade through 50 squintillion e-mails that aren’t relevant anymore.
On Sundays, depending on what’s happening, I might check in. I work in broadcasting, and sometimes stuff happens over the weekend and I need to check to see what decisions were made so I know what I have to deal with on Monday.
I have a server-side rule that sends my phone a text message if my boss or a handful of other folks send me an email. If I get one of those & the subject seems important (or if my curiosity gets to me) I will look at my work email in off hours. Other than that, no.
No…never, in fact I mock the people that do and encourage them to separate all the parts of their life.
There are several people at work who can ring me and if their names come up on the phone I will answer it. That is quite sufficient, checking my work email account would feel very “need me, please need me” as far as I can see.
I check it all the time. Whenever NPR has sent out an impaired radio feed, they also send out an e-mail to tell you it was impaired, and how. If I see a message for a show that we carry, before it goes on the air, I can alert one of two people who can do something about it. I rarely, if ever, need to make that call, though.
It’s not required, I do it out of courtesy and the desire to avoid broadcasting nothing, or a program that ends prematurely. I’m not responsible for anything that goes on within the company, nor any other people. My job is the sound that comes out the speakers.
There are no such rules about e-mail where I work.
Nope. I have a work-issued laptop that I have brought home twice in the year and a half I’ve worked there. The second time I took it home I didn’t even turn the thing on.
There’s just nothing that’s so time critical it can’t wait until the next morning. And believe me, that’s the way I like it. To me, it’s just a job.
I check it often when I am at home. I try to check at least once a day while I am on vacation, but depending where I am on vacation, it could be more or less and I give the folks back at the office a good sense of what that will be – if I’m at the beach, not so often, if I’m at a hotel with wireless service, probably more often.
There’s no expectation from my boss or my office culture that I WILL check on weekends, but sometimes I like seeing what comes in because it helps me mentally plan my Monday. I like feeling that I’m less likely to be surprised by something in my in-box in the morning.
Our office does seem to have a lot of people, myself included, who often send emails on the weekend that say things like (I really did this this morning) “Hey, this is for Monday, but while I was brushing my teeth, the sudden realization hit me that when we renewed our computer service contract on Wednesday, we didn’t include the new computer at the auxiliary office, so I wanted to jot this down in an email before I forgot about it again.” I could write it down on a post-it note and put it in my purse and then take it to work on Monday and then email it to the person, but it seems like less work in the end just to email it right when I think about it.
Often, especially if there is a crisis. I am also involved in a lot of semi-work activities, like conferences, mail for which goes to my work account. I often don’t have time for these at work, so I do them at home. I’m about to look at the edit of a column, for example.
I’m not the only one. Once, when I was program chair of a conference, I sent an email to my vice Program Chair at 1 am, and got an immediate response from him two timezones later.
Not strictly required, but it helps sometimes, and lets me have stuff cleared out in the morning. While traveling on business it is pretty much required, since I can’t be gone that long without checking.
I only have access to my work email while in the office, so no. Depending on how my career goes, I’ll be getting a laptop with access to the email server sometime and then my answer will change.
I check work email regularly on the weekends. I’m a department director, so I tend to fire off emails to people in the department as I think of things that need to be taken care of. It’s a little easier for me to keep track of stuff and send out instructions/reminders while they’re fresh in my mind.
The culture of my job doesn’t require working from home, but we all do it. The industry (advertising) is very mobile, so it’s pretty common for people to connect from home or somewhere else off-site and work that way.
I don’t have any specific rules dividing work/personal emails. If I’m busy at work I usually ignore personal messages unless they’re urgent. Same when I’m at home.
Do you check your work email after or before “working hours?”
Yes
2. If so, is this something that is required because of your job? Or because of the “work culture” where you work?
Both. Everyone carries Treos or Blackberries. We also carry laptops and have the ability to login at any computer through Citrix.
3. Do you have personal or office rules about when you check your emails or which emails you reply to after hours?
No, but I evaluate how “critical” each email really is and whether it can be ignored until business hours, requires a response or needs actual work done.