I love this idea! What it does is give the employee a valid reason to shut off his work phone at 6pm. No more passive aggressive bullshit from the boss.
Boss "I emailed you yesterday evening, didn’t you read it? you really need to stay in touch and connected to our office.
Employee, "I’m so sorry, I was at the hospital watching my wife give birth to our daughter. Please forgive me. I won’t miss another email. "
With this law workers will finally regain their after hours private life. The employee can shut off his phone at 6pm and actually go out for dinner in peace. Workaholic boss can email all he wants. They’ll be in your inbox the next morning.
Brilliant! We need this so badly in the US. This attitude of being in touch with the office 24/7 is just abusive and wrong.
You’d be surprised how insidious pressure from work can be. They can’t force you to check emails after work unless you carry call. But the bosses and coworker’s passive aggressive questions gets their meaning across.
Are you up for a promotion? Is the company downsizing? Got a poor annual performance review? People jump to that phone like crazy when texts or emails arrive.
The pressure is just insane. I lived through that crap in Computing Services for five years on call with a beeper. It was literally affecting my health. I took a pay cut to transfer into a computer support position (different dept) that doesn’t require call. We go home at 5pm.
I can’t even imagine life with smart phones. Texts, email, and even Skype when you’re out of town. It’s a digital shackle around your neck.
My email hours–as far as my employer is concerned–are 06:45 to 3:15 M-F. The day they require me to check emails outside of those hours is either the day they give me a extremely hefty raise or the day I start filling out my retirement papers.
Why is an incredibly arbitrary time? If you work graveyard, can your boss wake you at noon? I think the pertinent part is right below the grèveurs and not a fixed time in France. VW voluntarily doing it? Great.
Otherwise pointless. If you boss bugs you and wants you to come in Saturday… and Sunday, mkay? the most permanent solution is to get a new boss. I sometimes check email and respond at home, but I don’t want to check it on a weekend trip. Plus, no smartphone, so I can actually use the “no email” defense. I don’t mind getting the emails, just don’t expect me to respond.
Yep. That’s why I changed jobs. 5 years of call tore me up. It took almost 6 months before I quit jumping when I heard someone’s beeper in a restaurant. My overall health improved a lot in my new job.
I don’t care what the salary is. I won’t take a job that requires being on call. I don’t read office emails outside work hours.
So if some sort of emergency happens in my place of business that could cost me a shitload of money overnight and I desperately need the services of a given employee who’s an expert in the field where the problem is, I guess I’m just supposed to suck it up and take the loss because it would be rude to send him a text at dinnertime?
For a lot of jobs, well okay, MY job at least, it’s just not flexible enough.
My boss has, I think, a very reasonable policy that no responses are expected outside of business hours. But people can send all the email they want. Depending on the time of year, I’m not always on the clock in a traditional way. Sometimes, the best time for me to focus on emails is late in the evening, from home. I can do the emails much faster than if I am trying to juggle them in between other things happening in the office. Getting them out of the way reduces my job-related stress.
The other nice thing is that our office rule is that if there’s an emergency (and they’re mostly good about using emergency to mean “someone is dead or on fire” as opposed to “the whim of some boss”) that you get a phone call or text to say “hey, there’s an emergency, details are in your email.”
There would have to be exceptions for emergencies. It could get complicated stating the exact rules and exceptions. But, there would have to be exceptions when off work employees are urgently needed.
From an American worldview, and as someone who has always had to be at work by 8, I tend to agree, but… sometimes I wonder. Particularly given the coffee culture that our work hours tend to encourage. Is there something wrong with a work schedule that has something like eighty percent of the US running a low grade stimulant addiction to keep up with it? I mean, it’s not something that’s going to change any time soon, but if you really step back and think about it, it’s kind of messed up.
More on topic with the thread, it’d be a big culture shift. My jobs have always been relatively respectful of non-work time, in that you weren’t expected to reply to non-emergencies before the next morning. If it was a true emergency, though? Yeah, you better be available. I saw a guy get let go once where the last straw was that he blew off an emergency conference call for a big client… on Easter Sunday. They had been building up a case against him for a while, which kept it from becoming a big uproar, but the last straw was literally, “I am eating Easter dinner with my family, I can’t join the call.” I’d like to think that we don’t need a law for this, that there’s some other free-market way to handle it, but I’m pretty sure we’re into a “failure of the market” on this point. Geez, stop me now before I start arguing in favor of more unions.
Within my team, we’ve started putting things to the effect of “Can Wait Until Mon. Morning” or even “Don’t Even Bother Responding Now” in the subject. It’s weird but it seems to reinforce the idea that a response really isn’t needed. You’d like to think working adults could get that on their own, but even I feel like sometimes it’s nice to get the psychological permission that no one is expecting a response at 3 AM on a Sunday just because one person had some time to kill in an airport during a layover.
I’m all for it. Like everything else at workplaces, it’s all dependent on your manager, and their managers.
If they’re cool, then they will respect your off work time and not bombard you with emails or calls, but if they don’t have any lives, are assholes, or are just clueless, they will, and there’s not much else you can do except suck it up, or have a big confrontation where you tell your boss that you don’t want to do what they consider to be your job.
In a previous life, when I was a consultant, I actually got an email at 9 pm one time that I got my ass chewed when I didn’t act on it until the following morning. It wasn’t a big emergency or really all that critical, but my boss wanted to impress the client with some great new idea the following day, and my unwillingness to do 3 hours of work at 9 pm didn’t allow him to do that.
Some of these guys just have no lives, no clues and just don’t care if you actually have something to do outside of work hours, because for the most part, they live for work and don’t have anything else to do when they’re not there.
So yes, I think it’s a good idea for the government to explicitly limit that kind of thing, because there are a lot of people who don’t have the flexibility to tell the boss to fuck off and get another job, and they don’t deserve to be continually shit on by heartless bosses when they’re not even at work.
Why not? Either those people signed a contract or have really bad managers.
In my experience it’s not a problem. A reasonable level of pressure to be connected can be worked with. I’m usually reachable on my phone and I don’t have a problem with that but when I don’t want to be distracted I just disable email syncing and ignore (very rare) phone calls at stupid hours. If it’s truly urgent I’ll be texted and maybe cursed at but it’s never happened. My job is relatively low pressure emergency-wise.