How ironic that one of the most popular news stories over Christmas/new year on the BBC website was a report that Volkswagen in Germany had agreed with its works council to stop sending emails to employees via their smartphones when they are off-shift.
Clearly, digital tyranny was a hot topic for some of those digital addicts on-line over the festive break but worried about the threat to their work/life balance.
I wonder what VW might have wished to say to its Blackberry and iPhone-dependent employees. “Ein gutes neues Jahr”? More likely, it would have confirmed January shift patterns, or the date of a training course. But VW agreed to a request from the IG Metall union in future to email only during – or up to half an hour before or after – the recipient’s shift.
Judged by the flood of reader comments on the BBC story, it struck a raw nerve in anyone anywhere whose manager persistently demands that they engage with work emails or calls in their own time. This is endemic in some organisations, and the case grows ever stronger for HR to define what is acceptable practice and what type of circumstance genuinely constitutes an emergency.
But I can’t help thinking our German friends at VW and IG Metall are behaving a bit like King Canute in trying to turn back the irresistible tide of technology.
Let’s be frank about this. Communicating important information by email has enormous advantages for employers, and having to check first whether someone is on shift would be ridiculous.
What’s more, a majority of the working population will soon have smartphones, and many choose not to operate a rigid boundary between work and personal time, preferring to deal instantly with emails or social media messages. This approach, if applied sensibly, has benefits for both employer and employee.
Surely every one of us can choose when to open and respond to digital messages, just as we can with snail-mail delivered to our front doors? In the end it’s a matter of personal responsibility. I don’t need an employer or a trade union to protect me from myself, thank you very much.
That said, it’s also important to be able to switch off. We need time to reflect, in order to learn from experience and think through problems. And we need space to recharge, so boosting our resilience (a point also made in my article last month about quiet rooms at work). Both are so much more difficult if the computer or the smartphone are always on. This isn’t so much about work/life balance, more about the healthy balance between doing and resting.
I know of several people who switched off completely for part of the Christmas/ new year break. One, noting the short, cold, dark days of midwinter, described this as needing to hibernate for a while. What a great idea. Maybe we could all do with an HR policy on hibernation?
Rob makes a very valid point and personally I would prefer to dip into my inbox ahead of the return morning so there are no big surprises, whether it is returning from Christmas leave or an annual break. Somehow the reality is never as bad as the imagined!
It’s not the email at 06:45 I object to. It’s the phone call at 07:15 demanding to know why I haven’t responded to their email yet that causes the problem.
Stephen
The price we have to pay for technology, we are costantly demanding easier and faster ways of communicating with each other but there is a price to pay. Once you have disclosed your contact details you have opened the door to everyone and thier mothers telling you what they want you to know, when they want you to know it.Our reaction is immediate,we stop what we are doing,wherever we are, even in the loo, to respond.
The article has given a good perspective. However, companies that provide cell phones, BBs and other gadgets for official use demand that since these are provided for official use hence at any time during vacation it must be switched on so as to meet any official need. Secondly operations that are running 24/7 and dealing with customers all the time, do want that there should be no Hybernation at any time at all.
I agree with Stephen Booth’s comment. E-mails seems to create an expectation of immediate response in a way that more traditional communication methods never did. It’s fine having the flexibility to dip into your work e-mails at a time that’s convenient to you. It’s when you are expected to do so in your own time, at all hours of the day, and when you’re not being paid that it’s not fine. I have worked in an organisation where there seemed to be a competition to send e-mails as late as possible at night to ‘prove’ you were still working… not good, not healthy!
Matthew, I’ve seen similar contests, in particular as we tend to employ a lot of IT contractors who travel in and stay in a hotel. They seem to feel the need to demonstrate to our managers that they work late in their hotel rooms so therefore we should let them arrive late on Monday and leave early on Friday (or even Thursday) but still pay them for the full week. In actual fact many just use software that will let them write an email during the day but set a delay on it actually being sent so the recipient gets a mail that seemed to have been sent at 12:30 but was actually sent at 16:30. I first discovered this when I was networking with some consultants (i.e. in the pub with them) and an email from one arrived on my Blackberry. I asked him about it as claerly he hadn’t just sent the mail and he asked why I didn’t do the same (he thought I was a fellow contractor) and offered to get me a copy of the software.
On a related note I’ve also found that often suppliers will email or call after they think I’ve left the office with queries, so they can buy themselves an extra day (“Well we did call on Tuesday [omitting that it was 20:35 on Tuesday] but there was no answer”), and are quite surprised when I pick up.
Stephen