Volkswagen Turns Off E-mail After Work-Hours 377
wired_parrot writes "Responding to complaints from employees that email outside of working hours was disrupting their lives, Volkswagen has taken the step of shutting their email servers outside work-hours. Other companies have taken similar steps, with at least one taking the extraordinary step of banning internal e-mail altogether. Is this new awareness of the disruption work email brings on employee's personal life a trend?"
Banning internal e-mail (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing about banning internal e-mail was originally labelled by the press of doing away with e-mail altogether, which it wasn't. The article on it on the BBC was actually quite interesting, I was dismissive of the idea at first, but it was a pretty good article and worth opening your mind to.
My only concern is about auditing, if communications occur by IM, then where is the audit trail?
This is idiotic. (Score:5, Interesting)
The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous. I can send an email, and people will get to it when they can. It's worldwide, near instant, and pretty much perfect delivery. I don't have to worry about them sitting at their desk right this moment, or be working right this moment. Write detailed email, send, and wait for reply. If it's urgent, follow up with a phone call, but otherwise, it's fire and forget.
If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working, and that might mean that I have to work while I'm supposed to be off. After all, my working hours might not coincide with theirs.
I can't see this last very long. Besides, the solution is obvious and much less technically complex: have people not answer their email after working hours. Yes, it takes practice, but I've learned to ignore my crackberry after hours. If it's urgent, people will call.
Re:Banning internal e-mail (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:8 to 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Other motives (Score:5, Interesting)
The company didn't try to hide their reasons. They told us flat out it was for legal liability. People are a tad too cavalier in what they'll put in an email, and later, in court, email is treated like formal marching orders rather than the casual conversation it often is. There is even talk of doing away with work email all together, again for liability reasons. All "Marching orders" should come in the form of formal documentation. We have a chat system that can not be set to archive conversations that we're to use for the types of casual work talk we used to use email for.
From what the lawyers were telling me, industry wide legal advise is to get rid of email all together. They said a lot of companies are starting pilot projects to see how well their workers can do their jobs without it, and to get them used to the idea of not having it.
Re:It won't last (Score:1, Interesting)
The Occupy movement does little other than give the local popo a chance to use their new riot toys. At least in Houston, the protesters are getting felony charges now, so when arrested, they are not coming back. Two years in prison (and trust me, texas prisons are not the paradises you see on Lockup) will make people think twice, or just remove them from the population at large.
The real movers and shakers were Beck's two million in DC with his restoration of honor rally (and ZERO arrests due to that rally). That is why Congress dances to the Tea Party's tune now.
Re:WHAT?! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many after-hours work calls or e-mails that I actually *want* to get because someone is helping me resolve a time-sensitive issue or because we are in different timezones and our calendars are all full during the day.
The demand on time is self-fulfilling: you have to address an issue at 9PM because the dependent factor needs it at 10PM, who will be behind if he doesn't have his shit done by 2AM for Mumbai. If you make everyone go-the-hell home then the problem can wait. In the end I think a big part of the evening email correspondence is about employees punishing each other and using their evening uptime to compete with each other and make people who have social lives and families look bad. It isn't very productive and companies that see that sort of dynamic should just take away the toys.
Keeping the furnace running or the servers is a different matter, but why would artists and sales people need to be on call 24-7?
Different approach (Score:5, Interesting)
One approach to work/life balance is to strictly segregate them: Be at work, working, from 8-5, then be at home, not working.
That's fine for people who want to do that, but it's not the only way to maintain a reasonable balance. I'm generally in the office from 7-4, but I'm not necessarily working all of that time. On average I spend 1-2 hours of each work day dealing with personal stuff -- keeping up with my bills, fielding phone calls about my kids at school (I have one daughter who is really challenging), out running errands for my wife. I probably spend another hour screwing around on-line: slashdot, G+, etc. Once in a while I even leave the office entirely for a two or three hours because I want to go to a kid's production at school, or because I feel like working out, or whatever. As a result, I don't feel in the slightest that I'm giving "my time" away to the company when I check e-mail in the evening. Heck sometimes I'm working on some particularly interesting bit of code and I even decide to work on it at night after the family is in bed... not because I feel obligated but because it's fun.
For me, strictly segregating work and not-work would be a poorer work/life balance than having the flexibility to do non-work stuff during business hours and work stuff during non-business hours.
I'd rather manage the balance myself than have the company mandate it one way or another. I understand that for people with driving personalities this can lead to excessive work, and I understand that some managers can see this as a way to wring every last minute from their employees. I don't have the first problem and the times I've had the second, I've fixed it by getting a different manager, one way or another.
Beyond my personal preferences, I think the "strict segregation" approach is rather unnatural. It wasn't really even possible as a widespread lifestyle until the Industrial Revolution. Throughout human history, work and non-work have largely been inseparably mixed, both just parts of "life". I like it that way.