Banning Out-of-Hours Email 'Could Harm Employee Wellbeing' (bbc.com) 118
Banning staff from accessing their work emails outside office hours could do more harm than good to employee wellbeing, a study suggests. From a report: University of Sussex researchers found while a ban could help some staff switch off, it could also stop people achieving work goals, causing stress. Companies are increasingly curbing email use to tackle burnout. France has even legislated on the issue. But human resources body CIPD said it agreed with the university's findings. According to the research, strict policies on email use could be harmful to employees with "high levels of anxiety and neuroticism."
That was because such employees needed to feel free to respond to a "growing accumulation of emails", or they could end up feeling even more stressed and overloaded, the researchers said. Dr Emma Russell, a senior lecturer in management at the University of Sussex Business School, said despite the best intentions of policies limiting email use, a one-size-fits-all approach should be avoided. "[Blanket bans] would be unlikely to be welcomed by employees who prioritise work performance goals and who would prefer to attend to work outside of hours if it helps them get their tasks completed. People need to deal with email in the way that suits their personality and their goal priorities in order to feel like they are adequately managing their workload."
That was because such employees needed to feel free to respond to a "growing accumulation of emails", or they could end up feeling even more stressed and overloaded, the researchers said. Dr Emma Russell, a senior lecturer in management at the University of Sussex Business School, said despite the best intentions of policies limiting email use, a one-size-fits-all approach should be avoided. "[Blanket bans] would be unlikely to be welcomed by employees who prioritise work performance goals and who would prefer to attend to work outside of hours if it helps them get their tasks completed. People need to deal with email in the way that suits their personality and their goal priorities in order to feel like they are adequately managing their workload."
That's not out-of-hours (Score:4, Insightful)
If an employee feels the need to respond to email outside of normal work hours, he should be able to count that time as work time and get paid for it. He shouldn't hide time spent working from his boss.
Aside from that, I get the point made by TFA. Unfinished business can cause stress. But spending more time working isn't a healthy way to handle that stress.
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We had these SAME types of people, and they survived JUST fine back in the days before email.
Re: That's not out-of-hours (Score:2)
Well the type of work has changed. There are many more office and desk jobs now than in the 80s and before. So perhaps in the past these neurotic people had jobs that were impossible to do from home / after hours so there was no reason to get stressed about it.
It was also easier to find well-paid employment, so people wouldn't be as stressed about keeping the job they had.
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And if after hours email is banned, it is once again impossible, problem solved.
You may be on to something with the second point.
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And if after hours email is banned, it is once again impossible, problem solved.
Only if your company works in just one time zone. If you work in a company with offices around the globe, then there really isn't such a thing as "after hours", since that's when everyone else is working... and sending emails.
Re: That's not out-of-hours (Score:4, Interesting)
There is after YOUR hours, and you cannot do anything about the email then (because doing so is forbidden). The people in other time zones can't have any complaints about it since you ACTUALLY could not read or respond to their email.
At the same time, if there is a genuine hair on fire emergency, there are plenty of employees in other time zones that can handle it without working outside of their normal work hours. You can do the same for them when it's your working hours and they're off.
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And if you are a goal oriented person with high levels of neuroticism, you will get stressed over this. This isn't about emergencies, this is about how people react to environment around them. Different personalities do it differently.
The problem is that some people (those low in trait neuroticism and/or those that do not prioritise work goals high) will act the way you seem to suggest and benefit from being unable to access their work email after hours. And others (high in trait neuroticism and&or prio
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OMG, you're saying there isn't a one size fits all solution to everything?
Naturally, if conditions require on-call, an employer should hire people willing to be on-call and pay the extra that willingness generally costs. Those employees will naturally have different rules about when they email (and who out of hours). Nevertheless, I don't imagine receptionists will be part of the on-call, for example.
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And if after hours email is banned, it is once again impossible, problem solved.
I much prefer a late night email from my boss over a late night phone call.
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A sane company that bans late-night email would surely frown equally on a late night phone call.
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There are many more office and desk jobs now than in the 80s and before.
In absolute terms I don't doubt it. As a percentage of work do you have source on that? If you go back before the modern era (say pre-war) once again I'd accept it with little question. However I recall photos of big open rooms in banks with sometimes as many as a 100 people at desks working basic accounting.. Computers eliminated a lot of those desk jobs.
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I don't think we had the problem of spending 8 full working hours solely on answering emails. If email could all be answered with a simple yes or no it would go a whole lot faster. But typically for me is that in the time it takes for me to respond to an email another two have shown up. Add onto that the problem that people create new meetings so that we can discuss why we're not finding enough time to get work done.
It's possible that in the past all the paper work had an important use of slowing things d
Re:That's not out-of-hours (Score:4, Insightful)
Add onto that the problem that people create new meetings so that we can discuss why we're not finding enough time to get work done.
It sounds like you work for a dysfunctional organization. Have you considered finding a new job?
Competently run companies tend to pay better so they can attract even more competent people. So moving may be a big win for you.
At my company, we have people complain that we don't have enough meetings.
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Yes, quite. Look at how well that worked out for J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs when all those well paid people couldn't see the onrushing meltdown of the financial system and instead kept telling us mark-to-market was no longer relevant and they knew what they were doing.
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What are you talking about???
Goldman Sachs earned a lot of money, shorting the us home marked.
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What are you talking about??? Goldman Sachs earned a lot of money, shorting the us home marked.
Indeed. And JP Morgan got a bailout.
Hiring smart people paid off for both, but obviously, the Goldman people were smarter.
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Yep, and back in the day, you stayed behind for hours and hours to work on unfinished work in your 'inbox'. Nowadays you can take your work home, spend some time with the family and eat, then continue working.
Things haven't changed, what has changed is our work ethics. People used to work 6am-9pm, 7 days a week on the farm; in France a workweek is now 30h and people are legislating away any overtime anyone would want to do. You won't get ahead if you don't put in the extra time but most people aren't even i
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Maybe sys admins should work with on-call rotations that count as billable hours, not salary?
Exactly.
If you have to email your sysadmin out of hours, that is a dangerous single point of failure. What if something is broken while the admin is somewhere out of reach? (shower, sleep, medical apointment etc). One place I worked had a system down an entire night because I wasn't feeling well and passed out for the night and didn't hear the phone when they tried to tell me our provider crashed a VM host and took our crap down (my predecessor didn't do redundancy).
Better to have people scheduled and in
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Re: That's not out-of-hours (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a factor called pride in work. This is something that is tough to quantify. The fact that you care about your work, and want it to be done well and timely comes into play. For most people they know that Pride in work rarely will get them that promotion or a raise, but they do get to sleep at night knowing that they did a good job.
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There is pride in work and then there is being bitched out because you were out of signal for a couple of hours. At some point, limits need to be set.
Re: That's not out-of-hours (Score:5, Insightful)
That is all fine and good, however-- Part of doing a good job, is having a well-defined job to do.
When your employer drops unreasonable workloads on you, you cannot achieve a quality resolution in the time available. This is NOT your fault. It is the fault of your employer, and their unreasonable expectations.
Management LOVES it when you have your expectations redefined, or when you redefine a customer's expectations in ways that makes them profits.
They fucking hate it when reality rears is ugly death-faced head, and ruins their little vision of yet another quarterly bonus, because they demanded the fucking impossible, and could not get it-- and so have to redefine their expectations to something reasonable.
They especially hate it when the person who likes doing a good job, points out that the expectations are not achievable, and can spell out precisely why they are not achievable.
Their impulse reaction is not to go "Hum... Is there a way to reach those goals, and if so, what do you need?"-- Oh no. their solution is "We will find somebody that can comply with our magical wish fulfillment schemes. Goodbye."
In come charlatans, and other dick smokers who then make management happy by bending the fuck over backward, destroying any semblance of home-life, and who then STILL fail to give deliverables, promising that "Oh yes, sir! I can do that!", ruining it all even further.
No. These assholes need to figure out that the reason the quality of their products and services have gone to the fucking shitter is not because of worker rebellion or the like, it is because they have driven off all the people that made the product or service quality to begin with, with this asinine wish fulfillment bullshit, driven by the harpy shrieks of their investors.
There's pride in your work, (as in, you want to do the best you can possibly do), and there is pride in your work (as in, you make rational decisions about how to approach the work that assures the optimum outcome, and thus fully evaluate the expected outcome against what resources you have available, and come to conclude that the effort is futile, and the energy is better spent elsewhere within the scope of the project, how that is so, why it is so, and you can prove it is so.)
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Yeah, but in the US we have a stereotype that salary workers are more elite than hourly workers. It's a stereotype that benefits business stakeholders and harms workers, but creates the impression that you are on the executive team of the business, not (low caste) labor.
Honestly, I think salary work should be banned, as it only serves the purpose of extracting labor at lower prices and removes negotiating power from workers. I'll gladly exchange "paid" holidays for, fair wages, and the liberty to take tim
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Hourly work is bad for "Mental Jobs". Because as you gain experience you can do a job in 30 minutes that it would take days for a new out of school employee to do. So your actual pay would be a lot less as you will not be 100% hands on keyboard. But you would be orders of magnitude more productive. So a Salary Pay is often more fare, as the old guy is doing his work, and leaving after an 8 hour day. Because he got his work done in that time frame, while the new employee feels that he need to work ext
Re: That's not out-of-hours (Score:2)
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You can (can't say I haven't done it) but that's its own form of work and stress.
Assuming I've negotiated to my best and am being paid as much as the client can afford / is willing: In the best case say I negotiate a contract for say 1000 hours of work to get "thing" done. So I'm a super fast developer and get "thing" done in 200 hours. Then say bill the client 800 hours. They're happy and I'm super happy.
Throw in the fact I'm a procrastinator and the fact that clients expect to be billed at a "normal" pac
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I do a "Mental" job, and as far as I see it go (if you do a good job), you tend to get promoted in the technical levels, simply because you can do that job in 30 minutes. So they give you jobs that would take a newbie much, much longer, and use your experience to feed you things that still challenge your abilities.
So you end up paid more for your unit time, still have things to fill all your time, and still get the challenge. If I were still working on things that I was doing just after I graduated, I'd b
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It's not a stereotype, it's a legally-required fiction. Workers have to be re-classified as management in order to make their position salaried, otherwise it's against US law. The intent of the law is fine, but companies have easily defied it by declaring anything they want to be "management" since there's no clear way to define it.
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I like being able to read my emails at home, it helps me plan the next day, see if anything got canceled or if there's anything urgent I need to get to first thing. Then I do not have to start my working day by doing email, which is just the worst..
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Usually these people are salary.
Other than banning people from emailing off hours, laws should be setup to make sure they are not repercussions for people who do not email off hours.
I am one of those emails off hour offenders. As I much rather keep my email traffic down, and get the simple questions of out the way. However if I don't respond to my emails, I shouldn't expect to get the first degree in the morning on why I didn't respond to the emails that happened last night, and any email I send during o
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If it's not an absolute ban, some managers will find a proxy for doing email after hours and use that as a metric. The end result is that you get penalized for not doing email after hours in all but name.
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To be fair out of hours email has to be banned and people who do work out of hours actually punished. Not harshly but it should be noted as an issue at performance review.
Otherwise it just allows people to create a toxic work environment where putting in excessive hours and damaging work/life balance is encouraged.
Rationalization of screwing the employees (Score:2)
Reasonable FP and actually deserves a favorable mod. Artificial scarcity again?
I especially liked that you focused on a solution approach. Giving the workers more control over their work, including when they do it, is the one thing that makes them happiest. At least that was true for every survey I can remember (from my ancient days in HR). Your solution of allowing them to do that work at more convenient times without spending more total time working is quite nice, even elegant.
However, that isn't the poin
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First, I rarely felt a "need" to respond to emails outside of normal work hours, but I wanted startups I usually work for to be successful and if I can accelerate the resolution of an issue, note a problem that needs solving, or accelerate the completion date of a project by 12 hours by responding to an email at 10PM rather than waiting until I get into the office the next morning, I want to do it. Sometimes I also just enjoy the hunt for the solution to a development or customer bug/issue.
Second, by respon
Internal email. (Score:2)
I guess that would depend on where you work if the email you receive is internal then not only would you not be able to check your email no one be sending you any.
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You must have worked exclusively for small companies that have offices in only a single time zone. Try putting offices in the Bay Area, New York, India/Middle East, and China/Japan, and we'll see just how well that theory holds. :-)
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Also, if you're purposefully working from 7 AM to 4 PM, so you can go pick up your kid after school, or because you want to avoid traffic, you'd become a problem to your company under such a policy.
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I worked in an office with ~300 people, and a few smaller locations in time zones +/- 1 hour from us. I tried an experiment last I went on vacation where my OoO reply read something like "I am on vacation and this message will not be read. If it is important that I receive it please resend after XX/XX/XXXX".
In general people who sent me messages during my vacation could not possibly believe I would not read their message. Rather than resend
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We have locations in North and South America, Europe, China, India, Philippines, Australia. I have all of North America under me so I understand time zones, but I'm not salary so if I'm answering email I'm getting paid. I work 10 hours a day and I have someone in central time zone working banking hours on a pacific time schedule. Even more so I work in tech and changes, upgrades, etc... all have to take place after business hours.
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I used to check email once in a while from my phone, just to make sure nothing was on fire, and more importantly, to nuke emails that I didn't care about, a few at a time. Then, they tightened down the access policies, and I can't do that. Now, I instead of glancing at emails on my phone while I'm doing other things and deleting 90% of them, I have to deliberately open my laptop and check email at the start of the day, which means I waste the first ten or fifteen minutes of my workday deleting email mess
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So you'd rather waste a cumulative 10 minutes of your personal time on work issues rather than wasting 10 minutes of employer time?
If your employer is troubled by that 10 minutes in the morning, it can take steps to reduce the amount of irrelevant email.
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I'd rather spend a couple of minutes doing mindless multitasking (deleting emails) while walking or using the bathroom or whatever, regardless of whether that's on my personal time, than spend those same two minutes deleting emails while sitting at my desk and being unable to do anything else at the same time. Yes. No question whatsoever.
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So, what is it you were doing at work for those 10 minutes back when you were free to donate your personal time for the email handling?
I'm guessing sitting chained to your desk doing some other work related task.
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I donated zero useful personal time to gain ten extra minutes of useful work time, during which yes, I got actual work done. The only possible argument against doing that requires a belief that the company would hire more people if we made ourselves less productive. But in my experience, this never actually happens. The backlog just gets deeper and deeper, and the workers just get more and more miserable because of the resulting feeling of helplessness.
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Since the company has actually banned the practice now, apparently your donations were not appreciated.
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In my particular case, my inability to use my phone isn't because of a ban, but rather because I don't want to give them remote wipe permissions on my personal phone, and they won't allow access from non-managed devices. The net effect ends up being the same, but I'm hopeful that they'll eventually figure out a more narrowly tailored wipe policy that we can both live with.
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You'd think after all the favors you've done, they could be a pal...
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No. I'm spending time doing something that previously took ZERO time because I could be doing something else at the same time. That is the very definition of wasting time — spending time that does not have to be spent.
It's wrong to push employees into doing work on their own time. It's wrong for employees to feel like they have to do so. But it's also wrong to not allow them to do so, if doing so actually results in the
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I think you missed the part where I was deleting those emails almost mindlessly while doing something else (e.g. chewing food, walking out to the car, etc.), which meant I was effectively spending zero actual personal time do
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No, my priorities are very much not out of whack. Every minute I have to spend deleting emails is a minute I can't spend doing something useful. So if I can do that while I'm doing other things, that means I have more minutes to do something useful, which means I can go home earlier and feel less stressed about work, which means I live longer and have more free time, too. Being truly disconnected when away from work actually results in me spending more time at work doing work, i.e. the actual effect of
MORE harm than good? (Score:2)
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The implication seems to be that not checking makes you fall behind. It advocates a race to the bottom where you must outwork your fellow employees to succeed, which means the other folks in the office must also check email, work late, etc to outdo your raised bar. Before you know it you have an office full of burnouts that get little real work done, but are spending all their waking hours keeping up the appearance of hard work.
Overloading (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really about too high a workload. If you're anxious because you're prohibited from doing company work on your own time, maybe it's on the management to give you a more reasonable load.
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This is absolutely it. I am one of those people who checks my work email after hours, and it's because I don't want to wake up the next morning already really far behind and spend all the next day rushing rushing rushing to catch up. Spending all night dreading that the next morning is even worse than spending some of my night checking my work email.
If we want a technological solution for this, it would be for after-hours emails to be auto-rerouted to someone else currently on the clock who will handle them
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This is absolutely it. I am one of those people who checks my work email after hours, and it's because I don't want to wake up the next morning already really far behind and spend all the next day rushing rushing rushing to catch up. Spending all night dreading that the next morning is even worse than spending some of my night checking my work email.
If we want a technological solution for this, it would be for after-hours emails to be auto-rerouted to someone else currently on the clock who will handle them instead of the person who is supposed to be off work right now.
I check email after hours to make sure there isn't a new meeting scheduled first thing in morning or some such. I'm technically on call 24/7. My company has offices in over a dozen countries in many time zones, plus clients in even more.
right analysis, wrong solution (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the research, strict policies on email use could be harmful to employees with "high levels of anxiety and neuroticism."
Why not offer those employees ways to fight their anxiety and neuroticism issues instead of making life more miserable for everyone else?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Valium. Or something stronger, would work.
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Finding out later that workers cant work can be avoided by looking over their work history.
It's a real issue (Score:2)
I get hundreds of work emails per day. I have a system of filters and processes that makes this flood manageable (barely), but only if I stay on top of it. I don't get so many emails on weekends, so I don't check email then, but I frequently do spend time doing email while I'm on short vacations. For longer vacations (more than a week or so) I take a different strategy: I set my auto-responder to tell people that I plan to declare email bankruptcy on my return and so they should assume that any email th
Re: It's a real issue (Score:2)
Sounds like if you're even able to declare bankruptcy at times, that a lot of your email probably isn't actually that important afterall.
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Sounds like if you're even able to declare bankruptcy at times, that a lot of your email probably isn't actually that important afterall.
Some, sure. And some can be handled by my backup while I'm out, though the messages would still be waiting for me even if the issue were addressed. The rest, it's not so much that it's not important, but that things that are important don't just go away if they're ignored for a little while. The issues still exist, and the people emailing me would bring them up again regardless of whether they knew about my bankruptcy. Informing them via the auto-responder lets them know I'm not ignoring them, and what
Re:It's a real issue (Score:4, Informative)
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Fine, but there's massive misuse potential (Score:3)
OK, I'm looking at this from a solidly mid-career perspective (I'm 45.) Maybe a ban is not the right thing, but establishing a company culture that doesn't punish people who won't work 13 hour days like Japanese salarymen is. Tech companies hire younger people and burn through them at a fast pace -- they want workers who don't know they're being exploited, because they're "doing what they love" and have all their needs catered for like free food and wacky office furniture. I wouldn't fit in there, because even though I still am doing a job I like, you need to have a life outside of work. The place I'm at has a standard 40 hour workweek, interesting projects to work on, and although you'll get emails outside of work hours, there's no pressure to respond immediately unless you're on call for something.
The total ban on out-of-work emails is a reaction to the employers who shame employees for not being tied to their phones 24/7 or who would deign to have something more important than work like a family and hobbies. The problem is that while the burnout rate is high, there's an infinite supply of labor graduating from CS school every year. On top of that, this labor force seems to be competing against each other to see how many hours they can put in, how quickly they can respond, how fast they fix bugs, and how little vacation they take. (This is why I don't like the "unlimited vacation" thing -- it's way too easy to have a bad manager compare his employees and wonder why Tom takes 5 days more a year than Jane, or guilt both of them into taking one for the team and not taking any vacation during "this one last crunch time."
Don't ban out-of-work content checking. Ban the toxic all-day-every-day culture and make employees pick their heads up and look around once in a while. You're not going to get 90 hour weeks, very few of which are productive, but in the long run you'll have happy well-adjusted employees. And to all those coders and IT folks who say they can't imagine not working...wait till you have a spouse and children.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct me if I am wrong, but this studies premise boils down to:
"We have created such huge workaholics that if we try to get them to have fun, they literally go crazy."
It's called withdrawal. It's a pain to go through, but you are better off on the other side.
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Or, "You don't have to work sixty hours a week, but we'll write you up if you don't do sixty hours worth of work a week. So, why does only working forty hours a week stress you out?"
The exact people who need to be stopped (Score:3)
These are the exact people who need to be stopped, because they are transferring their anxiety to everyone in the organization and creating a culture of over working. I found working in The Big Online Retailer(SDE role, not fulfillment), that the immense toxicity of that work environment was simultaneously intentional and unintentional.
The anxious over-workers were never discouraged from their pathology by management, causing a standard of 24-7 availability, burnout, toxic first-in-last-out hours, toxic credit grabbing, and toxic politicking. Equally anxious middle management felt they benefitted from the implicit control from the distrustful and suspicious environment under them, and these anxious workers were pivotal in creating that. Ultimately however, the environment was more of a death march, where after sprint meetings, where the boss went on tirades, everyone would literally perform emotional triage for the remainder of the day, perhaps performing actual work only for the last hour. That and the attrition rate meant all the work was two steps forward, one step back.
Building more nurturing, low stress, high trust, work environments, where workers are engaged and happy, is ultimately the best business plan, and also good public health policy. Businesses can't do this on their own, because there will always be a self-defeating conflict of interest in the short term, when managers and upper execs see potential profits lying on the ground. There will always be a temptation to squeeze just a little more out of their workers, just for today. But as the video game industry has revealed, there's never a time that is not crunch time.
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Everyone says I'm an old dinosaur for thinking like this, but one of the things I think this Second Dotcom Bubble we're in is going to prove is that the whole DevOps thing encourages workaholism. Not the development and release practices per se, but the constant monitoring, tracking, etc. It's nice that you can deploy your application 25 times a day, but it's also possible for Joe the Bad Manager to go in an pull detailed reports on his staff's code commit speed, issue fix rate, etc. And because everyone ca
Dumbfounded! (Score:2)
"And, earlier this year, New York City discussed proposals to become the first city in the US to grant employees the "right to disconnect" after work."
Absolutely unbelievable! If "working hours" are 9-5, then outside of 9-5 one does not work. Employee's do not need some namby-pamby nanny to grant them the right to not work while not working. They can grow some balls and do it themselves.
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WTF is wrong with society??? (Score:2)
This is exactly the problem here. People are expected to have no life outside their jobs and somehow that's seen as a virtue by some mentally very sick people.
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Over Committing/Promising (Score:1)
You guys need an UNION when boss get X3 bill for a (Score:2)
You guys need an UNION when boss get X3 bill for an BS email they think must be deal with now that will stop them.
Two problems being discussed... (Score:2)
Why is it... (Score:2)
..when the powers that be try to do 'good', they end up making things worse?
NOT ME! (Score:2)
Re: NOT ME! (Score:2)
I'm salary. Therefor I'm paid to work 24 hours a day. That big six-figure salary is more like $25/hour.
Also I'm slowly dying from not sleeping, eating properly, or engaging with my family.
But that's what you HAVE to do to get ahead in business.
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No, you are paid to work 40 hours per week (or whatever the local standard is). Salaried does not mean Indentured Slave. The problem is YOU.
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My job is to blow air around the room. It makes a sound that goes: WOOSH!
badly formed goals (Score:5, Informative)
If you have to work more than 40 hours a week at an office job, then you or your boss have made a mistake in planning and organization. If you made commitments that you cannot keep by working during business hours, then you've made a mistake.
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then you or your boss have made a mistake in planning and organization
Or made a deliberate choice. I'd rather work 60 hours and make twice as much.
A study? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate solution: Do the productive work during working hours and handle the too many emails off the working hours
Government solution: Making people answer work related emails counts as working time. Pay them over time
Corporate reaction: Make them exempt employees ineligible for over time
Government reaction: Ban off working hours emails
Corporate reaction: Pay someone to conclude in "a study" banning this would increase their stress levels
Sane person asking: Why cant you reduce the email overload
Corporate reaction: That's insane. It is our fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to squeeze every last drop of productivity from our employees. How else can we pay our CXOs their huge pay checks?
Stop Parenting Adults (Score:2)
Let those people fail. They fail because of their own inability to adapt and change. If they don't learn, then they eventually eliminate themselves as weak links and humanity is left that much stronger.
So which tech giant funded this study? (Score:2)
Sure (Score:2)
I bet that all the bosses think that employees think of nothing else at home than their work.
You're wrong.
Keep separate devices (Score:2)
It really helps to have both business and personal devices too. Some people prefer (and work somewhere that allows them) to BYOD for work. Other people just use their work issued device as a perk so they don't have to pay for their own.
It's way easier to keep work and life separate if they are on different screens. Maybe you even leave the work phone behind when you are not working.....
Humanity sux (Score:2)
How to fix this (Score:2)
2. Ensure the contract has some detail on having to respond to work at different times.
3. Compensate the worker for the hours of extra work they are expected to do.
The worker has the ability to work. They get extra "pay" for the hours of extra work.
Wasting perfectly good mornings (Score:2)
Many productivity advice recommends not reading your email as the first thing in the morning. I tend to let them pile up, and try to eliminate them in the downtime. If I slip, and start with my Inbox, I quickly realize it has become lunch time before doing any meaningful work.
[One good thing could be trying to glance at the inbox to see if there are any real fires (like production being down, a last minute meeting, etc). If not quickly close the tab under a minute].
The rest of the emails that require some a
Re: Fuck you. (Score:2)
news at ten:
overworked employees trying to do the job of 3 people get stressed.
Propergandising class insists solution obviously not to just employ more people, but rather work more hours unpaid.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And the only appropriate response to that is FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON.