Maybe we should think of these things as employment flags?
There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature.
I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.
I recently had a slack message on my Friday evening from my delayed-timezone manager starting his Friday.
There was no expectation to answer out of hours, but it was some small detail I could answer in a few seconds. And this was from a new and intense 24/7 workaholic ex-FAANG manager, whose high expectations I was still getting used to, and who would likely spend his whole weekend working on this project. So I gave a quick response.
He said thanks, told me to turn my phone off, and sent a group message to the team reminding us not to work outside hours, with a link to instructions on disabling slack notifications. And then he started scheduling his own overnight/weekend DMs to send at 9am Monday.
It was an awesome response, and those firm self-imposed boundaries helped allow the work to be rewarding, rather than an absolute nightmare.
A lot of companies here are pretty good. It's the ones that aren't that necessitate the law change.
My workplace, for instance, published the formal policy last week and the accompanying announcement was honestly bordering on anger about it. My team is pretty good, but other teams have been having to work out of hours. It's a good change.
I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.
Totally different experience here working for FAANG, at least as it pertains to pages. For emails / slack etc I found it easy to ignore while working as an engineer, but much harder now in a management role. Even entirely disconnecting when going on vacation can be tough.
That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).
The hard part of disconnecting as a manager is feeling like the team is blocked on you when you're not there. If you're a good manager then you enable the team to function without you. It's just tough to get that level of confidence in your management abilities.
I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.
My old company we had rotating on call shifts that was about one week a month. I got paged an average of 2 times a night because of some random thing breaking or some error. My current company, we get a week on call about every month and a half, either primary or secondary. But I have been paged I think 2 times in 3 years. Its a world of difference having a stable application and well done page rules.
Average of twice a night is freaking insane. I was burning out doing 1-week-in-3 with pages 3 nights out of 7. These were all actionable issues (DDoS, packet loss etc.) so I had to actually wake up and work.
I have a literal pager because my company wants to take over my phone with their software and have the ability to wipe it out any time they wish. No thanks, kiss my ass. They will not provide a work phone either. An actual pager was the only alternative.
What's wrong with sending an email out of office hours? I don't understand the sentiment, even though I've seen some people express it. Nobody's gonna read that email until Monday anyway - or at least shouldn't.
it's the "at least shouldn't" that's what's wrong. if your director sends an email late Friday night and your amalgamation of devices and nervous habits ends up seeing it before 9am Monday, it's going to sit in your brain, messing up your off-work hours. so "send at 9am" is just being courteous these days.
If your own nervous habits lead you to checking work emails outside of work, it sounds like you were preoccupied with thoughts about work regardless of whether or not you received an email. No, the correct solution if you can't ignore a notification is to either block notifications from work apps entirely, or to create a notification schedule that blocks work apps outside of given hours. That schedule should be made during work hours, of course.
If the employee is a nervous person, and that nervousness is impacting their work, and you need them to relax, and they can't, you need to figure out a way to help them relax.
Mining operations run 24/7/365 days a year and workers have shifts.
Being contacted out of hours (notice the absence of the word office) is a no-no unless there's an on call agreement .. and even that has a roster.
There's an unspoken exception for serious accidents that require hands on deck to save lives | recover bodies.
I don't regard sending an email as an issue, it's much like posting a letter - but there's no obligation to read or respond to a work email out of hours (in countries such as Australia).
I'm so confused that the manager felt the need to say this or that your country would need such a right for you to have that right (because unless it's in your work contract, you've not agreed to work when you're not working)
Two questions: assuming you have fixed hours, does anyone (colleagues, direct supervisor, big boss) expect you to see messages or emails outside of your working hours? Second question: what culture does your answer apply to?
For me the answer is a confident "no", having worked in the Dutch and German tech sector, mainly in small companies
The upside to not including such a thing seems pretty low. Maybe people save a few seconds not reading it? The downside seems quite high if you actually want people to understand your expectations about working hours. The signature may not mean much to someone who has been working for a long time but it could matter more for someone who is just starting their first job, or who has come from a quite different working environment, for example.
I guess one thing you might say is ‘why is this manager sending emails at such times’ but I think lots of people like the flexibility of working strange hours, eg maybe they tend to wake up very early, or want to fit their work-schedule around some childcare obligations like breakfast or a school run.
I don't understand the first paragraph, what does "such a thing" refer to?
As for the second, yes that seems like a given. We send each other messages day and night because of that, but nobody expects a response outside of the recipient's working times
There's no right-to-disconnect in my country, but sometime this year my boss started putting "I don’t expect a response to this email outside of your normal working hours." on the end of his email signature.
I might not be earning FAANG money, but it's just another sign I'm working for a 'good' company.