Would your business benefit from a limit on out-of hours emailing, or do workers prefer flexibility over greater protection?
On both sides of the Atlantic, there are growing calls to give employees the right to ignore out-of-hours work calls and emails. In France, organisations with more than 50 workers are obliged to negotiate on employees’ rights to ignore their smartphones and other devices outside working hours.
And New York City Council is considering a law that would ban private companies with more than 10 employees from requiring workers to respond to communications such as emails and texts out of hours. Employers would still be able to send them, but they wouldn’t be able to discipline workers for ignoring them.
A wide range of multinationals too – including Volkswagen, nuclear power company Areva and insurer Axa – have introduced company policies against workers’ ‘hyperconnectedness’.
It’s all part of a growing wish to protect workers against burnout, intrusion, and 24/7 work pressures.
Does this mean your business needs such a policy, or may be forced by law to introduce one?
There are no such plans in the UK. However, you are probably already subject to rules on the 48-hour working week, and requiring employees to be available to deal with emails or calls can count as working time.
But burnout and employee morale is every business’s problem, in whatever country you operate. So, you may want to discuss the right to disconnect with your staff, for the sake of improving staff engagement or your business culture.
Bear in mind, though, that the right (or obligation) to disconnect is not every worker’s cup of tea. For all those who want to be protected from having to deal with emails as soon as they leave the office, there are others who want the flexibility of out of hours working.
For instance, many people like the option to leave work early to spend time with children or family, and then to spend an hour or two catching up with emails later in the evening, or on their early morning commute.
As a result, simply limiting out-of-hours messaging or access to emails may alienate as many staff as it delights. But we do recommend starting a conversation with your staff about this, gauging their concerns, preferences, and then trialling possible solutions.
If you do this, there are two things to remember. The first is that the conversation should be organisation wide, so include people with different levels of seniority and working patterns and from different generations. The second is that senior staff have to set the culture. If you do adopt a company policy, you have to follow it yourself.
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