The U.K. is considering joining a host of other European countries in making it more costly for restless employers to contact their employees after the working day ends.
The country’s fresh-faced Labour government is drafting legislation that would outlaw late-night WhatsApps, emails, and Slacks and potentially fine dissenting bosses heftily.
While commonplace across Europe, legislation giving workers a “right to disconnect” has lagged behind in the U.K., but now might become more European if reported changes to work culture are implemented.
UK following EU guidelines? giggle
i don’t know how much someone would have to pay me to tolerate dealing with work after work, but it’s more than anyone would ever pay me
I don’t work “traditional” hours. So it doesn’t bother when I’m called after hours. I work as needed. This week I’ll work maybe 5 hours. It’s actually busy this week. So if I’m called at 8pm. Who cares ? I have all day to run my errands.
Back when I worked in a traditional role. It drove me nuts the needless things I’d be contacted about after hours
Glad to hear that you found a position where your work experience is enjoyable and compatible with your desired life style. Given your last sentence, I hope you can see how the legislation mentioned here could potentially help people who have not yet been so lucky to achieve that.
I think it’s desperately needed. To get to where I’m at now I had to endure a lot of shit. Jobs shouldn’t be your life.
TL;DR “I’m alright Jack but there was a time I wasn’t”
I’ve no doubt a previous employer of mine would get us to sign a bit of paper saying we’re happy to be contacted outside of our working hours, and being told it’s mandatory to sign it.
IMO it is perfectly fine to sign that right away, but that is then called on-call duty and requires extra compensation. And THAT is what most employers try to avoid.
If I could get back all the years of my life spent walking boomers through tech problems for free…
Hey, I got thanked and told I was worth a million bucks to the boss one time though. If I had a tail I might have wagged it. :/
In Europe and the UK as well I think a signed document doesn’t nullify the law. So you can just sign that and the employer would still be at fault.
In a lot of places that would let you claim overtime pay for all that time.
I guess nobody has a problem with being messaged to after hours, just with the expectation to reply after hours. Remain and chat are asynchronous communication media, in Stark contrast to phone or video call.
I do. Your own time is your own time. I don’t want to be going to work the next day to be asked first thing what I’m doing about all the emails I was sent last night. Thinking about or reading about work is still work.
I’m not against being sent an email per say, but if I’m expected to read it and they’re making my phone light up with notifications whilst I’m outside of my paid hours, it’s a problem.
My company (24/7 production plant) has a culture of having Do Not Disturb on after hours and email/Teams really being us for “you’ll see this tomorrow”. It’s great! Takes some unlearning on new people coming in, with that and fully unplugging for PTO
Yeah same here, especially because I live in a very different time zone (Korea) than most of my coworkers (Europe).
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Yeah, why would my boss even have my phone number? There are corpo comm systems for corpo business.
In some companies I’ve worked at, it was even illegal to text each other outside said corpo systems. It made a lot of things clean and easy.
In my workplace we mostly communicate through mail and Teams, and I block notifications out of work hours.
It works wonders in terms of not thinking about work outside of work.
I know that not everyone are as fortunate as me to be able to do such a thing, which is why legislation is most welcome.
I manage a workforce across time zones and, as someone with ADHD, it’s usually best for me to fire off messages as things arise. If I read the summary, I’m not allowed to Slack/email after hours, which creates a huge burden for a remote workforce. I think that summary is incorrect and it’s more that I can’t force people to respond or even read those messages outside their work hours. I completely support this and I regularly bother my team when they respond to stuff after their day has ended. I call this out every quarter as we update our team working agreement. I don’t have any notifications set up for work comms period and have made it very clear the only way to get in touch with me is a phone call.
You do realize that you can schedule messages?
Yeah! At scale that really falls apart. I have lots of conversations with lots of people across timezones so waiting for the intersection of everyone actively blocks work.
Asynchronous communication is exactly that. If you are not listening when your manager says “don’t Slack after work” that’s on you. I sure fucking don’t and I make that very clear.
The fact that you are explicit about them not needing to read or answer after hours, and reiterate to the team during periodic meetings makes this fine IMO. You work when you do, and they work when they do.
They can message me all they want when im off the clock. Im not going to anwser.
Considering just how close they are to the Finance Industry where this stuff is 100% standard, I doubt it will go ahead or there will be exceptions done for the Finance Industry just like New Labour did in the past for other pieces of legislation.
Nah it’ll go through and then we’ll never even hear about it, the UK doesn’t even strictly enforce minnimum wage or overtime.
Make it mandatory to get extra pay for this extra contact and it would be greatly reduced. I agree that we live in a 24/7 society however that shouldn’t be an excuse to make people work off schedule. If you need someone at night then pay that person.
Oh, I absolutelly agreed that there should be a way for it to be possible to do it as long as it was paid for and trully optional for the worker.
My point is that, from my experience working in the UK most of which in that Industry, the guys currently in Government there and who have announced this measure, are and have long been totally in the pocket of the Finance Industry and will do the bidding of that Industry, so I suspect that even the fair version of this which you suggest will not be done because it means more costs to the kind of people New Labour really represents (which isn’t actually “labour”).
Any country should follow as well.
Why fine? Why not outlaw it completely? Make it illegal and close all loopholes. No matter the industry, contact by employers during employees’ off time should be illegal (this includes employees’ lunch/break time). Of course, there are a small exception for on-call doctors, medical emergency staff, fire department, etc.
