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Does Constant Access Shatter the Home/Work Boundary?
StonyandCher has passed us a link to PCWorld.au, once again raising the tough topic of work/life separation. A department of the Australian government went ahead with a purchase of dozens of Blackberry communication devices, but is now delaying their deployment. The reason: "Staff expressed fears about BlackBerries contributing to a longer working day and felt it was going a step too far because mobile phones are adequate for out-of-office contact. Not everyone agreed, however, with some senior executives claiming a BlackBerry can contribute to work/life balance by facilitating telecommuting and more flexible schedules. " For the time being this issue is on hold for those staffers, but how does this issue fall for you? Is constant accessibility freeing or just another chain around your neck?
I know employers can apply pressure, but employees should try to establish early and firmly what extended accessibility means. Pagers have been around for millenia, Blackberrys simply give better message.
Arrange and agree to a schedule for which you consider yourself "on call", publish those times, and make it clear you aren't "on call" when you aren't.
Personally, I see the encroachment more often by those who have some tension with their personal life whereby this constant connectivity to their job elevates somehow their status, and provides instant and real-time reason/excuse to be unavailable in their personal lives. In other words, lots of those who "get connected" like this do so willingly, and with a certain sense of self-importance.
My other observation has been that those who are not to be bothered by work when they're not expected to be available off-hours simply don't carry their Blackberry, or turn it off.
I know there's always the exception, but I think most employer-employee relationships can and do strike equilibrium with minimal fuss. If your employer is that horrid in their insistence and demands, find another employer. I did.
Aside from the fact that my manager sometimes asks me to take my BlackBerry with me when I go on vacation (which I refuse to do), it's really easy to just look at it in the evenings or on weekends to see if there's any mail and check on things. I have taken to setting the automatic power down/power on setting, so I am not tempted to sneak a peak when I walk past it when I'm at home. I never check work mail on the computer in my free time, but the BlackBerry makes it so easy, it doesn't feel like I'm working until I've sunk 2 hours into something that could have waited until the morning.
At least, I know it does for me. There are plenty of times now I wish we had never gotten these stupid Blackberries. Once your management knows that they can get a hold of you via email any time, any place, they suddenly expect that to be the norm. With plain old cell phones, it requires a personal interaction that feels much more intrusive. When you shoot off an email, it doesn't feel the same. You don't feel bad about it, like you do when you call someone and interrupt their dinner. Which makes people much more likely to do it.
I've heard people say "thank god I'm not eligible [meaning high enough in the food chain] to get one of those" over where I work. So I'd say people definitely fear the intrusion of work into privacy and I understand totally. There's got to be a time where you have to be able to say "I'm sorry, but I was out and couldn't check company mail".
I would think this rather obvious: using a black-berry to receive emails when you are out in the field during your business day is enabling remoteness, while using it to return emails at dinner is removing the work/home distinction. I don't generally see a black-berry as offering a distinct advantage over a cellphone with text messaging in the case of those "get everyone on the phone, the server is down" emergencies... and if you are doing routine emails during your off-hours then they are not off-hours.
The consequence is that I also don't work that hard when I'm actually at work.
It's easier for me to justify randomly screwing around on the internet or working on personal coding/whatever at work because I wind up checking email and working over weekends to get things done. I think it's fair. They steal some of my free time, I waste some of their paid time.
I'd rather have the crackberry (or mobile phone, or notebook) available if I *need* to do something, than have to run to the office on a saturday because of one forgotten task or reply. And yes, you can turn it off!
I have a blackberry 8800, which revolutionised how I work.
:)
I have several email addresses routed to it, which each have different notification tones. If I receive a Nagios alert to my "Oh Crap" email address, the notification is loud and insistent. If I receive personal mail, it's subtle. Business mail is also fairly quiet and subtle but different to personal mail.
Outside of "working hours", I can choose to ignore it easily enough. Only if our monitoring system picks up something alert-worthy do I have to actually bother actioning something immediately.
When I was first offered the blackberry, I made it clear to the MD that this would not intrude upon my personal life unnecessarily. If I *choose* to read my business emails outside of working hours, then all fine. I balance that with *choosing* to read my personal mail during work hours
P.
Beer Coat: The invisible but warm coat worn when walking home after a booze cruise at 3 in the morning.
The problem with just turning them off is the company will frown upon that. They didn't purchase these for their employees to not use them. No matter how you look at it weather it be only 5 extra min or 2 hours of extra work being accessible via Email at any time. People want to go home after a long days work and not have to deal with all the problems of them. I can see why they would be fearing having them, but turning them off could arise problems with staff.
You negotiate beforehand what happens when the pager goes off - either you get 'overtime', comp-time off, or your salary begins large enough to compensate you for the projected time spent on pager-duty. Not much different w/ a Crackberry...
If you get one issued to you, demand compensation for the added work that's sure to come with it - either through more flexible scheduling, more money, more comp/vacation time, or something substantial.
I have a decent setup where I'm at now - if I get a call, then the time spent gets deducted the next day or day after, or they pay me overtime based on 1.5x my salary broken down to an hourly rate (based on a typical 40hr week). Pretty simple after that.
Now, if you're adamant about delineated time-off vs. time-on, then simply state as much before you start.
But, like the parent said... most employers are perfectly okay with this, and it's only a minimum of haggle. Any employer who isn't needs to be dropped for one who is.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
From TFS: "senior executives claiming a BlackBerry can contribute to work/life balance by facilitating telecommuting and more flexible schedules. "
More flexible for whom? Where I work, that seems to be a one way flexibility. Senior executives are making (SWAG alert) 3x - 10x what I am making. They have made the choice to have a large stake in how the company performs. While I have a stake, of course, it's just not as large or worth my personal/family life. It seems like despite being more accessible, people's work hours never get shorter. And that's what it's about in the end, isn't it? Getting more done in less time? But in rality, it just seems that it's about getting more done in more time. No good. I am glad I have no blackberry.
blah blah blah
It may be trite to say it, but...
If you were to die tomorrow, this would affect your family for the rest of their lives. You are irreplaceable. Your company would fill your position within days and except for your immediate co-workers, nobody would even care.
blah blah blah
To everyone saying they've told work when they'll be available on their Blackberry...
It must be nice to be able to set the terms on which you'll work for the company. You must have a lot of leverage there. A lot of us are not so lucky.
hot foreign sheep.
My company has cel phone (not blueberries) on all the people in my group. We're the top end of problem solvers in the support side of the organization. They also encouraged us to work from home one day a week to help make up for the occasional weekend day or late night we were pulling.
This ended when a director level person walked through our area one day and didn't see enough butts in seats for their liking. Now they wonder why they have so much trouble getting people to answer the cel phones and work those long/extra hours from home.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Here's how it's done in a union shop. This is an Animation Guild contract.
Time worked on the employee's sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.
Minimum call for the sixth (6th) and seventh (7th) days shall be four (4) hours. In the event the actual time worked by such employee exceeds the four (4) hour minimum, s/he shall be paid for all time actually worked in 1/10th -hour increments.
All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.
Now that's the way it's supposed to work. There may be crunches when hours are long, but pay goes up, which discourages employers from overdoing it.
Note the "minimum call" provision. Calling someone at home to do work outside of normal hours triggers that, and costs the employer at least 4 hours pay. Again, emergencies are provided for, but they're billable, so employers don't overdo it.
Chief executives think that it enhances flexibility for everybody. In my experience, those executives spend more time not in the office than basically everybody else - they're the king, and they can do whatever strikes their fancy. They give presentations to big clients, or go to see about buying other companies, or even just go golfing. Sure, it enhances their flexibility; they can still get their mails when they're (inevitably) elsewhere. For the rest of the suckers, they've gotta be in the office 8 hours a day anyway. So how does that enhance flexibility, when the people are already there?
Second, on a more personal note, when I'm out of the office, I'm not working. Period. I'm not being paid hourly, and I don't feel the need to give away freebies. I don't have to go on-call at my current job, and unless I get scheduled for a downtime window, my work will still be there the next morning when I get back to the office. A few years ago, I realized that work is not everything. The paycheck is important, but there's much more to life than doing work. I have a lot of hobbies which I like doing infinitely more than working, and they occupy my time and interest just fine, thanks. I like visiting friends and traveling to new places, and I don't want to be interrupted while I'm doing either. If my boss and/or company require the level of fealty that a lot of companies seem to require these days, I'm working at the wrong place.
Back when I was going on-call, I would do my on-call duties when it was my turn, and when it wasn't, I was not very nice about calls I received. I never slept well when I was on-call. I had my Christmas morning of opening gifts with my family interrupted by the on-call phone ringing one year. I used to carry a blackberry, and never read emails on it. The volume of what I got was so high, it quickly (like over the course of the first day or two I had it) turned into the boy-who-cried-wolf device; 99.9%+ of the mails didn't need a response, and the rest could have simply been replaced by an SMS or a phone call of "hey, we need help".
I think for many, the problem is that when you first get it, you create a precedence. 2 years ago I got my first crackberry. It was purely for off-hours support only when I was on call.
First couple weeks I'm thinking, oh hey fun, I can send work emails while bored on the crapper on a Thursday evening. People see the emails, and think I'm "working" all the time. Of course the email could've waited until Friday morning. But after you do that a few times, people are expecting responses.
Learned my lesson, got a smartphone for off-hours stuff at my current employer, but I refuse to answer emails unless I'm scheduled on call for production support. If its important enough, and I'm not on call, they'll actually just call me. Which, of course, I let go to voicemail and only do anything if its a real emergencyI've often wondered about why 'privacy' and 'silent' options on phones are so poor. What I'd like is the ability to set up rules similar to these:
- Calls from this number are emergency, always ring.
- Between 5pm and 9am, and all day weekends, defer this group to voicemail
- When in 'meeting' mode send everyone to voicemail except for my boss, who gets a vibrate alert but not a ring.
On andy device (Can you do those with Blackberry privacy profiles?). Perhaps also with some form of short range 'hinting' available for certain types of places, for example cinemas can suggest to your phone that they enter a discreet mode (Nothing except for your 'emergency' numbers for example), or for hospitals to suggest to phones that they enter a limited usage mode (Intensive care wards, A&E, theatres etc force phones to airplane mode)
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
If you were to die tomorrow, this would affect your family for the rest of their lives. You are irreplaceable. Your company would fill your position within days and except for your immediate co-workers, nobody would even care.
Not always the case. I got very tired of the working conditions at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY and was vaguely entertaining the notion of leaving. Another company that was familiar with my work contacted me out of the blue and asked me for a resume. A week later I had a job offer in hand and gave notice.
$VERY_LARGE_COMPANY panicked. They had three different managers call me and try to convince me to stay, offered me a raise, more stock, better working conditions, etc. I told them that they should have done that before I got so fed up that I decided to quit, but that I would be more than happy to answer emails if they needed help with anything after I left.
I talked to a couple of my former coworkers recently. Turns out that a few months after I left, they gave up on finding a replacement, disbanded my old team and moved further development for the product I had been working on (which is used by millions of people and has at least one book written about it) to Bangalore, where it is languishing. And it's not like it was a crufty mess, either -- it was clean, very thoroughly documented and there were several developers who were very familiar with it. Unfortunately, they were also very junior, and apparently judged unfit to be in charge of it.
The moral of the story? Don't assume that just because you work at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY that you're just a faceless drone and they'd be able to replace you at the drop of a hat. And conversely, if you're a manager at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY, make sure you give your employees appropriate treatment before they're ready to walk out the door.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck