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?

Comments

this is incumbent upon the employee

[yagu]

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.

Re:this is incumbent upon the employee

[SetupWeasel]

If everyone who had this problem actually stood up, they wouldn't fire people because there wouldn't be enough people left. You're not helpless.

Yes, but if you are the only one...

Also, remember that some of these people don't have that responsibility. They just check their blackberry out of habit. They don't need to. It's all their choice. They aren't being forced into it, they are choosing it then complaining about it.

I am a tutor. I have taken shit from my boss, because she couldn't reach me Wednesday night to change my schedule for Thursday. Changing my hours at will was not in the job description, and I don't even make enough at the job to sustain me. I look for more or other work. I've been looking for 4 months, and guess what? If I find a job that will be a dick about my free time, I have to take it.

Work doesn't have to be fun. It's a means to an end: being able to take care of and feed yourself and your family. It's not your personal satisfaction center. That's nice if it is, but people used to understand that. A lot of this just sounds like whining to me.

Spoken like management. There was a time when jobs offered benefits, job security, and respect for their employees.

I've heard people say...

[Loibisch]

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".

It depends on when it is used.

[JerryLove]

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.

Yes, but I waste more time on the clock

[Reality Master 201]

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.

Re:Yes, but I waste more time on the clock

[ookabooka]

Hardly sounds like a long term solution though, eventually you'll just go to work and not do anything, only to come home and then start working. . .? In your case I think it's more important to keep work and pleasure separate rather than trying to keep them balanced. Otherwise you end up spending all your time "working" but accomplishing little.

saves the travel

[jeffreyMartin]

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!

Im constantly monitoring not necessarily available

[penfold69]

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.

Ditto what he said.

[Penguinisto]

Seriously - Those of us who are SysAdmins have dealt with this for ages...

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.

/P

Qui bono

[hobo sapiens]

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.

Re:Not sure about Blackberries...

[hobo sapiens]

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.

Bizzare telecommuting tale..

[Churla]

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.