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Volkswagen Turns Off E-mail After Work-Hours
wired_parrot writes "Responding to complaints from employees that email outside of working hours was disrupting their lives, Volkswagen has taken the step of shutting their email servers outside work-hours. Other companies have taken similar steps, with at least one taking the extraordinary step of banning internal e-mail altogether. Is this new awareness of the disruption work email brings on employee's personal life a trend?"
The article doesn't clearly state it, but VW does NOT shutdown its email system. They stop emails from being pushed to individual users' Blackberrys when the user's shift is over. The email continues to flow into their inbox, and the Blackberry still enjoys a flood of email 30 minutes before their shift starts the next day. It's actually a nice feature of Blackberry and Exchange software that they simply turned on.
This does not reduce the number of emails that they get or the spam or anything else. It just stops delivery to the Blackberry after hours.
Personally, I want to know if there's a problem in my datacenter at 3:30 a.m. so I'm not surprised with multiple alarms and users in panic when I come into the office at 8:00 to find a dozen or more helpdesk tickets in my queue and no one able to access their network drives. Similarly, I definitely want to know if the IDS has identified an intrusion at the firewall that requires my personal attention to address, or a DDoS attack on our website that may have taken us down and is costing us money due to lost revenue. I'm paid to handle these problems, whenever and wherever they occur and I am expected to respond, day or night to resolve them before the issue turns into a crisis. It's in my contract.
The German system of both unions and corporate governance are very different than America. In Germany, workers must have just under half of all seats on the board of directors (although the president of the board comes from the shareholders). This makes workers and unions influential in setting the corporate direction of all German companies above 2,000 people. The idea of a union in many countries is also very different. In the United States, unions are adversarial organizations. In many countries, however, unions are cooperative groups that work for the best of the workers and company as a whole. It is important to also note that the idea of companies existing solely to benefit shareholders is not the dominant paradigm in most countries.