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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?"
Here I was thinking that we were supposed to be connected to our jobs 24x7, accepting calls and emails after hours at no extra pay:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/02/1350229/us-senator-proposes-bill-to-eliminate-overtime-for-it-workers
Oh, wait, Volkswagen is not an American company. Carry on then, respecting your workers and whatever it is that you foreigners do...
Palm trees and 8
I don't expect this to catch on...either that or it will move to some other social media vehicle like Twitter. Most companies LIKE the fact that they can get their employees free efforts after hours!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
or ignore it.
I don't check my email outside of business hours. If something breaks that needs fixing, call me, otherwise I can wait until tomorrow between 8 to 5.
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The thing about banning internal e-mail was originally labelled by the press of doing away with e-mail altogether, which it wasn't. The article on it on the BBC was actually quite interesting, I was dismissive of the idea at first, but it was a pretty good article and worth opening your mind to.
My only concern is about auditing, if communications occur by IM, then where is the audit trail?
Seriously, just stop checking your work email device. Or shut it off. If you're not on-call or senior management, as TFA says, you're not in your working hours and should just ignore the damn thing.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous. I can send an email, and people will get to it when they can. It's worldwide, near instant, and pretty much perfect delivery. I don't have to worry about them sitting at their desk right this moment, or be working right this moment. Write detailed email, send, and wait for reply. If it's urgent, follow up with a phone call, but otherwise, it's fire and forget.
If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working, and that might mean that I have to work while I'm supposed to be off. After all, my working hours might not coincide with theirs.
I can't see this last very long. Besides, the solution is obvious and much less technically complex: have people not answer their email after working hours. Yes, it takes practice, but I've learned to ignore my crackberry after hours. If it's urgent, people will call.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
It wouldn't be so bad if email was entirely passive. However, these days people get email on their phones, and emails marked as urgent can be programmed to ring the phone. Employees emailing something as urgent may not quite recognized that "take care of this first thing tomorrow morning" urgent isn't the same as "the plant is on fire" urgent.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
They should just do what my company does, which is acknowledge that while we are salaried, it's unethical to lean on that to squeeze out a lot of unpaid work. It's this revolutionary idea that "can" doesn't mean "should" which in this day and age of minimalist ethics which are bound to the razor edge of what the letter of the law or contract allows is too radical for many managers.
Apparently they turned off spell checking as well.
In Europe we take care of life quality more than in the US.
In Germany average working hours are 35 per week, at 5 pm everybody is back home. They have about 30 days a year of vacation, and a very efficient and generous government-run welfare system that covers simply anything: retirement, healthcare, etc... Almost nobody pays for a private healthcare insurance, simply because they don't need it.
However, average tax rates are quite high: about 50% of the gross income, including social security contributions.
No room for tea-partiers in Germany, sorry...
So you call, and two minutes into the conversation it goes "I need to take a look at that log file..." or any other crunch time/shit hit the fan moment, then what? I leave my phone on 24x7 too, because I expect everyone to have good graces and not call me at 3 AM unless it's a really big emergency. It's a matter of culture, if you have to implement technical measures to stop people from acting like sociopaths you're doing it wrong. If people max the rules, then it won't be a nice place to work no matter what.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Recently the company I work for implemented a new system that auto-archives your email after 2 weeks. You can go to the archive to view the mail, for up to 6 months. At 6 months it deletes the email. It may be saved elsewhere for a period before permanent deletion, I'm not sure. But I do know it gets irrecoverably destroyed at some point. You can not create a PST, and they've got services scanning the network and local hard drives for PSTs, then deleting them. Saving email in any way is a violation of our code of conduct. There's even a faq that poses the question "I found a print out of an email that is over 6 months old, I feel it is important, can I keep it? Answer: No, shred the document immediately."
The company didn't try to hide their reasons. They told us flat out it was for legal liability. People are a tad too cavalier in what they'll put in an email, and later, in court, email is treated like formal marching orders rather than the casual conversation it often is. There is even talk of doing away with work email all together, again for liability reasons. All "Marching orders" should come in the form of formal documentation. We have a chat system that can not be set to archive conversations that we're to use for the types of casual work talk we used to use email for.
From what the lawyers were telling me, industry wide legal advise is to get rid of email all together. They said a lot of companies are starting pilot projects to see how well their workers can do their jobs without it, and to get them used to the idea of not having it.
A friend of mine use to work for Sony in Germany. They had a similar thing there. They would be disciplined for checking e-mail after work hours due to German labor laws. If you checked e-mail, it was considered overtime work. She said they went so far as to have security walk thru the building asking people to leave after 5:00pm.
Also it was illegal to work on Sunday or Holidays. Again, checking email would qualify you as working, so they were very strict about remote VPN access on those days unless it was absolutely required.
I'm not sure if Germany has relaxed these rules in recent years. If they haven't then the no-email after work sounds like they are trying to confirm with the law, not that they are trying to be nice.
The feature that I've been waiting for pretty much ever since mobile phones became common is the ability to run two sim cards in the same phone and have a switch that can turn either or both on/off.
I've always kept my work and private stuff seperate - e-mail, phone numbers, etc. - but if you don't want to carry two phones with you everywhere, that's actually very hard to do.
I would love a phone that allows me to tell it "I'm at work now" and then enables the work-related mail account, phone number, etc. - outside work hours, all work-related stuff goes to voicemail, server-side inbox, etc. and with no notification.
And the reverse is just as important - "not available for private things now" can be a crucial setting (the people who might have reason to reach you anyways in case of emergencies would have your work phone number anyways).
So there are scenarios where you would want one enabled, but not the other. There are also scenarios where you would want both enabled, like when you're on the train during a business trip, or at your desk and don't mind getting private and/or work calls intermixed.
I would really, really love a phone that supports something like that. I fear the general trend is still getting the boundaries between work and private life blurred more and more. Most people have no idea what they're doing to themselves there. Been there, done that, seen others burn out - don't do this. And find gadgets that don't do it to you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The problem I see is that people use their personal devices for work or work devices for personal. It should be the individual's responsibility to separate their work life from their personal life. A company can't force you to use your personal property for work--so don't do it. If you are trying to be a cheapskate and use your work phone or notebook for your personal business, you are a) setting yourself up to be inundated with company communication during work hours and b) allowing your company to snoop on you because after all it is their phone. Go and buy a separate phone or notebook for your personal life that doesn't have your work communication associated with it. Then leave your work devices off. Problem solved. I think it is ludicrous that a company has to shut it's email servers down at night and weekends. There are different parts of a large organization that doesn't fit into the 9 to 5 mold. If I were the CIO at Volkswagen I would create an employee policy that requires employees to separate their work and personal digital lives. And it is the employee's responsibility to keep their personal and work life separate. Additionally, emails with company domains not be used for ANY personal communication of any kind. This protects the employee's privacy, it protects the company's reputation in regards to public blog posts and illicit websites, and it lowers the amount of spam/marketing emails the company email servers need to deal with. I worked for a large company with over 2000 employees and a clueless CIO. I managed the web development team and tried to convince them to have a stiffer work vs personal policy (also to use Linux and open source software, but that's another story). But corporate structures being the way they are, I could never get much traction.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
In the financial industry, it's becoming modus operandi to only retain email for a 6-month period and then after that it's destroyed. We're being told that if something is important, we're going to be given a "15 month" folder to keep it in, after which, it will then be destroyed.
There's an internal effort to reduce paper waste as well, so we're being told to not print emails. So basically, they are hoping we can commit everything to grey-matter, even though I deal with hundreds of documents a day.
I fear we are moving towards a corporate version of Fahrenheit 451.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There's absolutely no way you can compare the various European countries with the US. There's just so much variety here in Europe, not a single country looks or acts like the US labor market. The UK, while English-speaking and Common Law, is still "socialist" by comparison.
To say nothing of the much more "socialist" Scandinavian countries [where I live]. In my country the unions work in cooperation with the employers' union. If there's a dispute the government's negotiator will do his job and find a reasonable compromise. I believe this describes Germany as well. Unions are not like and do not behave like American "unions".
My country has been ruled by a Labor government more or less since the early 1900s, and both employers and workers are firmly in agreement about what is acceptable practices. Everyone from government ministers to CEOs leave work at 16-17 to pick up their children in the kindergarten/after-school program or go home to eat dinner. While there are people that work later than that, here we emphasize a work/life balance, and the employers understand.
One approach to work/life balance is to strictly segregate them: Be at work, working, from 8-5, then be at home, not working.
That's fine for people who want to do that, but it's not the only way to maintain a reasonable balance. I'm generally in the office from 7-4, but I'm not necessarily working all of that time. On average I spend 1-2 hours of each work day dealing with personal stuff -- keeping up with my bills, fielding phone calls about my kids at school (I have one daughter who is really challenging), out running errands for my wife. I probably spend another hour screwing around on-line: slashdot, G+, etc. Once in a while I even leave the office entirely for a two or three hours because I want to go to a kid's production at school, or because I feel like working out, or whatever. As a result, I don't feel in the slightest that I'm giving "my time" away to the company when I check e-mail in the evening. Heck sometimes I'm working on some particularly interesting bit of code and I even decide to work on it at night after the family is in bed... not because I feel obligated but because it's fun.
For me, strictly segregating work and not-work would be a poorer work/life balance than having the flexibility to do non-work stuff during business hours and work stuff during non-business hours.
I'd rather manage the balance myself than have the company mandate it one way or another. I understand that for people with driving personalities this can lead to excessive work, and I understand that some managers can see this as a way to wring every last minute from their employees. I don't have the first problem and the times I've had the second, I've fixed it by getting a different manager, one way or another.
Beyond my personal preferences, I think the "strict segregation" approach is rather unnatural. It wasn't really even possible as a widespread lifestyle until the Industrial Revolution. Throughout human history, work and non-work have largely been inseparably mixed, both just parts of "life". I like it that way.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's the most stupid argument I've heard Americans use. An old and tired "argument" of no significance.
The Germans have their own armed forces, perfectly capable and well equipped. The US is not defending Germany or Europe. Those bases in Germany are there to serve US interests abroad. Much further away.
Greece and Spain are not the greatest markets for German products, the whole world buys from Germany. China is a major customer of German goods. If the Euro becomes cheaper it will just help their export economy.
Socialism is not a problem, except in your imagination, I'm sorry, but there are plenty of successful "socialist" states in Europe. From Germany to Sweden. The Greeks are not an example of socialist malpractice, they're an example of corruption, mismanagement and overspending.
I am cheap and only have one phone (theirs).
The possible problems with fascism in nations with extreme right-wing parties fueled by religious fanaticism is also not imaginary.
So-called "socialism" in Europe is in reality a mixed system, a balance between free market capitalism and socialist ideas. The word in itself is misleading, then again most Americans don't understand the difference between socialism, communism and social-democracy.
It is curious that you would draw lines between "socialism" and National-socialism, I'm afraid I strongly disagree with you on that. Frankly, I think you're crazy to suggest there's even a link. I have heard Americans claim as much, especially post-WWII anti-Communist propaganda, but that's not the accepted truth here. The NSDAP literally fought and legally banned both social-democrats and communists, the Nazis took power in cooperation with their right-wing Conservative friends of the DNVP.