Slashdot Mirror
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 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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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.
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!
You mean.. most American companies LIKE to exploit their workers.
Most corporate IM systems log everything.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I've read that to be efficient you should download and check your email no more than a couple of times per day. Have time set aside 1st thing in am, noon, and late afternoon to read and deal with it, and don't let it pop up, speak or distract you the rest of the day.
If you ignore your email then people start phoning you, which is far more distracting.
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.
Apparently they turned off spell checking as well.
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.
The concept of a group of workers organizing themselves in order to achieve common goals, such as better working conditions, isn't new. That's the definition of a trade union.
Remind me again why the average US citizen is so violently opposed to the existence of trade unions, let alone joining one?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Just because you're a professional doesn't mean they own you 24/7 - unless YOU let them.
Step 4 - Get fired from your job.
Step 5 - Job hires a tech who has been unemployed for 9 months who is more than willing to be on call after hours for less pay.
Step 6 - You start looking for new work, and you and now more than willing to be on call for a job as well.
I have limited experience with being a union worker, but in both cases, the union promoted good work, supported good workers, and bad workers met with peer pressure to get out or get good. I don't know about the UAW or whatever union the post office has. But I am pretty sure that a lot of stuff said about unions is no more true than stuff said about gay people, "colored" people, etc.. In other words, I bet a lot of it is a bunch of divisive lies spewed by "1%" to keep the "99%" distracted and effectively disenfranchised.
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.
I don't know... I sort of like unions. They gave us stuff like:
Weekends.
Holidays off.
Sick time.
Worker's comp.
Vacation time.
40 hour work-weeks in theory.
Pension plans.
Oh, they took our kids out of the coal mines and allowed them to get an education, which means they might be able to compete against the Chinese children who get calculus 101 in the eighth grade, or the Europeans who already know 3-5 languages before high school.
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.
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