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France's After Work Email Ban Is 1 Step Closer To Reality (huffingtonpost.ca)
Jesse Ferreras, writing for Huffington Post: France is that much closer to becoming the first country to ban after-work emails. The country's lower parliamentary house passed a bill this week that would ban companies with 50 or more employees from sending emails outside regular work hours, BBC News reported. It now goes to the Senate, where members will study it before sending it back to the National Assembly to enshrine it in French law. The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails. And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News.Hamon adds: "Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash -- like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails -- they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down."
Yeaaaaaah, how ya doin' Peter?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Because the next day, your boss is screaming at you for not answering his "emergency" email the night before.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I don't think it is.
The benefit of people dealing with email after work is probably not something that has a huge impact on the company's bottom line. Very few things can't wait until the morning.
Mostly this is more a problem of pushy managers rather than business need.
Some employers forbid their employees from turning off their work phones at any time. Furthermore, even if their isn't such a policy in place, any employee who doesn't respond after hours may be seen as "not a team player". Putting pressure on the employers not to allow employee e-mailing outside the working day may be the only way to tackle the problem.
As an American, no, we wouldn't want or need a law like this. It would be unambiguously an anti-freedom nosey-government sort of thing. Blech.
Except when my wife is checking her emails. Then suddenly I wish the government were slapping everyone's wrists, controlling their behavior against their will, and suppressing their freedom as much as possible. STOP DOING THAT, WIFE!! Come back to the here-and-now with me, dammit. Ok, I get it: the TV show we're watching, bores you. We can watch something else! Now put down that tablet.
Ummm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mmmk... oh oh! and I almost forgot ahh, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up.
What does that mean? That I as an employee am not allowed to send email to another employee outside of that employee's defined work hours? Or that the company will queue mail until that employee comes to the office? Or that employees are not required to check their email. If the latter that will be about as good as saying "don't come to the office when you are sick". But then guilt employees for staying home causing them to come to the office sick anyway.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
A screaming boss is my cue to ignore him so I can concentrate on writing my 4 weeks notice.
You do not scream at me. For no reason. Ever.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Even if other countries adopt this policy, it won't work because of time zone differences. China is six hours ahead of France, the USA is 6 to 9 hours behind France. Conducting international business becomes impossible.
Not impossible - delayed. The e-mails will wait until someone can read them. Many businesses already have a policy that electronic communication will be answered within 1 business day.
yeah, with the great job market every one has, I'm sure that will work out well for you.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Even if other countries adopt this policy, it won't work because of time zone differences. China is six hours ahead of France, the USA is 6 to 9 hours behind France. Conducting international business becomes impossible.
No, it just requires a more specific solution. Just a few that occur to me immediately:
(1) Unless the business is especially urgent, just have a policy that emails will be replied to within 24 hours. That's pretty reasonable for most circumstances, except for emergencies or if you're actually providing a 24-hour service of some sort.
(2) If you are providing a 24-hour service of some sort, you just hire different employees with different effective business hours to cover all hours of the day. Or if your company opens a new division dealing with a business 6 hours different, change the effective business hours of a few employees to handle those transactions.
(3) If you need someone to deal with emergencies, presumably you could pay them "overtime" or something like that for their time... which is what businesses really should be doing when they require people to do stuff outside of business hours.
Basically -- you want people to be available to deal with stuff at other hours? PAY them to do so. Nothing hard about this.
Simply make it a financial cost to the company for sending any e-mail to employees after work hours.
1 e-mail is instantly considered 4 hours of overtime pay. 2 is equal to 8, and so on.
If the employer doesn't want to pay the overtime, then they don't send e-mails. Period.
And the ISP's and servers have records of the e-mails being sent, so they can't deny it either.
Even if other countries adopt this policy, it won't work because of time zone differences. China is six hours ahead of France, the USA is 6 to 9 hours behind France. Conducting international business becomes impossible.
Gee, if only someone would invent the electric lightbulb so our work hours wouldn't be locked to the movement of the sun.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
So if Einstein wants to immigrate to the US, and we don't have full employment, you're going to kick his ass to the curb?
Personally, I think the free flow of labor is a good thing. I wouldn't mind going to work in e.g. Germany, Costa Rica, or Japan. Moving to another country is not for the faint of heart even if you don't have visa issues. I could develop this theme more, but I think that even you can come up with as many circumstances where immigration is good.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Previous posters are corrects, the goal is to stop abuse and a situation which is becoming too common and too abusive.
If there's no immediate urgency, just wait for the day after, else put shifts or an on call team.
That costs money , but the company is actually working for an extended time, and most likely making more money, so better officialise it.
If you re worrying about the well being of you re company, you ll just answer late at night thinking it might important. Then it will become a habit and you ll do it everyday. And peoples knowing that you'll answer will contact you more often. I had on duty peoples phoning me when i wasn't on call the week end. At one point i had phone calls every week end, not making any money from it, because i was not "officially" on duty.
Peoples didn't take this habit to call me, from one day to another, it took a few years. And that s what the other poster is referring to. Once it becomes the norm, peoples who don't answer the week end, get marked as not interested in their work, but they aren't paid either to do this either. And yes at one point it becomes the norm for the whole job branch to be reachable 24/24.
Then why takes expensive contracts with super fast SLA and everything if peoples answer all the time? The whole market get screwed. At one point they try to officialise what should be the norm and what is not, and answering emails outside of your workshift is not .*
I am working in a company where peoples take 0 break, that's their norm. I am smoker, i always take a 5 min smoke break the morning and the afternoon (all very dutyfully metered with my token.
My opinion : my back hurts as hell, i need a mental break, taking a 5 min break won't hurt my productivity. I work (mesured with my token) an average 7h20 per day, when i am paid for 7.
My coworkers opinion : i am a lazy guy always taking breaks. I stopped answering phone calls the WE (si i can try to have a life, social activities and such), so i am not cooperative.
The law opinion : every 4 hours period of time needs a 10 min break and every employee working more than x% of their time in front of a computer (i think it s 75%, me : 95%) must have a 5 min activity every hour that they dont do on a computer. And whatever you try to turn it to, the week end is a no no.
My interpretation of that law ( and there's not much room for interpretation ) : The 5 min break is an activity that would involves me, not being at my desk and being one which is the decision of my employer (there's none). I should take longer break the afternoon to reach 10 min and 0 the morning, obviously, leave earlier.
What i still do, being passionate about my job and i shouldn't do: Check my office mails and our monitoring every 2 hours in order to catch situation that may become harder to fix later, do a bit more hours, for free.
Small background on me, should have a few digit less, just didn't register in the early days. Linux admin since 11y. So, yes, i didn't liked that token thing.
Err... the whole point of email is that it is asynchronous communication medium. I know because I'm old enough to remember what things were like before email. Stuff was either handled immediately in real time by phone call, or by letter (or telex, and later fax). So for the most part you had two time response frames: right away, and a week or so.
One thing I've noticed about technology over the years is that it isn't so much a productivity amplifier as a general human proclivity amplifier. So technology amplifies laziness as much as anything else, and the lazier you are, the harder you work in the long term. Back when you had to get your work done in 35 hours, you had to be focused; you had to be tactical; you had to plan things out to make good use of your time.
Back when I was an engineering manager I used to have strict comp time policy. If you pulled an all-nighter, fine, but I want you to take a short day the next day or take it off entirely. It's not because I'm a nice guy; it's because when you work for me I expect you to work harder than you can keep up for fifty or sixty hours a week. I expect you to use your time intelligently and selectively.
As a manager I view needing to have routine unrestricted access to your employees' time as laziness. Undisciplined management leads to unstructured work time. You also have to be assertive with customers. I also never allowed customers to take out their insecurities on my staff. If we said something will be done by X, it'll get done by X; and no you cannot call my engineers directly to see how things are coming. They will report progress to you at the intervals we agree upon. The "give the customers 7x24 access" is a the lazy manager's response to bad customer service. You have to train your customers to expect success from you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In addressing terrorism there's a big gap between doing nothing and ending civil liberties.
Basically -- you want people to be available to deal with stuff at other hours? PAY them to do so. Nothing hard about this.
While this is a nice plan, it would be illegal in France. There's regulations about the number of hours one can work.
Umm, so you don't actually know anything about French labor law, do you?
There's this myth that no one in France can work more than 35-hour weeks, but that's simply not true. They just set that as the threshold where overtime pay has to kick in, and (unlike, say, the U.S.) the overtime laws generally apply to white-collar salaried workers as well as blue-collar wage workers.
So, it's definitely possible in France to pay people to work overtime beyond 35 hours/week. There are a few different thresholds about overtime hours and how much extra you need to be paid, as well as maximum limits on hours/day or how many weeks you can have overtime beyond a certain threshold, etc. And once you get to a certain amount of overtime, you have to compensate employees with extra "rest days."
Anyhow, the system is complex, but there's nothing preventing a company from paying overtime for employees to handle most reasonable issues outside normal business hours.
AND -- guess what? If you can't staff your business for enough hours with the employees you have under the law, that's a clue maybe it's time you have to pay to hire ANOTHER employee! (Weird how that works....)
Pro-top for French legislators: When you have 11% unemployment, and 0% GDP growth, perhaps you shouldn't be looking for ways to be even more hostile to employers.
Or perhaps you should, because they're obviously not doing things right.
It's the businesses that have to be able to adapt to the environment they're in - failure to do so isn't a failure of the environment. Sahara doesn't support penguins, and Antarctica doesn't support camels. Animals that migrate either place must adapt or die.
Businesses unwilling or unable to adapt to different countries are better off packing up and leaving, making room for those that are able to adapt to the local climate.