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Most Tech Workers Would Ignore a Call From Their Boss Outside Work Hours (zdnet.com)
In this age of instant communication, there is pressure on employees to be "switched on" all hours of the day. But do we really have the mental attitude to totally disconnect from work? From a report: A new study by UK-based HandsetExpert has revealed that almost two out of three tech workers would ignore an out-of-hours call from the boss. It surveyed 1,850 mobile device users in the UK to find out how we deal with the pressures of being an "always-on" society. This number might be the roll-up of various reasons -- from being on the toilet, in the bath, or in other compromising situations. The survey showed different behaviours from different job roles. Healthcare professionals seem to be most connected to their place of work. They were the least likely to cancel any calls from their boss, with only 42.5 percent stating they would not pick up the call. At the other end of the scale, real estate agents -- who already work some of the longest hours in the industry -- are least likely to respond. Almost three out of four workers (72.6 percent) in that industry sector would not respond to calls from their boss.
I ignore calls from my boss during work hours.
Trolling is a art,
I know my boss respects my private life and work balance, so if he's calling me then it must be something dire.
With healthcare, there are literally lives on the line. "Did you give Mrs. Abernathy her heart medication or is the lack of entry in the chart an oversight? I'm calling cause I need to give it to her in the next 2 minutes if you forgot"
With real estate people: it's not the boss who buys the property and it takes quite a long time for a sale with all the bureaucracy. There is just no real urgency.
IT worker: for some it can be important cause the server might fall down and the downtime might be very expensive. E.g. some Amazon AWS downtime or maybe a nuclear power plant. But most IT workers work cupholder replacements or such, there it doesn't really matter.
Healthcare: if you ignore a call, people can actually be harmed or die.
I.T. outside of nuclear power plants and healthcare: if you ignore a call, people might not be able to use the latest fart app for two hours.
In one instance, selfless dedication is appropriate, in the other, less so. Also, was the 2 out of 3 number for techies for the US or the UK?
Half the time it's because he wants to hang out and have a beer.
I think a great determiner of whether or not one would pick up the call is if you are salaried or hourly. If salaried, the temptation may be greater to ignore the call as once you do start answering that may indicate to the boss that it's OK to call anytime outside of work hours. If hourly, then go ahead and pick up the call and then claim the time on your time card. It will get real expensive real quick if that's the case and that would naturally solve the problem. Also, it depends on the expectations and line of work. Are you the only one that can fix a critical business service/process/piece of equipment, etc? If so then ignoring a call could be dire for your career (but if that was the case then any self respecting organization would have an on-call plan set up anyways, so that may be a moot point). If not I would definitely ignore the call as it can always wait till the morning (or whenever you start your shift).
If I am available, I will answer the phone if my colleagues call outside work hours. But when I am out on my bike in the forest I put it on silent and place the phone in my backpack, if I feel stressed I'll put it on silent when I go to bed. If they want a guarantee that I answer, sober and ready to help, I want to get paid to be on standby because it is so bloody taxing, even if the phone doesn't ring, I once were on 45 minutes standby for a year 24/7(45 minutes to start problem solving/login remote)
My boss knows this and agrees. The same goes for my other colleagues. :) In other words, we answer if we can, but there are no guarantees and that is accepted.
L'Idiot
So you don't get any of my time outside of business hours.
When I was a steelworker (USWA) I got paid triple time if called in during holidays and vacations, and double time if called in during time off. If I was on call, I got paid 50 percent during that time period.
If you want us there, pay us.
Simple.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is it possible that some studies are done purely to spark discussions on places like this and otherwise serve no purpose and provide no value at all?
I was 2 hours out of town on a Sunday at a friend's birthday party and my boss calls. He demands I come in and work on an issue that he believes I caused. And berates me for 5 minutes on the phone after I refused with the reason being that I'm out of town.
When I get into work Monday, I get reamed out further and put on a PIP (performance improvement plan). I was never told I was "on-call" for that weekend. And later on Monday, once I finally got to look at the problem. I discovered someone committed changes without running it through the mandatory integration process.
Those changes conflicted with my weeks old change and causes numerous test failures. In short, not my fault. Not even my responsibility to diagnose what went wrong. Needless to say I was out there quickly due to the PIP and my total dickishness with telling everyone at work I've been wrongly accused of such bullshit and how poorly the management handled it.
(not posting as AC, because you know who you are)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When I was a sysadmin, my systems were set up to page/text me when a problem occurred. If it was ultimately something that had a business impact (like having to keep a system down outside a maintenance window), I was the one calling my boss at 2 am... He always took those calls from me as he knew I wouldn't be calling if it wasn't important and I needed input or had to give him a heads up.
In the best of situations, it works both ways and the boss doesn't call you unless it's important and you're really needed. You both know the other will answer and you can count on each other to do what's needed to get the job done and also not abuse that trust or relationship. Less optimal situations may require that you find another job.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'd also charge a minimum of 2 hours for answering the phone too.
Had so many employees not seen it all before, they wouldn't be so eager to jump ship when they smell fire.
Here's a tip: your company views you as a replaceable asset. You should view them the same way, unless you want to get a nasty surprise one day.
True story: in my last position, my entire department essentially stopped talking to me because I told key opinion makers that I suspected our department was getting cut due to too few investments and a lack of direction and interest from the stakeholders. I was told no way, the CEO loves us, and perhaps I didn't fit the culture. 6 months later, pink slips.
If you think your company cares about you, you're a fucking sucker that bought HR boilerplate bullshit.
I tell anyone who needs to call me after hours to facetime me. Because i'll be nude. If they can handle that, it must be important.
Same here. My boss wouldn't call without a darn good reason. In addition, if the shit hits the fan I'd MUCH rather fix it than have someone else TRY to fix it and leave me with a much bigger mess to clean up in the morning.
I've told my boss PLEASE call (or message) me because it's much easier for me to spend 10 minutes properly diagnosing a problem and fixing it, rather than try to figure out wtf all a co-worker did while randomly trying this and that at random hoping to make the problem go away.
===
Heck, even my FORMER my boss, as I was leaving that job, I told them several times - you'll probably run into one or two situations where you have this choice:
A) you spend five hours trying to figure out what Ray did
B) I spend five minutes answering their email, answering their question
I'd much rather me spend 5 minutes answering their question than they spend 5 hours trying to figure it out without asking me.
Of course the old employer left me on as a "hourly employee" at a high rate of $xxx/hour, just in case they needed a couple hours of my time. At well over $100/hour, I'm happy to leave open the possibility of doing a little work for them. Even giving them a few minutes of my time for free.
As it turned out, I think they had one five-minute question for me, and once I asked them to send me a copy of a bit of code I'd written for them because it was a good example of a concept I wanted to demonstrate.
I'm self-employed, and after hours, unless I'm expecting a call, if I'm in the middle of something, chances are very good I'll let the call go to voicemail. Part of the reason I'm self-employed was to wrest control of my professional and personal life from employers that would take advantage of me at any opportunity.
I've been that guy on-call, and that's a different story. You know what you're signing on for when you take on that responsibility. I'm talking about situations where I'm expected to answer the call for "all hands on deck" without any additional compensation or consideration. Now, if I spend time on your system, you get billed, as it should be.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
I'm in the US, and when I was fresh out of school in my first IT job I was asked to be on call with no pay, and no OT. I was underpaid at the time, because I had moved up a position and "due to budgetary reasons" they weren't immediately able to give me the appropriate pay raise. The work was far more interesting, so I was happy to be making less than I should while doing fun work, but they still owed me about a 30% pay increase.
Given that, I laughed at them when they asked me to be on call every night. "But you probably won't need to come in more than a couple of times a month". I said no, a co-worker said yes, and he ended up paying the price for that.
That was a really good lesson to me to set ground rules with employers before taking jobs. It's gotten easier as I've gotten older, and now I'm very much in the position where if someone wants to hire me, we work out the expectations and compensation well ahead of time. A couple of companies I work with as a customer have put out feelers, but both abuse their staff so badly that the compensation I'd need to suffer that is far more than they're willing to pay. I know one engineer who spent his last family vacation in the hotel room working while his family tried to have a vacation without him. If that's your expectation for your employees, I'm going to need a solid 2-3x my current pay to be interested.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Most of my co-workers probably fit into this category. I routinely answer calls in the middle of the night from management or co-workers in a bind. Generally I think the authority you are entrusted with is tied to the the amount of responsibility you assume. Some people don't care about earning 30-40% more if it means any kind of commitment to the job and that's fine. Other people, they pick up the phone.
Genuinely curious because it's damn sure not the US. Most of us are "At Will" employees in "Right to Work" states (I bet you're English so you can appreciate our Orwellian double speak). At least that's how it works in the Bible Belt wasteland.
I.e. you can be fired for any reason that isn't EoE protected (LGBTQ/race/religion/sex) which is extremely hard to prove. Oh, and if you get fired you get no unemployment benefits because the state will invariably side with the employer and you have no choice but to look for work instead of fight them for your weekly pittance from the system you paid in to for many years (I'm employed but I've also not been and seen all of this first hand more than once).
Note that in the UK, if your boss phones you late at night regarding work, you are well within your rights to tell them to poke it.
UK Employment law contains lots of protections for employees and you cannot fire people for fun and giggles. Also people consider that if you are going to phone me out of hours, it had better be really earth-shatteringly important. The only time I can remember getting such a call it was because the mains cable into the building had exploded and damaged a lot of infrastructure through a power surge. It was a request if I could come in early the next morning to help sort out the mess which was fine as it was an extremely rare event.
I worked at a place where there were four of us on the admin team, and I was expected to be on-call for one week out of four. As sometimes happened, the Network Operations Center people would muff an "emergency," or just call out of an overabundance of caution, and we'd quickly determine it was no big deal, close the call. Then, there were other times where it would start with me, then snowball to my go-to guy - though I hated bugging him if I could avoid it - if it was over my head or costing us big bucks per minute of downtime. More than once - New Years Eve of 2017, for instance - it escalated to all-hands. Every one of us got roped into it for a good three or four hours that evening. We never did figure that one out, but it eventually went away. The good part of our group was that we all had each others' backs; it was a solid team of good guys, even the manager, who took regular weekly on-call shifts. The bad part was that we didn't get paid extra for it. I missed a number of family events - even had to take a call while in the hospital as my mother was dying, but I didn't mind so much because I needed to take a break from the sadness - and I won't deny I got pissed off more than once about being on-call, but I understood the job requirements going in. The lack of extra pay also kinda motivated us to get shit fixed quick-like.
"The morale, I suppose, is that if you want to encourage good employee work/life balance, you should implement more security policies. Or not, I guess, depending on your corporate goals."
If you want to encourage employee work/life balance, then do so. It's really easy. Say "Hey, John, it's 6pm, you should be at home enjoying your family. It's not an emergency, we'll sort it out tomorrow. Have a good one."
I have had several bosses that do exactly that.
Most of my co-workers probably fit into this category. I routinely answer calls in the middle of the night from management or co-workers in a bind. Generally I think the authority you are entrusted with is tied to the the amount of responsibility you assume. Some people don't care about earning 30-40% more if it means any kind of commitment to the job and that's fine. Other people, they pick up the phone.
If your organisation relies on you answering calls in the middle of the night (when you're off duty) there is something wrong with your organisation. If a role needs 24/7 coverage, you need to employ at least 3 people to cover that role.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I have several "bosses" at my job. Let's focus on two of them.
For one of them, I will answer at any time. Day or night, work day, weekend, or even a day off when I'm out with my family. I know that he is knowledgeable enough to handle most issues on his own, and respectful enough of my time that he won't call unless I'm really the best (or only) person to handle what needs attention. He also has enough strength of character that I know he won't panic when management does. When he does call, he apologizes to me, my wife, and anyone else around for the interruption.
Another boss, on the other hand, is the opposite. He's earned the reputation for calling folks during dinner to discuss incorrect paperwork, threatening HR consequences if the issue isn't resolved immediately. Whenever management panics about something they should have addressed six months earlier, he will jump and sound the alarm just to show that he's doing something. Rather than think about who else is on duty that could handle the problem, he goes straight to his senior people, both interrupting their lives and depriving the junior folks of the experience they would need to become senior. Since this boss doesn't respect me or my time, I have no inclination to answer his calls when I'm not obligated to do so.
For what it's worth, I'm salaried, but working time is tracked and overtime is paid. Nothing I do affects life-threatening situations, but a lot of money is involved.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Not just three people. There are 168 hours in a week, and standard practice is 40 working hours, except for things like holidays and vacations and sick time. I'd figure five people is the minimum to cover something 24/7.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes