tinyurl.com/jsd9fkv
(Daily Mail)
The French will be able to opt out from having to check work emails after work!
Brilliant idea.
My previous employer got in the habit of expecting employees to be available 24/7 with the obligation to keep Blackberrys on! I was once bawled out for not responding to an email sent at 03:00 until 09:00. The email was just to confirm seating arrangements at a meeting FFS!
It is one of the reasons I left them!
My current employer has equipped all key staff with iPhones in the hope that they are used regularly and important matters get addressed. I don't carry mine around after work, preferring to use my own phone.
The only communications we have to reply to are emergency tests (checking emergency cover / availability).
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I read Daimler give their staff the option to delete mails which come in while they are on holiday rather than put an our-of-office message.
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I think I'm quite lucky in this regard. I've not (and never had) a works phone or laptop. Never get sent a email regarding work and only get a text once a blue moon about work and then it's something simple like a change of time that needs no reply.
Is this unusual amongst the car4players?
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Certainly is.
I get emails 24/7. Just don't need to reply or read them unless a reasonable hour! (The exception is emergencies / emergency tests which are announced by text first and all you need to do is reply with the word "received".)
My company's iPhone is managed remotely by the company. It came boxed and shrink wrapped as new but with the company logo on the start up screen etc. and has custom work apps and VPN.
Tracking is also on (which you can't switch off) as was the microphone (which can be switched off).
Last edited by: zippy on Sat 31 Dec 16 at 19:36
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Never had a work smartphone but had a laptop at home for last 18 months of employment in CS.
No requirement or expectation to look at it out of hours. Did though develop habit of logging in about this time on a Sunday as some stakeholders worked all hours and forewarned was forearmed when we had the weekly briefing by teleconference at 10:00 Monday.
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>> Certainly is.
I suppose it's one of the advantages of being far down the food chain, no one bothers me at home. That and i can't do anything without being physically at work.
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I can log on to works e-mails. They don't discourage it but they can bog off !
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I've always been a clock-watcher when an employee. 5:10pm quick cigarette and pee on company time and then off home at 5:30pm.
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Sometimes I'd read an email at 3.00am on a Sunday morning, another time I'd be playing golf at 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon.
Swings and roundabouts.
Its rare that effectiveness can be proved by hours worked.
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100% agree
Last edited by: legacylad on Sat 31 Dec 16 at 21:16
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100% agree also, but there are some bosses that think that if you are being employed by them then you are available 24/7 which is ridiculous. They also think that if they can't see you in the office you are not working!
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Managers mange the most complex thing that they understand.
If you find them managing time keeping then one can make a good guess at their level of competency at the actual job.
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>>but there are some bosses that think that if you are being employed by them then you are available 24/7 which is ridiculous.
The two-fingered salute usually deals with that problem.
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I'm completely the opposite, one of our design studios is in California, our customers are in Europe, head office in the UK and production in China. All routing their enquiries through yours truly. Different timescales, different holiday patterns and different working hours all leading to 24 hour and 7 days a week emails.
I just have to discipline myself to switch everything off at bedtime or I could be answering them or creating new ones all the time. Never clock watched but equally if I decide to take some time out whenever I choose it would never be questioned. Little things like deciding to take my dog for a walk in the middle of the afternoon if it suits me, because I and my employer know that I'll just as likely be working at 11.00 that same evening. Never taken a "lunch break" as such but if I'm hungry I'll just stop and eat something.
It never ever stops, even on holiday I do a half hour early every morning of fielding, and if appropriate, binning emails.
Doesn't bother me in the slightest, and conversely I simply couldn't now work in a 9-5 regulated type environment. It would freak me out in truth.
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I think for many of us, it's what you get used to.
It never ever stops, even on holiday I do a half hour early every morning of fielding, and if appropriate, binning emails.
If you don't mind me asking, how many emails do you get per day on average?
Last edited by: sooty123 on Sat 31 Dec 16 at 21:30
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Varies of course, but the maximum would be a 100 or so, the minimum could be as few as 20. Probably 50 most days. Because the business is so spread out we communicate mainly by email or phone. I spend so much time travelling that I just have to make time 2 or 3 times a day to deal with them. Thank goodness for 4G !
Last edited by: Runfer D'Hills on Sat 31 Dec 16 at 21:36
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Wow that's some number, i don't think I'd get 20 internal emails a week, more like 10 sometimes less.
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Most of it is rubbish, trouble is, you have to sift through that to find the stuff that matters. And indeed respect that some of the rubbish matters to someone.
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That's what I couldn't be doing with, trying to sift through that many every day to find ones you actually need to deal with. Thank god no one at work cares/ knows what my email address is.
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Like Runfer, I guess I get about 50 ish a day, of which maybe half need some sort of attention other than a quick scan, usually. But they do come at all hours, so when I wake at 3:30 in the morning or whatever, which happens all the time, there's always an email you can deal with to alleviate the boredom.
Nothing in my contract says I have to read them out of hours (though if there was an emergency and I missed it then it wouldn't go down terribly well).
I do proactively check my mail at intervals no longer than about half an hour when I'm awake, holidays, weekends, out shopping, whatever, all the time. I just automatically do it. I checked just before typing this and will again in a few minutes no doubt. I've done this since email was a thing I reckon. Certainly the last decade or more.
Probably I'm a weak enough character it makes me feel important or something.
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I love Dilbert.
So much of my work life is mirrored in his strip!
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When I was on the treadmill, I used to get 50 emails a day. Emails have subject headers, and sender names. Email clients are designed to list that information in an easy to scan manner. Work skills are knowing who and what is important. Work skills are also about using those two key features to ensure you garner the kind of attention your missive demands (or not)
Its a sorry employee who reads all and acts on emails in received order.
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>> Tracking is also on (which you can't switch off)
Surely you can just turn off location services in the settings menu, or just the tracking part.
I know someone who's company also had the tracking on, and could log into the iCloud to track the whereabouts of their employees. He just disabled that part as per above mention.
Last edited by: VxFan on Sun 1 Jan 17 at 01:41
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Nope, its disabled.
You can switch to airplane mode though.
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Are they tracking you, the phone or both?
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Talking about tracking: DPD (the best parcel delivery service I've encountered as a consumer) track their drivers every step of a delivery round. The addressee can look on an interactive map showing where the van delivering one's parcel, is at any time, together with an estimated time of delivery.
Great for customers, but hell for their drivers.
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>>Hell for drivers.
It is and it isn't.
Drivers are tracked but then they can demonstrate that traffic has held up a delivery etc.
Also routes are planned by a program which isn't always efficient. I saw a delivery a mile away from me, before he had to drive 5 miles to do another one then back to me.
(These programs can not reasonably work out all of the most efficient combinations: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem)
A DPD driver has told me that rest breaks are planned in their day and managers can't order them to speed up (otherwise they would be jointly liable in an accident). He told me its better than some of the other services that he has driven for.
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Tracking drivers / workmen isn't 100% reliable though.
A couple of years ago we got a mobile pipe fitting company in to make us a one off pipe connection.
I queried the invoice that arrived a couple of weeks later as it was far more than the estimate they had previously given us. Excuses followed trying to justify the price for the work. I asked why the company I work for should be paying for the engineers time sat out in his van playing on his mobile.
When I submitted the visitors diary entry for the workman from the reception desk which he had signed to say when he entered and left the building, it painted a completely different picture to what he had written down on his job sheet. He had tried blagging an extra hour for the job, and although the tracking records for his van were true, which shown how long he was on site, it didn't show how long the job actually took.
They ended up knocking £100 off the bill.
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I spent years on Malaysian estates subject to phone calls at any time around the year. I have had an ex-directory number and answerphone ever since changing jobs, and on into retirement. I never answer the phone directly now. I check for messages most nights but seldom find any.
I trick suggested by a colleague; call the offender back at 3 a.m. He said it had worked for him.
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>> I trick suggested by a colleague; call the offender back at 3 a.m. He said
>> it had worked for him.
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Only if he had called you in the middle of the night, shirley?
I used to have a client - not my favourite person - who would call me, number withheld, and then say 'who's that'? I got fed up with this - in my book, the person calling should introduce themselves, e.g. "hello, this is Joe Bloggs, may I speak to Ray Plunkett, please". So when he did his usual "who's that", I said "who's that, who's saying who's that?"
The strangest thing was, he had a very attractive wife.
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>> The strangest thing was, he had a very attractive wife.
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So had Donald Trump
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No Emails After Work.... - smokie
