[1] Obviously, this policy is not targeted at staff in different time zones, which makes their remedy meaningless.
However, please recognize that even with a well-meaning boss like you, there are still mechanisms that incentivize individuals to at least read these messages, and once their free time has been "tainted" with work stuff, much of the damage is already done. Psychological pressures (which may be entirely internal but often are the result of other peers' attitudes as well) will still take a toll.
IMHO, as grown-ups, it is the most reasonable thing to avoid such leakage altogether; when my phone rings after hours I need to be certain that this is not something that can wait.
Luckily, since you're already using slack, you can just use the "send later" feature which is super simple to use and will work around this effectively. :)
In case of something that is urgent the sender can override the "do not disturb" and send a notification anyway. This in my opinion is the right way to do.
You should own the fact that your free time is yours and that you shouldn't open Slack to read those late messages. People work at different times (especially true for globally distributed team) and expecting people to "know" that they are outside of YOUR business hours simply does not scale to multiple employees.
It sounds like that works for you at your company. Congrats!
But if you're lucky enough never to have had an overbearing boss, you're not familiar with all the nifty ways they will try to control or coerce labor while not paying you.
In US low-wage jobs, they know they can get away with violating labor law with impunity until it gets bad enough to attract media attention. Even if workers had the money to sue, it wouldn't be worth it.
I got to see texts from a younger relative's boss at a national chain restaurant leading up to quitting. She had been working 6-7 days a week for over a month, but wage theft was keeping her under 40 hours a week paid. Multiple demands she come in on her day off with less than a couple hours notice to "support the team" or "do her part", with escalating threats in response to anything less deferential than "yes boss".
She finally responded by quitting. That solicited a remarkable fit of rage, calling her a loser who can't hold down a real job and so on.
The thing that kills me is I know most people don't want to be abusive shitheads. It is absolutely learned behavior from an abusive top-down system. The only way to win is not to play.
And I think that's driving a lot of the job churn our sanctified "job creators" are bitching about. Fuck 'em. If you can't build a company without abusing people, you don't deserve a company. Go get a real job, whiners.
There are already laws against wage theft, if her current employer is already ignoring the existing laws, what exactly will improve with an additional one? Bad work environment won't be improved by a ham-fisted legislation around when your employer is allowed to talk with you.
This kind of good intention laws can only be used by employees that already have some leverage and are in a decent work environment. Say the no-text-after-5 law is implemented in the US, what exactly do you think will happen when your relative quotes it to her employer? In an at-will state she'll get fired, in a not-at-will state she will get fired for a bogus reason.
Powerless people don't magically gain power with shitty edge-case laws like this. Create a social net that allows her to quit without dying of starvation one month later or going bankrupt from lack of insurance. That will give the poorest among us some actual leverage.
That's a very good point! And true. But it's not a xor situation, you can have both as they handle different things. Regardless of any social security net, you can still be bullied or manipulated into yielding your free time. It's good to have it written into law that it's against the law to contact a worker outside their contracted hours.
I did not argue that it was, I meant that the counter argument of the person I was replying to was moot. Vulnerable people stay vulnerable and those laws are just basically just cosmetic.
> Regardless of any social security net, you can still be bullied or manipulated into yielding your free time.
Yes, but I am old fashioned and that's where I break from some of the takes in thread. If you can say no, then it's your responsibility to say no. If you are bullied at work or manipulated while having a social net and you choose to endure then I think the responsibility lies with you as you make no effort to improve your situation.
Now my last point is entirely an opinion based on my values, I can recognize that, but I hope it clears up why I believe in a social net that prevents abuse while also opposing laws like the one discussed.
I, like others, sometimes use work laptop for pleasure. actually, I know a lot of people who do this exclusively. sure, you can blame it on them... but also I use slack for more than just work, and when I see unread notifications, even if I didn't get a push, i'm compelled to read them.
This is actually not true. Slack will still red-badge the app or workspace and show that you have an unread message waiting for you. All do-not-disturb does is prevent OS-level push notifications I believe.
I use Slack also for some social groups (though, I'm trying to less and less), so just "quitting slack" means also removing myself from groups im in outside of work.
I wish Slack had a way to "soft log out" of a workspace - right click -> deactivate and it greys out the workspace and doesnt show any unread messages indicators until you reactivate.
On the other side of this argument, which other society-scale problems do we know of where an appeal to individual discipline has worked well?
Because, as they also say, sometimes it might be appropriate to respond right away (“Or it could mean ASAP”).
If that’s the case, then the clear expectation is that people read all messages at all times, they just might not always have to respond right away (but in order to make that judgement call they have to actually read all messages).
This might actually be worse than just sending messages after hours where you actually have to respond right away – because you actually have to do sifting and filtering (after hours!) through messages, the vast majority of which might not require an immediate answer. If you are only contacted at those times where you actually do need to respond right away then at least you know what to expect …
This sounds like a pretty awful boss with awful communication who somehow convinced themself that they are oh so gracious and nice.
Reading this as written, you're requiring your staff to read every message immediately but they only need to respond if you think they need to.
That's no different than 24/7 on call when it comes to making some people's lives miserable.
Why?
This basically means they must “read” the message ASAP to decide whether to reply ASAP or not.
That OUGHT NOT TO BE the expectation ever!
Let alone the expectation of an immediate answer, the root problem is expectation of that message “being read right then” or soon.
It's likely the end result of this is using communications tool features to queue or hold messages until a worker's work day starts. I believe Slack, Teams, and Office 365 already support "quiet hours" at org level.
Tangentially, when thinking about labor regulation, I think it's important to frame the conversations as "what monsters lurk in the private sector? [1] [2]" vs "I am a great boss, why would this be necessary?"
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+type+psychopath
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=leadership+dark+triad
Why not just close slack when you leave for the day? I don't get it.
Because there are bosses out there who, if you don't meet their expectation of round the clock access to you, will fire you or PIP you out. Regulation will always have some edge cases where said regulation is suboptimal, but optimal over the aggregate. Your life might be worse, but more people's lives are improved.
Having children myself, I understand and can relate to your situation, but also understand the value of setting employment boundaries using regulation. Constant off hours contact is legitimately harmful to worker wellbeing [1].
"The insidious impact of 'always on' organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit – increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries," says Becker. "Our research exposes the reality: 'flexible work boundaries' often turn into 'work without boundaries,' compromising an employee's and their family's health and well-being.
Becker's research [2] is part of a growing body of work that is affirming the negative effects of an "always on" work culture. Around the world, several governments have begun to go as far as legislate laws allowing employees the freedom to not have to engage with work outside of official work hours."
[1] https://newatlas.com/right-to-disconnect-after-hours-work-em... (The right to disconnect: The new laws banning after-hours work emails)
[2] https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.121 (Killing me softly: Electronic communications monitoring and employee and spouse well-being)
Option A is a well chosen proxy, option B is the poorly chosen proxy I am arguing against.
It's much more difficult to prove that a worker is being fired for not being available 24/7 when they company says they have other reasons, than to prove that your boss sent a message out of hours. Your proposal would be practically unenforceable.
The difficulty of enforcing wrongful termination laws in a "right to work" environment is a separate issue, solved by better standards of evidence with clear guidelines.
On the other hand, if you ban out-of-hours messages, it's pretty easy to prove you received that message, so it's much easier to enforce.
This happens with a lot of similar issues. For example, in my country it's illegal to ask in interviews about family situation, pregnancy, religion... The point is to stop hiring discrimination, but it's much easier to prove that the employer asked me about whether I wanted to have kids than to prove that the employer rejected me because I want to have kids.
If your goal was simply to make the most easily enforceable law, why go through all the trouble of getting records of after hours messages? Why not just ban the use of instant messaging altogether. Or work email. Or employment. You will instantly stop 100% of employee abuse. Of course this is a facetious statement, we don't want to stop employment, or communication, these things are useful and desirable. We want to do minimal harm while preventing egregious abuse.
I think the restriction on interview questions is also an example of a poorly chosen proxy, but at least in that case there is no legitimate reason to ask those questions - you shouldn't be making hiring decisions off those criteria, there should be no need for that information during the hiring process. But if you come into the interview and are visibly pregnant, that protection doesn't do shit for you, because the issue isn't them asking questions. If you have a system in place good enough to prevent a visibly pregnant woman from being discriminated against, you don't need to prevent questions about pregnancy.
You end up with millions of individual struggles with boundaries set by need/urgency, ability to say no, how much of a dick the boss is etc etc
In NL we have some law for a sector where people need to sleep on their shift while still on call. They get some small hourly compensation for those hours. When called their normal shift starts which has a minimum duration. After working for the maximum number of hours per day/week someone else will have to take over. Perhaps an exception like that could work.
Something like 25% of the normal hourly rate for being available. (for example 4 hours after each shift (20h) and 12 hours in the weekend (24h) for 12 hours extra pay) When called it is considered a minimum duration shift of 3 hours, hours beyond 8 or after 18:00 at overtime rate. The 3 hours are removed starting with the last work day of the week and the first of the next.
Replace responding slower with say being a different skin color. If a white and a black employee are equal on meaningful metrics but one gets to go on all the fun trips while the other is consistently given the shit tasks, that's obviously a problem, but you can't simply avoid the situation where the problem might present itself. You need structures in place so that employees can identify that they're being mistreated, notify someone with the power to fix the situation, confirm that the problem has actually been solved, and escalate if not; all without fear of retaliation. That is tough to do, but it doesn't make it any less necessary. Once you have that system in place, it is the logical way to deal with all forms of mistreatment. Then there is no need for special exceptions which substitute one rigid restriction for another.
I believe my comments make it clear where I stand on support of regulation to prohibit this activity.
GP was correct—that means you've gotta read every message in case it's one of the "ASAP" ones. That's just exactly what the post under discussion explicitly stated. No adversarial reading required.
Assuming positive intent, in this case, would be to assume that they've at least made it clear what counts as "ASAP" so workers don't have to guess, after checking the message. If not, it's even worse.
But adults who's source of income is their job that you hold the power over.
Even if everybody has a great relationship, that power differential is real and present and can't be changed.
I have one team member in Quebec and the way they handle this seems to make more sense than Portugal's. Basically, the employees have the right to refuse 'overtime'. So, the boss can message them, but they cannot be penalized for not responding.
When a project manager asked me on my private WhatsApp if me being at home meant I couldn't attend this very important number, I looked into a separate phone for work.
I got a separate SIM for 2,50 euro per month and put it into my previous smart-phone (I don't need performance for WhatsApp and the like). This was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Being able to physically shut down your work phone gave me heaps of peace.
Would you dm your boss's boss after hours? I would only if important.
The entire point of this law is that you don't get to message employees who aren't working.
They aren't obligated to read your message and determine whether it is appropriate to reply immediately or tomorrow.
You can message them during work hours.
That said, I'm sure some bosses have abused this policy despite its well-meaning origins.