Never underestimate an economics-based solution to a legal problem, a.k.a. "if you really want to ban it, tax it".
The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US.
I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour without triggering overtime etc.
I sometimes want to send my employees emails over the weekend as I think of something and don't want to forget. But there are certain employees that I know will immediately act on the email, which I actually don't want. So I end up emailing myself and then forwarding them the email on Monday morning.
Certain clients (like Apple’s email app) allow you to schedule emails to be automatically sent at a later date.
This is a you problem. Fix the forgetting part, you are management that's literally your job. Leave a post it somewhere, start keeping a checklist, whatever.
Stop making it your employees' problem.
That being said lots of people still do unpaid overtime, but only because they're afraid about losing the job / care too much. Not because they actually legally have to. There are legal means to defend yourself from that.
I don't get overtime, but I do get time in lieu - I did about four hours extra the week before last doing set up for one of our busiest days of the year, and I'm taking Thursday afternoon off to make it up.
Things like 60 hour work weeks also aren't even legal without signing away your EU Working Time Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003) rights (which isn't even an option in every EU country). I don't _think_ the post-brexit legislation did away with that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
For instance when getting an alert on PagerDuty in the middle of the night, you might get paid by 30 min increments while dealing with the emergency, even if your regular pay is by the day.
The flipside is that no one ever gets paid less as a salaried employee either, but most employees are too afraid of getting fired to remember that part. Any day that you work any portion, you get paid for the full day.
There are a bunch of exceptions for specific jobs.
The working hours, comp+ben etc. are usually determined by collective agreement with unions.
Pay for the same job can vary dramatically depending on which union your employer has a collective agreement with.
I know several people who got 25-30% pay rises just by moving to another part of the company that had an agreement with IG Metall instead of ver.di.
It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.
So actually, I really don’t like your idea.
We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (instead of alerting).
- The only critical alert that can actually page people is if the blackbox test fails. Every 30 seconds, it downloads a test image and if the contents don't match the expectation, an alert is raised (with some delay).
- Warning alerts are mostly for any errors being returned from background tasks, but these are only monitored during business hours.
Doesn’t seem like your case at all.
If it happens frequently, the guilty is the process, team lead or whoever runs the things.
Until whoever dealt it just leaves the team. Then it’s everyone’s problem.
It was a project that was critical to the company, but that was not very reliable, and broke overnight very often, sometimes 3-4 days per week.
I was the 4th dev on it. Everyone else who worked on it before had burned out and quit. The dev before me couldn’t tough it out another 2 weeks and quit before i joined.
Eventually I burned out after a year and quit too. All this to say, that’s great when it works, but when it goes bad it’s real bad hahaha.
Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee).
And then we're all working weekends.
> Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine
Instead of going into an immediate frenzied panic when someone says they need something now, stop and ponder for a minute how it will impact you and them. Only then make a decision.
I remember a friend who was asked for something urgent from a client. They rushed to do it to their own personal detriment and uploaded the result. About a week later, they could see the file had never been downloaded. Turns out the matter wasn’t that urgent and the client had other priorities. My friend was understandably upset, but it was a valuable lesson.
The advantage of framing it in monetary terms is that clients are very used to thinking in monetary terms. It's not a "no, we won't do that", but a "yes with a cost" that they'll very likely reject on their own terms. And it clearly leaves the door open for something that is really really urgent - be it a genuine emergency or just the result of poor planning.
I live and work here 14 years, 2 companies, and never had to pick up phone I didn't want to pick up, or react anyhow. Even if for some reason they would expect to - 'sorry hiking in the mountains, 5h from computer' and they know it. But since everybody is in same mode, there is nobody to call me. Our Pune colleagues on the other hand, I see them working regularly long weekend hours on top of long week days during crunch time.
There needs to be a little bit more of a give and take. If employees are not expected to receive a single phone call or email outside of working hours. Would it be acceptable if the same restrictions were placed on personal calls and emails during working hours?
How many of the same people would be screaming murder, if their bosses came to them and complained about them taking personal email during work time.
If employees at work are not completing tasks then by all means carpet them, warn them and fire them.
During working hours.
You don't get to follow them home physically or digitally and take them to task outside of contract and labour laws.