[lincolnq]

Employees not succeeding at disconnecting from work is often unintentional, and caused by subtle, pernicious effects of middle managers simply existing and following basic incentives (such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along").

Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.

[pottertheotter]

This sounds like the sort of thing a founder or executive would say to make themselves not seem like the bad guy and shift blame to “middle managers”. There’s a reason that in the world of fraud and auditing that “tone at the top” is such a big focus and not “tone at the middle”.

[ketzo]

You’ve never had a teammate who was just ALWAYS online on Slack? Or found yourself working on a weekend because you thought of a bug fix?

I agree that there’s a lot of blame-shifting that happens at work. But lots of people struggle to disconnect from work for non-malicious reasons, either their own or those of someone else.

[jjav]

> You’ve never had a teammate who was just ALWAYS online on Slack?

Yes, but I don't care if they are, it won't make me.

Where it becomes toxic is when the CxOs are on slack 24x7. Then it becomes a company direction, whether explicitly stated or not.

I've also seen the opposite, where the executive team set an exemplary tone about work/life balance in actions and words, so that becomes the company culture.

[Dylan16807]

That's unfortunate. Anyone that isn't being paid similar piles of money shouldn't be made to feel any work-hour pressure based on what a CxO does.

[AlwaysRock]

Yeah after working for a boss who was obsessed with people being always on slack I decided I was done with it. I set myself to offline and in a meeting until sometime next year when I started at this job. No one has ever asked about it and its never been an issue. I hate that slack shows availability by default.

[jjav]

I've been in a company where the the CEO is on slack from 6am to midnight 7 days a week expecting a response within a minute to anything. Extremely toxic environment.

The worst of it, in some sense, is that they don't even do it from an angle of intentionally attempting to overwork people. It's just that they're an obsessive multitasker who doesn't really get that focus-oriented people need focus time, which is the complete opposite of what slack is.

[GoblinSlayer]

Overwork means the manager can't manage time and doesn't get work done on schedule. Is there some memey site that explains this? Like https://www.managersresourcehandbook.com/lessons-from-bad-bo... (but that site focuses a lot on fluffy stuff like giving much attention to employees).

[datavirtue]

Yeah...signalling. Makes the world go around. Doesn't matter what you say, subordinates adjust thier behavior to match the signal.

[Karrot_Kream]

I don't think it's _not_ the fault of those at the top. Every level needs to be cognizant of the effects of "forward the comms" culture. Ultimately I think it should be the top that takes the responsibility. Unfortunately it seems like the law only mandates writing down the current culture, though hopefully it's the first step to challenging employers based on what they wrote down.

[eru]

A technical solution could help:

Make it easy to set up things so that by default whatever message you send after reasonable office hours only gets delivered in the morning.

[Karrot_Kream]

That's what we do at our company FWIW. Lots of people queue up comms to be sent during the start of the other person's business day. It helps a lot especially for folks in other time zones.

[sokoloff]

As a remote-first company, many of our teams/channels have people spanning five or more timezones. For my team, there is no time that I could send a slack to the channel in which everyone is working (and I think exactly one hour where it’s not 10:30PM-8AM for someone in the channel if everyone is in their home time zone).

Further, I don’t require employees to notify the team if they travel to another time zone temporarily (it’s none of my/our business).

Receiver-side notification settings are the workable answer here IMO. (I don’t care when you respond to the Slack channel; I do care that we can use Slack. Slack has the ability to set your own schedule on notifications already.)

[midasuni]

I don’t understand why anyone would have slack open outside of their work hours. And then complain because they lack the self control to turn it off.

[midasuni]

I don’t care when the email comes in as I won’t look at it until 8am (assuming I’m working 8-4)

[tomrod]

Some of the most successful campaigns I've seen in this pace start at the top.

[mikro2nd]

How and why do you even know there's an email in your "work" inbox? Have your devices switch off notifications outside of work hours and you're done. If the sender asks why you didn't respond, explain politely that you didn't see any notification until work started.

eta: If you keep yourself on the hook, that's on you.

[andreilys]

If the sender asks why you didn't respond, explain politely that you didn't see any notification until work started.

Come review time you will be dinged for not being a "team player".

Meanwhile the employee that does quickly respond to these messages will get ahead and eventually become your boss.

TBH if something is important enough, I have no problem with responding to it "After work hours", whether it's on the weekend or after work. In the same way, I have no problem taking a long lunch or sleeping in because I know it's a push/pull relationship with work. This is of course much easier to do when you're permanently remote so YMMV

[baby]

If these impact your performance then you work in a shitty place and there’s little you can do about it. Just don’t aim for a promotion or change job.

[pixl97]

Stuff like this impacts people at almost every job I've seen (and I've been contracted out a lot of different places and watched what employees do).

It turns out that it is typical for these behaviors to occur in workplaces, hence laws to prevent it.

[CaptainZapp]

Or even simpler: Don't use your own device for work related stuff.

I can get work email on my device with appropriate software and configuration by my employer.

But why on earth should I ever do that?

[baq]

I want my work calendar to be on my personal device, because I don't want to have two devices. Email comes packaged with the calendar.

[midasuni]

My iPhone only downloads email when I tell it too, even when it does it sits in the background. If I’m not working why would I read it?

If I’m on call like I’ve been over Christmas, I’ll be called by a manager sufficiently high up enough, with a charge code for me answering the phone (4 hours at time and a half), and explain why it was so important to do so.

[randomswede]

depending on your calendar tooling, you may be able to have calendar events shared between multiple calendars. And I do understand the whole "not wanting more devices", although it can lead to having a harder time separating work from not-work.

Personally, I have accepted that the only way I can get a decent-enough separation between "work" and "not-work" is to, as far as possible, separating work devices from personal devices. I have a me-phone, and a work-phone. Unless I am on-call, the work-phone tends to not be near me during not-work-hours, it sometimes gets shut off on weekends (unless, again, on-call). I have a work laptop, and a me-laptop (currently about 80 mm apart), the me-laptop stays closed during work, the work-laptop stays closed outside work.

[AlwaysRock]

I do some time sensitive work with clients. It's time sensitive because there are often hard deadlines or deadlines that are created and set 25-48 hours out. Clients are often in different time zones.

This is the first time in my career where I have had push notifications for work email on my phone. I don't love it. Mostly because while many of the emails are not time sensitive once I got in the habit of answering things when they come in instead of batching emails (what i've previously done) then every email seems more important and its easier to answer than to know I've got a non urgent email I need to answer at some point in the next 24-48 hours.

I write all of this to say... Not everyone can turn off work email after 5pm.

[mavelikara]

> "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along"

I can't understand why the person sending the email after dinner is off the hook, but the person forwarding it along is solely to be blamed in your eyes.

[jessecurry]

Most C-level folks that I’ve worked with in the past decade have told me that they send messages when they have time, which is often off hours, but they don’t expect a reply until business hours. I’ve heard very few middle managers say the same thing, so a late night message may be perceived differently. But that’s just my personal experience, obviously very situational.

[LeapingLennie]

Yes, I've also had managers that start their day at some ungodly hour in the morning and so it wouldn't be unusual to receive emails from them at 5am. There was never any expectation to respond to emails straight away and the same should apply to emails sent in the evening.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

One nice feature of Slack is that you can schedule messages to send when the recipient's working hours start. Let the automation take care of keeping messages to working hours.

[viraptor]

In smaller companies (where C-level doesn't exist) this works similarly where directors/owners just have to deal with stuff outside of normal hours because somebody has to. Just because they do and have skin in the game, doesn't mean they expect the employees to respond to anything.

Slack helped a lot by making scheduling messages for the next day really simple and not notifying out of hours by default. Outlook could really improve its UX around that functionality - you can schedule messages right now, but it's pretty much hidden.

[8ytecoder]

I know at least one senior level exec that uses that feature. I had never heard of it before (and I use outlook).

[akudha]

This is all good. But the fact that we have reached a level where there needs to be a law for humans to treat other humans nicely - that is the sad part. Not emailing after work hours should be common sense and politeness, instead of needing a law, no?

[menzoic]

I think you're looking at this backwards which makes it look bad. The reality is, humans haven't been treating other humans nicely in labor relationships for tens of thousands of years. I don't think you'd be able to look back even a decade and say it was better than now, so rather than "reached a level" of inhumanity, I'd say we reached a new level of humane treatment with a law like this. Its just another step in the right direction after centuries of progress. Without laws this good behavior is left up to the culture of the leaders of a company. Its similar to how before child labor laws, some companies didn't use child labor. Now that theres a law for it, no company does (at least on the soil where then law is in effect) which causes the next generation to see this better state as the new normal.

[akudha]

Thats a very good way of looking at it.

That said, if we need laws for every small thing that should/could be resolved with common sense, where does it end? Plus, we been ultra specialists for everything, when there are a billion laws.

Still, as you pointed out, if these laws improve the situation, it is a good thing I guess. I just hate that everything needs to be enforced with the threat of fines or violence. Another thing is I don’t trust the government to be impartial.

[8ytecoder]

Sometimes a law is a necessity. It gives a level playing field for companies. If one business establishment wants to do the right thing, they have to weight it the financial loss they suffer against goodwill or their own conscience. But if it’s the law, it’s straightforward and since everyone has to abide, the loss of any potential business profit is out of the equation entirely.

It’s something that looks like a stick but really a carrot.

[twobitshifter]

In the history of labor, this would rank as a minor infraction in terms humans failing to treat other humans fairly. The only way out of the mistreatment of employees has historically been enacting laws such as the fair labor standards act of 1938. Without that law we’d still have children working in mines and the 40-hour workweek wouldn’t exist.

[eru]

We don't _need_ a law. Politicians just want to be seen doing something, and people like to see them do something.

It's just more bureaucracy and fodder for the compliance department.

[baby]

My SO is an HR and the head of HR at her place calls her on her personal phone late in the evening all the time. Blows my mind that HR themselves can be inappropriate :D

But imo it’s both people fault: it’s also on you to set boundaries, not use email on your phone, etc.

[beckingz]

HR are often the worst offenders.

Sometimes they're great and actually invest in the humans at an organization, other times they are the worst humans at an organization.

[watwut]

The problem has nothing to do with email being sent at night. The problem is about expectation of quick response.

[IsThisYou]

> such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along").

Wait until 2 AM, then reply to your boss with a question about the email.

[teeray]

Mail servers should just be configured to stop delivery between 6p-8:30a of they’re really serious about it.

Have an escalation process in place if it’s that important to reach someone after hours.

[halpert]

Complaining middle managers seems so weird in this day and age. In the past, when people stayed at jobs for decades, it made sense to complain about annoyances at work like having ineffective middle managers. However, you shouldn’t be working at a job with ineffective management in today’s world, where it is common to change jobs. If you are, then that reflect more poorly on you than on the managers.