Comment by toomuchtodo
4 years ago
[Sentence removed due to misinterpreting comment I replied to]. It's important to consider the managers and poor leaders out there who might not be as upstanding as yourself with regards to expectations, necessitating legislation or regulation. Citizens are entitled to their uncompensated time off hours not being interrupted.
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
He says that he expects people to respond to DMs ASAP when he considers it appropriate. That means his staff have to read each message he sends them when he sends them. This is hardly good leadership.
They said they set appropriate expectations, and I’m supposed to be polite and assume positive intent of other comments per HN guidelines.
I believe my comments make it clear where I stand on support of regulation to prohibit this activity.
> That could (and often does) mean the next business day or even later. Or it could mean ASAP; they’re adults, and have the judgement to make the correct call.
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.
I have an 11 month old child. My work hours are all over the place. A law telling me I can't catch up on Slack when I'm up at midnight for unrelated reasons just makes my life worse.
Why not just close slack when you leave for the day? I don't get it.
> 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)
This is an example of regulating a poorly chosen proxy. If the issue is people getting fired for ignoring a message, make firing people for not being available 24/7 illegal. There are plenty of reasons why after hours messages might be useful and no one really has a problem with them on their own, it's other behaviors which are loosely correlated with it which are the issue. Yes you will always have edge cases, but we should strive to minimize those edge cases as much as possible. In the particular situation of "some people prefer work schedules outside the standard 9-5" it's not even a small edge case, nor an unintuitive one.
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