We may not think so, but an increasing number of companies are taking steps to prevent their employees from emailing out of hours.
In recent years, particularly with the development of new smartphone technology, there has been increased pressure on staff and an expectation that employees will continue to engage with their work, including emails and telephone calls, outside of working hours. Experts argue that this has led to a decrease in employee productivity over the course of the day and an increase in employee stress levels, with a study in Germany showing that there had been a marked increase in early retirement, with the primary reason being cited as an increase in stress.
In an attempt to counteract this, the German Labour Minister, Andrea Nahles, has called for a ban on managers calling or emailing their staff out of hours. The Ministry itself has already informed its managers not to contact employees after 6pm, unless it is imperative that the work is done before the start of the next working day. The measures come following a voluntary collective agreement which was signed up to by two major trade unions in France in April of this year, imposing a ban (albeit a voluntary one) on employees in the consultancy and digital sectors from accessing their emails after 6pm.
This goes a step further than the recently reported measures that Daimler, a large German car franchise, had taken in relation to their employees’ absence from the office. In a somewhat brave move, Daimler now have an optional “auto-delete” email policy in force for their 100,000 employees, whereby employees who are on annual leave can set up their “out of office” to inform the sender of an email that their email is being automatically deleted, requesting that they either forward it to a fellow colleague for urgent attention, or wait until the recipient’s return before sending it again! Volkswagen are also reported to have taken the step of preventing their Blackberry servers from sending emails to employees any more than half an hour before their shift starts or half an hour from when their shifts finish.
Whilst the UK does impose some statutory restrictions on working time (employees cannot work more than 48 hours per week unless they specifically opt out of the maximum working week), there remains a question mark over how long many workers now spend “working”, with a high percentage admitting to checking their emails whilst at home or on annual leave. Voluntarily checking emails or answering the phone outside work is probably not currently viewed as “working time”, but as the legislation hasn’t been subject to substantial amendment since 1998, when smartphones were not even a contemplated vision of the future, it could be that employees or trade unions start to argue that UK employers should follow the example of their European cousins.
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