Business News

We should get rid of nonsense emails at the end of the hour

[ad_1]

Imagine buying a large bowl of sugar-soaked peanut butter and finding a message on the label: “Top Ten Tips for Weight Loss.”

If you think the advice is, “Leave the peanut butter ice cream,” then you don’t think Tim Cook, Apple’s boss.

Last week, Apple he announced his iPhones would soon have a “powerful tool” called Focus to better handle the snow of beeps and pings that can make it desperately hard to concentrate and relax. Users can ignore Twitter if they are busy at work or silence work emails over the weekend.

Or they can do something even more effective: turn off the distractor device or delete apps to remove attention. Apple would of course prefer not to do it either, as it makes money from its App Store and selling iPhones. But you can see why he is so enthusiastic that digital din is doing something to calm him down.

The emptying of the work culture and the problem was a problem before and since the pandemic.

Jennifer Burn, a U.S. workplace expert who surveyed workers in 46 countries last year, said we are in the midst of a “burnout epidemic”. Most said the work was getting worse he wrote In the Harvard Business Review. As one respondent said, “Emails start at 5:30 a.m. and don’t end until 10:00 p.m., because they know you’re not going anywhere else. It’s worse for unmarried people who don’t have a family because you don’t say ‘Go take care of my children.’ I need”.

These words are backed up official statistics People who worked from home in the UK last year were paid an average of six extra hours a week unpaid, compared to 3.6 hours for those who never worked at home.

Consideration of homework is left to stay after being locked in here, in part because many employees want it, which creates problems. Long working hours kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, the pioneering World Health Organization examination he said last month. They have found that working more than 55 hours a week can be dangerous.

It is not surprising that governments around the world are under increasing pressure to give workers something they have long considered a suspicious novelty – the right to disconnect.

This is spreading faster than you might think, and not just in white and submissive neck work. Police in the state of Victoria in Australia recently won the right to spend time after their staff schedule the association said it was the first such agreement for a law enforcement agency. People were “tired of feeling like they were working 24/7,” and they needed a chance to rest and heal, the association said. The hour-long work messages were too trivial or could easily wait.

Ireland brought a code of conduct on the right to disconnect in April and Canada is examining similar behavior as other nations.

This is good. The fear that these measures will stifle the flexibility of employers is excessive. “It’s not nine to five,” says Andrew Pakes, research director at the UK’s Prospect union, which claims disconnection rights. “It doesn’t mean people will say, it’s 17:02, so I’m not going to respond to that email.” It doesn’t mean you need a blanket. This has not happened in France, where a law requiring companies with more than 50 employees to negotiate agreements has been in force for more than four years.

In France, employees of the telecommunications company Orange do not have to respond to work messages on weekends, days off or evenings – or when they are training, a spokesman said. In other companies, employees returning from vacation can spend the entire day recovering what they have lost without having to deal with customers or internal meetings, said Alex Sirieys, head of France’s international sector. FO-Com union.

Sirieys says not all disconnection policies are perfect. “It depends on the will of the CEO,” he told me last week. Success is based on just talking to employees and managers about each other, he added, and using them sen ona, or common sense. Either way, the ability to shut down made a lot of sense and never more than it does now.

pilita.clark@ft.com

Twitter: @pilitaclark



[ad_2]

Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button