Should work email be banned during vacations?

[George The Curious]

For many of those, I can only say 'get a life'; what is sad, however, is that many of those who do have family lives etc, would rather be impulsively checking their Blackberries then enjoying the time off with their families or SO.

I think companies have no business telling employees what they should do with their time off.

 

[fuji]

You could update the employment act to specify that if an employee checks work email they have to be paid for a minimum of 4 hours on the day they checked it.

Companies would immediately implement policy forbidding anyone from checking work email on their off days. In fact, they would likely lock you out of work email when you are not working to ensure you don't start racking up 4 hours every saturday for a 5min glance at your email.

 

[Frosty]

Some jobs require you to be on call even when you're on vacation.

 

[TeasePlease]

You could update the employment act to specify that if an employee checks work email they have to be paid for a minimum of 4 hours on the day they checked it.

Companies would immediately implement policy forbidding anyone from checking work email on their off days. In fact, they would likely lock you out of work email when you are not working to ensure you don't start racking up 4 hours every saturday for a 5min glance at your email.

Remember back in the day when folks received "pager pay" for carrying pagers off hours? Kinda like that, eh?

I have to admit that I'm not good at unplugging. It actually makes me uncomfortable. I always have my phone nearby. Even if it isn't for work, I'm often msging or surfing.

My job also makes it easy to justify. I can't realistically foresee a life/death situation in my work, but being in a client-service industry, responsiveness is an issue. If I don't respond promptly, the client will just to to the next guy. That makes me cringe.

 

[George The Curious]

Corporate culture has NOT kept up in pace with technology. In fact it is 20 years behind. Given that people can work from anywhere, they should have abolished 9-5 office presence policy long ago, and allow people to work any time, anywhere, and only mandatory presence is weekly / biweekly status meetings.

 

[TeasePlease]

Corporate culture has NOT kept up in pace with technology. In fact it is 20 years behind. Given that people can work from anywhere, they should have abolished 9-5 office presence policy long ago, and allow people to work any time, anywhere, and only mandatory presence is weekly / biweekly status meetings.

Some would beg to differ. I believe Yahoo is trying to cut back on work-from-home arrangements. Being in the office and building team synergy is valuable. Some staff prefer to work in the office and only the office. Why bring work home or to the cottage. Keep you personal space sacred.