Out of hours working banned by German labor ministry
Germany's employment ministry has banned its managers from calling or emailing staff out of hours except in emergencies, under new guidelines intended to prevent employees from burning out.
This news further says that as per new guidelines, employees should not be penalized for switching off their mobiles and not reading their mails/messages post office hours.
This was long overdue, and good that Germany has taken an official stand on this issue. I hope rest of the world notice and follow suite. I work in Application Support, and fully understand the risk of critical resources not available during any major incident. But I also appreciate the fact that we have an on-call rota system, which ensures that someone is available to manage such incidents during out of hours. We have the process in place, but still I have seen, and sometimes myself done, calling someone who is not on rota, but we are comfortable with that person. Or the person is much more knowledgeable or has worked on specific issue earlier. This is so common, that even the person getting calls in odd hours does not mind much, and tries to help resolve the issue in hand. This is happening in all organizations. But this is not just on-call rota, or production incident. We are so used to have people working or available round the clock, we just forgot the actual “office hours” and find it convenient to call someone at any given time. Why have we started bypassing a perfectly working process and no one raised any eyebrows? Was it a culture change? Was it the requirement of modern business? Lets examine to see how it all started.
We had a perfect work environment, people used to go to office in the morning, came home in evening, spend time with family and friends, enjoy their weekends! There were people working in different shifts as well, but still manage to work for 8 hours and spend time as per their own wish. There were few exceptions to this rule, like sometime due to holiday rush or year-end books finalization, people spend more time, usually getting additional pay, and be happy as its not a regular routine. These were the days when organizations were running with initial technological advancements. Land line phones were privilege and only big organizations or rich people can afford it. If you need to send a message to someone, it was send physically by a person visiting their home.
Then came technology, and land line becomes common in every household. That still had not changed the process. It only made the person available during off hours, at his home. But people did not get calls as sitting at home; they were not much of help to people in office. They can only advice and not do anything themselves.
Technology never stops reinventing itself, and soon enough, pager came into existence, making people reachable while on the move. Even if that was one way communication, it still created lot of buzz and Pager becomes a status symbol. A simple thought of you being able to receive numbers (later text as well) from someone while walking on the road, or watching a movie was enough to get everyone excited about using this device to its full extent. They started monitoring the Pager and made sure that they respond to each and every message, even if that is just to show that they have received the message.
Soon enough, Pagers has been replaced by cell phone. Now everyone is available 24 hours a day, no matters where they are! You can always call them, speak to them! Cell phone completely changed the way we were communicating. Instead of tied down to our land line phone, we are now free to go anywhere, still in touch with everyone! And cell phone keep reinventing itself, and becoming smarter and smarter by every day. It also kept changing our communication methods, and soon become de-facto of person to person communication. It allows you to call and talk, then it provided short message service, then Multimedia message service, and the list goes on. Now, a cell phone can do almost anything your computer can do, and sometime more. It is all good, and having an absolute communication device in your pocket, which can enable you to talk, message, video conference and much more, is a must for every person. Along with cell phone, computerization also spread to every industry. Now, 80% of the official jobs are done on computers. Email is standard medium of communication. You can login to your office network from anywhere in the world using internet.
Employers realize the benefit of this, and started providing mobile phones, laptops to employees. It all looks very good to employees. They took it as reward of their good work, and flaunt these cool gadgets given by organizations. It was like cool thing to work on office laptop from home. What people did not realize that it slowly and slowly, changed the corporate culture. Now with these devices given by company, employees are reachable at any hour, no matter where they are. And they can be given any urgent task, to get it completed before the next day, even if that means working late night at home, or sacrificing their weekend. This gave an opportunity to employers, to get more output from employees. The employees took it in a way that they can still spend more time with their family, or plan the schedule accordingly, to work at their own time. But what they did not realize, that by doing this, they become a 24X7 employee. This goes on, and becomes so normal, that if someone is not reachable during out of office hours, you actually question him – Why? Like he or she was supposed to be available, and taken an unplanned leave.
Later, few people started realizing the downside of this, and started becoming offline after office hours. Employers are so much into this anytime availability process, they started penalizing the people for not being reachable. This is where the actual conflict started. There are still lots of employees, who continue to be available 24X7, and never complain about this. But the number of people who wants to be on their own after office hours are increasing regularly. And this is the reason why Germany has banned managers to contact their employees out of office hours. I welcome this, and hope that other countries should also follow suit.
Comments