Work Follows Workers Home

[Jonathon Watkins]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://edition.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/04/13/go.work.life.tech/' target='_blank'>http://edition.cnn.com/2004/BUSINES...work.life.tech/</a><br /><br /></div>CNN has spotted that workers can be tethered wirelessly to work wherever they wander: "PDAs, 3G mobile phones, broadband connections at home, wireless access in hotels and airport lounges -- there is no reason not to be in touch with the office 24/7. New technology now enables flexible working hours around the clock, but some are beginning to feel the strain from vague expectations about how available they should be. It does not help either if a company has employees in different time zones working on the same projects, in real time. It has got to the stage where Microsoft has even issued guidance to its UK employees on when they should disconnect from the Internet at home or turn off their mobile phones."<br /><br />I know all about working with different time zones. :morning: Interesting that Microsoft feels it has to help it's workers stop working though.<br /><br />"The guidelines were issued after a six-month trial, when 443 Microsoft employees were given smart phones, tablet PCs and broadband Internet access in their homes. Although work productivity went up, there were calls from staff for "clarity of expectations" and an "agreed etiquette" from management as to when work ended and when home life began. "There is a problem with (work) encroaching on home life, if the individual does not manage it and set the boundaries," said Harvey. "You may never get quiet time for reflection away from emails and the phone, if you do not take positive steps to be in control of both your time and the technology.""<br /><br />So, are you guys in control of the technology, or is it in control of you? How are you coping with the electonic leash from work?

[bikeman]

Well, I've been there and back again. Last year I had VPN access to my workplace. I would check email evenings, on weekends, and on days off. Part of my job was support for field workers sturggling with a new, buggy application, and I felt obligated to help as much as possible. On Jan 1, a new VPN was initiated, and I no longer have access. My time is now my own again. I was never pressured to access work stuff from home before, and management did not care (note that I no longer have access), but the field users appreciated it. I can definitely see the benefit, but you have to remember that they really will survive without you.

[capo]

Nothing vague about them at all. 24X7 it couldn't be too much simpler than that.

[foebea]

All my technology is used for gaming and reading the latest thoughts website :mrgreen: I use my gsm phone to get usenet postings and cheat at pub trivia games :devilboy: (thank you google, for loading quickly on an ipaq)

I get to work at exactly starting time, and leave on the nose. no overtime, nothing goes home with me. if they tripled my salary, i might consider >40 hrs a week, but until then, no thanks.

[Pat Logsdon]

For the most part, my work stays at work. I work overtime occasionally, but not a lot, as I don't get paid for it. I have VPN access to work via my laptop, but I rarely need to use it unless I'm horribly behind. Which I'm not. Usually. :mrgreen:

This site is a different story. I recently purchased a T610 and got a plan w/unlimited GPRS so I could be here EVEN MORE. 8)

[gorkon280]

I do have to carry a cell phone 24/7, but I rarely get called. The rule is, try to figure it out yourself. Then you call. If you can't, the you call the primary. If the primary doesn't want to be called alot, he makes sure he has VERY good documentation. Still, if my servers are about to be bathed in water, I want to know regardless otherwise I am in for ALOT more work! :D

[whydidnt]

I work out of my house, whenever I'm not traveling to visit my clients. I decided when I started in this position that work was work and home was home. I have a spare bedroom that is my work office. I'm sure to be there everyday at 8:00 AM, but also when I leave at night, I'm done. I don't answer the work line after I'm done for the night - but sometimes thats 6-7 in the evening.

I think if I worked from the same PC, or in the same area as I relax in it would be far too easy for me to mix the two, and it seems I hardly have enough family and me time as it is. I'm probably lucky that most of my customers are 9-5ers too.

[Jon Westfall]

As a faculty member at a university, I am always (in a sense) on call to my students. They aren't as big an issue as the webhosting company that I do support work for. Being the only tech within the US means the owner can call me whenever he likes. I've had midnight 'emergency' calls before. Mostly, I believe I"m too plugged in for my own good. I never feel awkward away from my email / internet, only when I connect to it later do I feel the sting.

[Zack Mahdavi]

I work at a small biomedical engineering lab in my university. I'm the only system administrator there, so I'm the only one to turn to when something happens. The fact that I have a cell phone and a PDA doesn't help at all..

Here's what happens when the printer stops working...

1) Call one...
2) 5 minutes later, call two...
3) 5 minutes later, call three...
..... and this continues until I arrive at the lab.

Sometimes, when I need to study and don't want to deal with lab problems, I end up shutting off my cell phone. It's the only way to get some peace.. :)

[Jonathan1]

Interesting that Microsoft feels it has to help it's workers stop working though.

If I had to guess this is probably because of lower end management setting unrealistic and asinine expectations and most likely corp had to step in and say enough.
Management is an interesting breed. Dilbert isn't just a comic. This crap can be seen in a day to day work environment. And you DO have diminishing returns from a person expected to be available 24/7. At some point such a person burns out and actually starts costing a company money rather then making a company money.

[jizmo]

I had this problem with the previous job I was in and just after two years I was pretty burned out - I couldn't escape work to anywhere. I was just a little over 20 then and I really felt that this can't be too healthy in the long run.

In this new work I've taken a strict line between work and free time. Not only does this help me stay relatively sane, but I've also noticed that when I have to do my work on a strict time limit, I do it more efficiently.

A few companies here in Finland have tried 6hrs / day work shifts and to everyones surprise the productivity didn't go down at all. People just work more efficiently in the same time frame. More free time gives people more time to relax and to be with their families and hobbies - thus relieving stress.

Work can be definied as you selling your free time for someone other. Give a thought or two for this.

In my opinion the life is too short to spend that 24/7 for someone other than yourself.

/jizmo

[dlinker]

I have VPN access from my home PC (or laptop if I take it home). I used to occassionally check my email from there or on my iPAQ via Bluetooth to my mobile phone (cell phone for you Americans).

Now I have a Blackberry - as I am thrid level support for these. They don't call them a "Crackberry" for nothing. It is all too easy when you walk past it to have a quick check of your email. Before you know it, you're dashing off replies to support staff in other time zones or otherwise doing work.

It is just SOOOOOO addictive - it takes a conscious effort - or nagging spouse - to stop me from using it.

I can't wait till they release the "Blackberry Connect" software for the PocketPC so I can stop carrying three devices - my iPAQ, mobile phone and Blackberry. I'll just use a Blackberry enabled PocketPC phone.

Yes - 24x7 is just too easy to work now - especially if you work for a global company (and in an Investment Bank this is especially true).

[TJMurphy]

Interesting that Microsoft feels it has to help it's workers stop working though.

If I had to guess this is probably because of lower end management setting unrealistic and asinine expectations and most likely corp had to step in and say enough.
Management is an interesting breed. Dilbert isn't just a comic. This crap can be seen in a day to day work environment. And you DO have diminishing returns from a person expected to be available 24/7. At some point such a person burns out and actually starts costing a company money rather then making a company money.

Interesting, because actually I'd read this in a different way.
In a lot of companies, and certainly in my own, a lot of people have mobile phones and laptops and feel obligated to be contactable 24 x 7. You come across this in the little things like the voicemail message says "phone me on my mobile". You won't find an official policy that says you must be contactable at all times, in fact you find all sorts of "woolly" statements about "work-life balance" and "family friendly" policies. What I read this statement as, is Microsoft actually putting some real policy behind the vague terms and I salute them for that.

And yes there may be unrealistic expectations at certain levels in any organisation but IMHO this is mostly down to personalities rather than sections of management. And I've come across such sociopaths (sp?) at all levels in companies!

[dMores]

i run my own company, and naturally work follows me everywhere.

especially due to the fact that i can't be creative/productive from 9 to 5, i end up stretching my entire work process over the total hours i'm awake.
so it may happen that i bum around in the office only to go home and suddenly get the energy and drive to do something and end up going to sleep when the sun is about to rise again.

other times i get up early (that's 8am for me :)) and have a really productive day, so when i come home i forget about it all and just spend some quality time with my girlfriend or friends.

i'm not on the phone that much, so that helps being independant. if people were calling me at night, at home regularly, i think that would bother me a lot more.

i agree with TJMurphy, everybody has a right to a private life. i don't expect people to answer their phone after 6pm, or answer to my emails when i send them out after work.

[JvanEkris]

Well,

I used to be on call 24x7. I was responsible for testing large technical installations (chemical plants etc.) and that meant that i had a 16 hour working day anyway and be on call for emergencies for the other 8 hours. When work goes on 24x7, management is expected to be available for questions as well. This was extremely demanding so i left after a couple of years. I was totally exhausted by that schedule. The holliday i had then i will never forget: i was completely free :D: No fear for calls, no e-mails, no notes at the reception. Great!

At my new job my work-life relation is still a bit blurred. I do private things at work and a lot of work at home. Like Daniel says, sometimes you just need time and energy and that is impossible to guarantee that that is available from 9 to 5.

However, sometimes i want work to stop herassing me. So I got two phones, two e-mail accounts and two MSN-accounts to manage the stream the work comming my way. I must say it works. When my work-phone is killed, people get the message (perhaps my voice-mail message has something to with it). I have white-lists on my private accounts and cell-phone. Work can't reach me even if they tried. It feels great.

Jaap

[Evee Ev]

my old boss was a workaholic and once i got a vpn at home he wanted me to "be him" - check e-mail constantly, call nightly to check on support guys. he wanted to be alpha paged about every little outage we had.

it wasn't cool at all. now that i'm running the department i don't check my e-mail from home or call to "check up" on the support guys. i even told my people to only send pages if a site is 100% down.

and what do you know...everything is still running smooth! and i'm a lot less stressed out!

[Jason Lee]

I have done a pretty good job of seperating home and work. I try to leave as close to 5 as possible. I have seperate email accounts for work and personal. Work does not know any of my personal email accounts or my mobile phone number (they don't pay for it, they can't use it).
I don't check my work email from home, honestly I don't often check my personal email at home. :) I even stoped syncing my ppc with work's exchange server and my work pc. I only sync at home to my hard drive (a lot less corupted data this way too). I do put work stuff on my ppc but most of it is personal, again they don't pay for it, they can't use it. :)

To my father there is nothing else but work. He can't go on vacation or even a weekend without thinking/stressing about his job. It is ruining his health. I don't want to live like that, plain and simple.

[Jeff Rutledge]

If you're fortunate enough to have a company that's supportive and understands the concept of work/home balance, the ability to work 24/7 can be a great thing.

I live in a different time zone than I work (2 hour difference). The technology available to me (VPN, Blackberry, etc.) greatly reduces the potential issues with time zone differences.

Additionally, the fact that I can work at home when necessary gives me flexibility in my work day. I'm seeing the line between work and play becoming more blurred. That's a good thing if it's managed sufficiently.

[erussell]

Why would anyone want to be in touch with their office 24/7? 40 to 50 hours per week of work should be enough. Corporations are getting cheaper by the day, and sending tech jobs overseas.

[eric815]

In a world of compeitiveness and unemployment, we as individuals are driven to do more in order to obtain some level of job security. If not, someone else will out do us and force us to the unemployment lines.

If you look back 20 years ago, the was no 24/7 communication in the masses. We arrived to work at 9 and left at 5. The only thing our IBM XTs and Apple IIs did for us were word processing and simple database management. 300 baud modems allowed us to enter BBS boards and post simple messages in ASCII form. "Voice Mail" was a non existant pair of words. Your phone message was on a cassette tape.

15 years ago we had fax machines. This scared companies like Fedex, but it allowed companies to be more competitve by getting a deal signed 3000 miles away in just minutes. Our 286 PCs coupled with Word Perfect allowed us to be more productive at typing up reports and bosses expected them to be free from spelling errors. 1200 baud modems connected us to Prodigy for entertainment and email. The separation of classes was just begining: Those that had computers and those that did not. If you did not have a PC in 1989, then chances are you are currently making much less salary today then a classmate that did have a PC.

10 years ago, Windows 3.1 was on every Gateway 2000 PC in your office. AOL was starting to come out of the closet. 9600 baud modems connected friends acros the world. If you were lucky to receive 4 emails in a given day, you were excited! Multimedia was thought of as ground breaking with colorful pictures from CD rom games, scanners, and music from your PC speakers. The upcoming Pentium 75mhz processor was big news! You probably owned a 300dpi ink jet printer, a beeper, and had a calling card. If you were a hot on technology, you would call your office secretary from your analog car mounted phone. But to be more competitive, you went out and bought a Motorola DPC-550 Flip phone. All those that did not have a cell phone, still had their fake cell antennas on their rear windows and were losing ground on the competitve edge of technology.

5 years ago you just bought your first digital cell phone (the Motorola Star-Tac 7760). You had a 200 minute plan and called everyone. You made sure work was in order and even answered your cell phone at the dinner table. You just bought a Compaq PC with a Pentium III 450 mhz processor and 128 mb of ram. You ruled Windows 98 and even setup a small network in your home with 2 PCs. You just spent a few hundred bucks on your CD burner and are making copies of all the software at work. You send your resume out to companies in PDF format and make sure your cell number and email address is listed so they can get in touch with you. You instant message all your friends and check your email religously at work. You spend an hour of your work day on eBay and yahoo mail. You have now almost made yoursepf completely accessible to communicate with at least 12 hours of the day. You are expected to reply to emails no more than one day later. You are on the cutting edge of technology.

Today- You were recently uinemployed due to layoffs and now willing to work more for less. You have a Pentium-4 3 Ghz Dell PC with a gig of Ram. You burn DVDs and have a broadband connection. Your walkman is a 30 gigabyte iPod that holds 40,000 songs. You produce more work, job reports, documents and emails then 10 people did 5 years earlier. You have already reached the 2 gig limit of an Outlook PST file 4 times. You no longer get 3 emails a day, but now get 100 emails a day at work and 100 spam emails a day at home. You arrive to work at 7:00 am. You eat lunch at your desk. You leave work at 8 pm. You are stressed out because you still have to complete the work and read all the emails that piled up while you finally took a one week vacation. And now you will have to work 3 more hours a day for 2 weeks to catch up. You go to the beach with your Blackberry on Sundays. You are expected to reply to emails within 30 minutes of receipt. You have a VPN connection to work at home. You ignore your spouse since you have a deadline tomorrow. Congratulations!!!! You now work 24/7!!!

And why???????

Because we all compete with one another to outdue each other and stay ahead of the game. If not, we fall behind and get replaced.

Whats the solution????

We all need to collectively stop from working so hard. We need to ALL colectively place pressure on ourselves and our management that we cant work so hard. Dont answer the cell phone! Leave the Blackberry at home! Make people wait! the more we are eager to due things right away, the more we are expected to do more.

What are the possible ramifications of this solution????

Our jobs get outsourced to India.

[minimage]

I work in PC support for a hospital. My supervisor told me that I should always have my pager on, even when I'm not on-call (which is rotated between 8 or 9 techs). I have VPN access, and it's almost always connected. I generally check my email several times a day, even on weekends, and will send and respond to work email when I see it or think about it, and that could be at 1am on a Sunday, for all I care. Once, when I was out sick, I connected to a PC remotely to do some updates requested by a co-worker. My PPC is set up to sync to our exchange server, with or without a PC. My tablet (not a real TabletPC, but a 100mhz PC in tablet form) has Outlook on it and various work documents and goes with me everywhere. I am by no means a workaholic, but I am obsessed with technology, and any time I pick up some new technology (which is pretty much all the time; I've bought two tablet devices this year alone), work tends to be dragged into it, somewhere. I'm probably just using work to justify the expenditures.
:ppclove:

[Jonathon Watkins]

Very thorough, thoughfull post Eric815, thought I don't like the conclusion. :?

There do seems to be some companies like MS that do respect their workers and recognise that outsourcing can actually *increase* costs as well as drive staff morale down the pan and alienate customers. Just look at HP at the moment for how bad things can get. :roll:

[Sheena]

The problem lies not with management, but collectively within ourselves.
Completely agreed, eric, even with the gloomy conclusion. :cry: Most of you here are either executives, IT, or support (or any combination of those) that take the "needed 24/7" as part of your job description, but even as a regular employee like myself some companies will ask that you remain in touch, or try to test your loyalty & their own ability to pull your strings. In my previous job I was once tracked down at the community college nearby (someone went classroom to classroom 8O ) on a Saturday afternoon, and I spent the rest of the weekend preparing a report that was forgotten by 11am Monday. I had a cell, but it was my own & they didn't have the #. :twisted: Yes, you bet that little exercise was one of the reasons why I left, the typical power play. The line must be drawn somewhere.

These days I'm wired to everything, but again my job doesn't really require it & connectivity is used mostly for my convenience. I am on call anytime in the sense that my boss knows where to find me in an emergency, but that's not abused (so far). Actually it worked to my advantage a year back when we had a bus strike & I was allowed to work from home some days.

As much as it's nice to be needed all the time (precious job security!), it's up to each one of us to remember (& remind others), that it's just a job, not our reason for living.

Rosie