NYTimes.com: You might envy the serene workers at Daimler, the German automaker. On vacations, employees can set their corporate email to “holiday mode.” Anyone who emails them gets an auto-reply saying the employee isn’t in, and offering contact details for an alternate, on-call staff person. Then poof, the incoming email is deleted — so that employees don’t have to return to inboxes engorged with digital missives in their absence. “The idea behind it is to give people a break and let them rest,” a Daimler spokesman told Time magazine. “Then they can come back to work with a fresh spirit.”
7 comments:
This is a great article that addresses a huge issue in the modern day American workforce. With the technology of smartphones, work has the ability to follow people essentially wherever they go. While this technology surely has the ability to lower our stress levels, it also has the ability to transform us into workaholics (without even knowing it!) When I was a kid and my family went on vacations, I have clear memories of my dad being on his phone for 20% of the vacation. He would say "let me just check this one email" and two hours later, he was five emails and two conference calls deep in his work that he was supposed to leave at home. Now that I too receive "work" emails, I can sympathize with my dad's need to check up on work during his times of leisure. This feeling of stress and guilt when unplugging from work is something that is quickly becoming a part of our workforce's culture. This article definitely provides some insight as to why this behavior is harmful both for our mental sanity and our actual work.
This is a great article that addresses a huge issue in the modern day American workforce. With the technology of smartphones, work has the ability to follow people essentially wherever they go. While this technology surely has the ability to lower our stress levels, it also has the ability to transform us into workaholics (without even knowing it!) When I was a kid and my family went on vacations, I have clear memories of my dad being on his phone for 20% of the vacation. He would say "let me just check this one email" and two hours later, he was five emails and two conference calls deep in his work that he was supposed to leave at home. Now that I too receive "work" emails, I can sympathize with my dad's need to check up on work during his times of leisure. This feeling of stress and guilt when unplugging from work is something that is quickly becoming a part of our workforce's culture. This article definitely provides some insight as to why this behavior is harmful both for our mental sanity and our actual work.
A performing arts center that I worked for right after undergrad supported this theory of the 7-to-7 working. It was incredible to see how fellow employees either embraced it or fought it. While at first it seemed like a test, more of a “you’re not required to do anything outside of this time frame” it became very clear after I didn’t follow this rule the first time that it was actually a rule to be followed. I’m not going to lie, I resisted it. I was unsure that I could get everything done and I was a younger employee and eager to prove myself, but you know what? I got everything done in plenty of time and the world didn’t explode. I found that I was able to have a life outside of my job and to go home at night and take care of myself mentally, coming back refreshed the next day at work. The key to this was that the environment I was working for supported this ideal. Hopefully more people can latch onto this for the sake of their employees whenever possible.
I love the tone and message of this article. I know for my family who's always on the go it can sometime be hard for them to check emails at certain times or always checking their emails. When ever I'm with my mother, even if it's just a girls night, I always felt like she was working 24/7. She was always sending email. It sometime took her a few hours to finish just one. This article really shows how being a "workaholic" or just checking your messages a lot can create more and more stress on yourself. I think people need to step away from their devices focus on what life has to offer instead of what's on their phone for more than 3 hours a day. People need to realize that phones weren't always around. Even if they make our days easier, they are still detaching us from our culture and our life.
I agree with this article to a point. As a freshman, I am overwhelmed with the amount of emails that I receive everyday. The concept of getting ten to fifteen emails per day is such a change from the life of a high school student of one to three. When my parents said they received hundreds of emails a day, I laughed. Now I am struggling to keep all the important emails in an place where I can find them easily. Although I am getting the hang of it, weekends off from the constant emails would be wonderful. I think that by the end of the year I will be so used to it, though, that I will look back at this comment and laugh.
This article should be widely distributed to all companies. The concept of off time that is truly absent of any work is great and should really be embraced more. The most interesting thing is that productivity actually goes up when you limit when employees can email each other. The part about confidence and empowerment is also really fascinating and I'd never have thought it about it the way the article does. If you send an email about every little thing that you have a question about instead of biting the bullet and just making a judgement call, it makes you less self-confident. Sometimes a phone call or a face-to-face conversation is actually more productive than an email where it is much easier to miscommunicate. Cutting down on emails sounds like a great idea.
This article hit it right on the nose. Whenever I need to take a break from my phone, I always feel really crappy coming back and seeing so many notifications and unread emails. It's daunting. Even with spam filters, I get so many emails from CMU alone that it's hard to discern which ones are actually important. What really caught my eye is that statistic that the average worker checks their email 74 times a day. Thinking about it, that's not such an unrealistic number. It's certainly astounding, but I can certainly believe it. One aspect of this system that I really like is the 7 to 7 rule, saying that you shouldn't send emails to colleagues between the hours of 7pm and 7am. You can, of course, check your own email, but you're discouraged to send anything out. While this will not work for theatre due to our crazy hours, I do like the idea of having a "do not send" time. I can't tell you what it should be, but I endorse it whole-heartedly.
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