I agree. Can you imagine how management would feel if you would allow your work hours to be interrupted by friends and family asking for favors and going ahead and doing them? Hey, I need a lift, can you help? I fight my keys inside the car, can you help me get in my car? Yes “everyone“ shops in line while at work, but few people are anti social robots. Point is you got a few hours to yourself after work, employers should respect that.
> Can you imagine how management would feel if you would allow your work hours to be interrupted by friends and family asking for favors and going ahead and doing them? Hey, I need a lift, can you help?
Our executives specifically asked middle management to be flexible to allow employees time to handle errands and favors during normal business hours. Within my team we've been stepping up to handle on-call coverage so on-call can handle family stuff during the day.
Management has been extremely flexible at my current company, and at one of the two companies I worked at before this one. It's been fine if people shift their working hours forward or back a few hours to avoid commute traffic or go off in the middle of the day to take care of personal stuff. This sometimes included things like "I need a lift" where one cubemate would go pick up another cubemate. Other times it would be phone calls, medical stuff, mental health breaks, double lunches an hour apart because someone was extra hungry/anxious/restless, weird errands like banking, walks outside around the block with coworkers, anything involving children, etc. In general at my salaried jobs I've found management to be more focused on team and individual output than input.
In exchange, I've had no personal qualms responding to coworkers if they emailed or messaged at 11pm and I happened to be awake to see it for whatever reason. Management certainly never expected people to work at these hours and generally actively discouraged it except during strictly-defined emergencies. I'd certainly have pushed back on any kind of expectation like this, and in all honesty I think when people work odd hours sometimes managers strongly question their time management skills. But some colleagues seemed to have odd working hours and I both enjoy my work and enjoy helping / chatting / troubleshooting with my coworkers. So if I wasn't doing anything else I'd usually respond and provide the info they needed to get past their blocker.
A key part of this though, is that I'm doing this with/for other employees at my level who happen to have asynchronous working hours, not at the insistence of management.
Also notable, was that the company that was very strict about clocking in/out using a fingerprint scanner when arriving, or while taking lunch, also never saw any employees working before 8:15am or after 5:15pm. In their case this seemed like dysfunction, due to their overall poor culture. But I could see in a hypothetical healthier culture that this could be a strong positive for many employees.
I think at the end of the day, employees should feel comfortable ignoring pretty much any communication they receive outside of working hours. I also feel like they should feel comfortable responding to off-hour communication if they find it rewarding, engaging, or simply not a hassle.
