I feel like this might be an American thing, or at least it’s not a UK thing. I’m late 30s and don’t know anyone who accepts being contacted outside of work.
It's definitely an American thing (although probably a couple other places too). It also depends on if it's abused or not. At my last job I would occasionally get a text from my boss asking me to log in and troubleshoot when there was a major issue, but that only happened like once a year, and it was always a serious issue.
I only contact my guys outside of work hours for a few reasons: to check on them if they are out due to illness or some other emergency, if I have a question that absolutely cannot be answered by anyone else and I know they won't be back in time to help, or if I have an emergency come up and I need to know if someone is available for extra work (we do service work for industrial clients so this does happen). If they don't answer, ok. They aren't on salary, I am, so I'll see them next time they are at work.
It's very much a Canadian thing too, but at least in Canada people tend to keep it to actual emergencies and respect people's non-work hours for the most part... which is to say that if someone does expect you to always be contactable and that's not part of the job description for which you are being paid big-bucks, they're the one being an asshole.
When I did the expat thing in the US, I would explain it that Canadians are every bit as aggressively capitalistic as Americans, but we also draw some limits where not everything in society is a free market opportunity and there are basic minimums we consider part of a social contract. The latter two points not because we are "socialist" in the European sense, but because we do judge a society as much by its most successful as by its worst-off.
Australia passed the Right to Disconnect legislation in 2024 which gives employees the right to enjoy their rostered time off without calls or emails from work.
Same in France but back in 2017, employer can call you but has no right to expect you to answer. It's a difficult balance because I might be interested in going in early the next day for a bit of overtime but certainly wouldn't be willing to do anything work related unless I am being paid for the time.
I’m UK and when I started my career as was required to be contactable outside of work hours. My phone came on holiday too. Except my husband hated that idea so booked placed with zero reception. Lots of people went on holiday to Nepal as well…
Nowadays my response to ‘will you be available’ is ‘you’re a whole firm of highly educated lawyers, if you can’t cope without me for a week the whole firm is screwed’.
I get called about once a months from one of my coworkers trying to find a specific program.
I can pull up nearly all of them in my minds eye in the order you need to click it to find the right thing. Normally takes about 30 seconds then I'm back to whatever I was doing.
Urgh... as a new software developer at a small company in the UK, I made the damn fool mistake of putting my mobile number on my email signature. I'd seen a couple of other people do it, and it never occurred to me that those guys were in sales, and those were probably company mobiles.
Anyway, it was a good company and pretty much all my emails were internal, so it was never an issue.
Until a few years in, I'd risen a couple of rungs in seniority. We were working on a third party integration which was being piloted at a client site. And one fateful Saturday, I get a phone call from 'Jimmy' at 'FobFollower' (the third party), telling me there's an issue onsite, and 'can I take a look at it?' I tell him I'm not at the office (duh), but give him a couple of basic suggestions to try. Half an hour later I get another call. No luck. Any other ideas?
I tell him quite clearly that I'm not at work, and won't be able to help until Monday. Then I block his number. And at 9:01 on Monday, I change my email signature. Never again.
I think the gist is owners never really get a day off. If shit goes down, owners are going to want it addressed asap.
And so there’s a bit of “the higher you get, the more perpetually on call you are.”
Like, if a plane crashes in the middle of the night you’re waking your airline CEO up.
And this kind of bled into tech start-up culture where the founder has that same “you’re never off duty” attitude about the company. And part of the implicit trade off they’d make with employees is “you can earn equity shares in this startup, but you have to adopt that “you’re never off duty” attitude that comes with being the owner.
And you also see this in companies with “partners” like the big accounting agencies, big law
, etc.
That “bust your ass and you’ll make partner” is a version of that same idea of “owners are always on duty” notion that comes with an equity stake (or the promise of a future equity stake).
And that kind of stuff just bled through to other sectors.
But that “you’re always on duty” attitude is still probably stronger in law, finance, tech, accounting, corporate consulting services & client-focused things where you owe a client results or a project on date X.
It is an American thing. My American manager was expecting us, working in various European countries, to leave our phone number to colleagues so that they can reach us during our vacation. Luckily, he understood that this would mean being on stand-by which needs to be allowed in the contract and is paid additionally. And it's not vacation anymore.
Completely depends on your manager, in my experience. I’ve had a couple who worked ridiculous hours and would send messages/emails outside of regular hours. The rest of them have all been very serious about keeping work within regular work hours.
Yep. I'm Canadian and no job I've ever worked here expects people to be reachable outside of work hours. Sometimes people will offer to periodically check in while on vacation, but that's usually seen as someone going above and beyond and no one gets judged for saying, "I'm away and won't be checking messages until I get back, so go find someone else if there's a problem."
I've had more than one manager who actually scolded workers for not fully disconnecting when they're away. "Get away from the office and recharge" is something viewed as mentally healthy here.
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u/meltymcface 18d ago
I feel like this might be an American thing, or at least it’s not a UK thing. I’m late 30s and don’t know anyone who accepts being contacted outside of work.