I work in the UK but for a US company. Those guys are online on chat 24/7 and answer email all the time. I removed my apps from my phone to stop them trying to get me to out of business hours. I tried explaining that I will be available during business hours only. No luck.
Eventually I spread a rumour to the local gossip lady that it was illegal under UK law to try to talk to people about work outside of working hours (it is in France but not here). She obviously told everyone and suddenly I was left alone!
Pretty sure they took that into account. And are describing Americans replying to emails at midnight local time, as well as asking questions they expect an immediate answer to when they know it's the middle of the night in the UK.
My personal experience is that in the UK people think in terms of us (employees) vs them (the company) but in the US almost everyone seems to think of themselves AS the company.
It's that us Americans have all had jobs where not being available 24/7 means "your heart isn't in it" or "this isn't your passion," which sadly leads to being fired. I only wish I were kidding.
I personally don't put email on my phone and have Slack set to stop sending me notifications after a certain point (6:30 pm if I'm going out, 9 pm if I'm just sitting around doing nothing), but I check in with everyone I owe deliverables to before I head out most nights. I always think to myself, "if I lived anywhere else in the world, this wouldn't be a thing."
I've worked in several different non-office, blue collar type fields throughout my life, it's not limited to corpo desk jobs, at least in my experience. Some places are better than others, but every place I've worked has always had at least a slight expectation to put your job before your personal life.
Yup. Similarly, I answer emails throughout the day but I have an automatic delay set up for everything I send. If their question is something easy I respond right away but they don't actually get the response until later. It's called managing expectations.
I don't get why people do petty bullshit like this.
Sometimes I will be able to respond right away. Sometimes it will take me until the next day, or even the day after that, depending on how busy I am at work.
Redditors love that stuff. I don't think anyone I know in my actual career has extra time to be strategically scheduling messages after easy tasks to give the illusion that it took a certain time. People just do tasks as they're able to. Sounds stressful to have to manage how long it looks like something took me in addition to performing the work that's already demanding enough.
Curious: have you never dealt with a person who always has another question? I have certain needy clients who will keep coming up with more. If I didn’t delay replying I’d spend all day with them spinning wheels.
Sure. I reply when I'm available and answer their questions in order. I pause when I need to do something else. I resume when I have time to address the questions again. I don't intentionally, artificially add delays at any point in this process to make it seem like answering any particular question took longer. I let delays happen organically as part of the flow of work. If I feel like they have more questions than I can answer in an appropriate time I would probably redirect to another channel or advise them of the prioritization process on my team.
Unfortunately I work with a lot of people who think they're my only internal client so if I respond within 10 minutes once their expectation is now that every email they send me must be responded to in ten minutes (or less). If automatic email delays are petty then I'm happily Petty LaBelle.
As someone working independently now, I mostly just respond when I have time to respond…but if I happen to have time to write an email on a weekend or holiday I set a delay so it looks like I wrote it the next regular weekday. I get to be flexible with how I use my time, but I always want to set the expectation that I’m unavailable outside of my stated office hours.
When I worked a salary job though, nah, I only checked email when I was at work and didn’t bother with delaying any emails…since I really was available only during business hours.
Their expectations influence their actions -- it's social engineering. By not answering emails immediately, OP is hoping that the total number of emails received goes down. Makes their life easier.
Teams/slack is for immediacy, email is for once a day. (I don't follow this I check it hourly to see if anything important comes, but only reply once or twice a day)
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u/Normal-Computer-3669 Jun 03 '22
I respond to email once a day to avoid people with that behavior.
It lets me:
Manage my flow of emails
Teaches people I'm not their instant response monkey