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Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

reuters.com

311–320 of 449 posts

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#311
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean interrupting is one of the harder social actions in my opinion, especially in the workplace. So much of this comes from culture, family and your personality. I say this as someone who interrupts, and loves to be interrupted. Am I a kid in an adult body, or are my norms different than yours?

That depends entirely on if you ask permission before you interrupt another person.

I really don't mean to be pedantic, but that would already be interrupting someone right?

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#312
post #258

I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company w…

Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price". It was one of the first times I realised that people are…

Context matters. When I walk into a high-end store and see a shirt on sale for $X, I assume that I need to pay $X to get the shirt. If I see a shirt at a flea-market priced at $Y, I assume I can get the shirt for some percentage off by just bargaining. The sellers are also aware of this context and, presumably, set their prices accordingly. The same thing regularly happens in business. For most services, people understand that pricing is not fixed and act accordingly. They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#313
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a jerk extends all around. As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist. Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claim…

In my experience “performance” is code for “I don’t like you”. I have never seen a performance metric that isn’t arbitrary and inconsistent. Not just between peers but day to day for an individual. PIPs are just CYA for HR. I can’t speak to these specific situations because I wasn’t there but when managers speak about “performance” they’re using a euphemism for their perception. This can easily feel like racism becau…

In your experience what are legitimate grounds to fire someone?

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#314

> But the Australian Industry Group, an employer group, says ambiguity about how the rule applies will create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs will become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added. Whenever I encounter someone professionally who can't deal with a little ambiguity about when it's appropriate to interrupt someone; I feel like I'm working with a child trapped in an adult's body. "Ch…

It gets worse when infantile bully managers treat other adults like children, such as adversarial treatment or imposing unnecessary inconveniences like RTO.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#315
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends entirely on if you ask permission before you interrupt another person.

I really don't mean to be pedantic, but that would already be interrupting someone right?

Eh I mean it would depend on how your doing it really, Im thinking its the difference between "hey sorry to interrupt, I have a question do you have a minute?" vs "hey {question}"

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning. I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week…

I think it's also a lot more work for new teachers since they can't reuse lesson plans. I think it's probably quite possible after a few years to be a good teacher and also not spend all your free time marking and preparing lesson plans... but it's still hard work and underpaid. I'll stick with my overpaid and stress free programming job, thanks!

A lot of assignments can be partially machine graded, even if they think they can’t be.

Teachers are usually luddites though…

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weekend work etc. needs to be approved by a person's manager, so weekend-work without approval would in practice not be compensated (it's possible that technically they should compensate it then fire you for insubordination). The hurdles for "exempt" are way higher than in the US. I doubt it is actually done much in practice, although an employee who wants to be left alone on the weekend certainly could. I would also…

> I would also expect that guidance of "don't read your e-mail outside of working hours" would be sufficient to be able to send e-mail to employees at any day or hour I sometimes want to send my employees emails over the weekend as I think of something and don't want to forget. But there are certain employees that I know will immediately act on the email, which I actually don't want. So I end up emailing myself and t…

> I think of something and don't want to forget.

This is a you problem. Fix the forgetting part, you are management that's literally your job. Leave a post it somewhere, start keeping a checklist, whatever.

Stop making it your employees' problem.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most things, there's a gaping chasm of variance between teachers that are phoning it in and teachers that want to engage their students in learning. I know a teacher who leaves for work at 6:30am, gets home after 5:30pm most nights, cooks dinner for the family, and spends the rest of her evening marking work and preparing lesson plans for the next few days. Then there's preparing reports, which is like a 6-week…

When you say preparing lesson plans, is that like printing out worksheets or is it literally planning out what the lesson is going to be? I'm not a teacher so am obviously missing context, but I don't understand how this part isn't standardised for every teacher following the same curriculum. It would be like asking each individual teacher to write a new textbook every year.

You’re going to get meme responses about why this is the case from Americans who have never been to countries with centralized education systems, but the only reason that America doesn’t do this is our strong federalism and decentralized, local, education system.

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#319
post #292

> But the Australian Industry Group, an employer group, says ambiguity about how the rule applies will create confusion for bosses and workers. Jobs will become less flexible and in doing so slow the economy, it added. Whenever I encounter someone professionally who can't deal with a little ambiguity about when it's appropriate to interrupt someone; I feel like I'm working with a child trapped in an adult's body. "Ch…

I mean interrupting is one of the harder social actions in my opinion, especially in the workplace. So much of this comes from culture, family and your personality. I say this as someone who interrupts, and loves to be interrupted. Am I a kid in an adult body, or are my norms different than yours?

> “I … love to be interrupted”

Can you elaborate on this?

Re: Australian employees now have the right to ignore work emails, calls after hours

#320
post #285
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, can an employer fire you even if you didn't make a fault? What country are you in?

Probably the US - it's scary over there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Our work culture is a strong part of why the US is so economically dominant.

Reap what you sow “I work to live not live to work” crowd. Your destiny is to be further economically colonized by the “I live to work” crowd.

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