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

reuters.com

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

#411

Post by roshankhan28 »

dools wrote: post #258
steelframe wrote: post #39

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…

you create such a great linkedin post on this story, you will get quite good traffic. But i think the guy who told you to lie is not wrong. hear me out. He tried to save money. he didnt steal or do anything but. am not saying what he did was right, but it was not harmful or wrong. he should have framed the sentence better so it would make the contractor feel that he was not being promised anything. he may have had his own reasons. its how life works.

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

#412

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #376
vitaflo wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud.

> If you’re bad enough at your job to get fired you basically are a fraud. Depends on who thinks you are bad enough and how they came to the conclusion. If your boss thinks you are bad enough - the question is why do they think so? Is it laziness, incompetence, or merely small nonsense that the boss couldn't accept retroactively? Is this all via stack rank or fake BS quotas? What is it?

Even without stack ranking, if you lead a team large enough, you get people who are struggling more than others. Sometimes it’s clearly situational: they are more junior and are still learning the ropes, the project is going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver, they are going through a rough patch and it’s hard to deliver and sometimes it’s just that their skillset is mismatched with what they have to do. In this case, you have to decide if it’s a case where training will solve the issue or if having someone else there would be better for everyone. And yes, not constantly being in conflict with everyone is also a professional skill.

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

#413

Post by GJim »

ryan69howard wrote: post #241
nicbou wrote: post #165

This is already the case in Germany. It also applies to vacation and sick days. Above all, it's deeply ingrained in German culture, so that no one expects to reach you outside of your working hours. I help people settle in Germany, and it's one of the main cultural aspects I cover. The other is how normal it is to take sick days.

Result: complete loss of freedom to have flexible working hours and use the company office space

Americans really do argue for the right to be treated like dirt don't they!

I can assure you old sport, not being contactable outside working hours has nothing whatsoever to do with requesting flexible working hours. And quite why an employee would like to "use the company office space" (be in work!) outside working hours I've no idea!

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

#414

Post by setr »

Suppafly wrote: post #381
takinola wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 under…

>They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in. That's a good point and honestly is often caused by the seller in the first place. A lot of tools used by businesses are intentionally not priced or priced on a floating scale so that the sales team has an opportunity to introduce fake discounts to make the sale, but ultimately this signals to the buyer that negotiation is…

Doing business in the Middle East, we ran into the mistake of not intentionally pricing 20% higher than what we were actually aiming for. Even if you’re not actually looking to negotiate, you still need to keep a buffer for the negotiator to claim he’s done his job effectively — and some room for his boss too.

Doing contract work, I usually find that eventually extra work gets identified during the project; no one wants to do the paperwork around a change order (or more importantly, explain to their boss[es] why a change order is needed), so the easiest solution is to pad the initial pricing to account for it, and then when it comes up do it pro-bono. The larger the company, the more you buffer, as the paperwork gets worse and the misidentified scope becomes more likely.

And then of course a lot of companies end up with “yearly budgets”, and are price-insensitive as long as you stay in their remaining budget. Not pricing as much as the budget allows is just leaving money on the table.

That is, the floating price isn’t just some sales fuckery to trick buyers into bad deals (although it probably often does happen) — there’s some legitimacy to the madness. And buyers love haggling; IME it starts with haggling on direct price/effort, and then with haggling on scope. They want the project price to be fixed after haggling, not before.

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

#415

Post by iforgotpassword »

mulmen wrote: post #407
iforgotpassword wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Some nudges” is a red flag to me, regardless of race. You think you communicated a message but aren’t sure if it was understood. Hence the "gave a very clear speech" part. If you don't get it at that point then I don't care if you're just stupid or it's cultural differences, at some point you have to adapt to the environment you work in. And no, there were no language barriers involved.

Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made. After redemption was possible. At that point you’re just reinforcing your perceptions. Your job as a manager is to manage that expectation. If you fire someone for it that’s your failure.

> Yeah but the “very clear speech” came later, after the decision was made.

Huh? I clearly stated they had another three months at that point. Nothing changed, so they got the boot three months later. What the heck do you expect? Another two years? At this point I have to assume malice from your side. I guess you're just one of these people yourself. Blame everyone and everything but yourself.

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

#416

Post by CalRobert »

Flop7331 wrote: post #385
CalRobert wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really suggesting people use snail mail simply for async?

LMAO! No... How did you even get that? > Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday I'm suggesting when you have that random thought, you write it the fuck down -- even if you have to add a reminder to call or email someone at an appropriate time. I'm kind of shocked that this is some new development to people.

That adds one more opportunity to forget though. There’s no need to be condescending.

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

#418

Post by ghaff »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #384
mapt wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small fraction of the time, private equity is brought in to make an ailing, breakeven business profitable. Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets. And then the third portion of the time, the business is generating reliable, modest long-term returns, a "blue-chip" company. Private equity doubles down on future growth that is not projected, gets the company into debt to…

> Much more often, it's to bite off limbs until it dies, feasting on cashflow and assets This can be a legitimate strategy. I know someone who made millions buying yellow pages companies and managing them for de-growth.

Eastman Kodak is a good example. Fujifilm arguably sort of came out the other side but much smaller company in much different country.

B&M retail, especially in the traditional department store sense, is much reduced. Could Sears have become Amazon (presumably including AWS)? I guess. Would anyone to a first approximation who was employed at Sears still be there? Probably not. Would Sears as it existed have brought any particular assets or expertise to the table? Probably not.

At some point, reinvention is sort of pointless because it means bringing along a lot of baggage that has net negative value.

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

#419

Post by Flop7331 »

CalRobert wrote: post #416
Flop7331 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMAO! No... How did you even get that? > Sometimes I get a random thought on a Saturday I'm suggesting when you have that random thought, you write it the fuck down -- even if you have to add a reminder to call or email someone at an appropriate time. I'm kind of shocked that this is some new development to people.

That adds one more opportunity to forget though. There’s no need to be condescending.

Yes, there is a need to be condescending. Outsourcing your personal notepad by emailing people off-hours is silly, rude, and abusive. That kind of behavior warrants direct confrontation and aggressive ridicule.

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

#420

Post by CalRobert »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #389
glitcher wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often others don't behave in the same way we would or even the way we would expect. My suggestion is in the spirit of trying to offer a little help to your fellow teammates with a few extra clicks, in what seems like a very low effort compromise. I suppose it depends on your team dynamics, size, structure, etc. I work with a small, tight knit team and if I already knew someone was going to act a little neurotic with…

Large corporate setting for sure and yes I ended up doing scheduled emails specifically for this person. But im not sure the original cause of why they couldn’t stop checking. I couldn’t control everyone’s emails in the whole group either.

I suspect it was when smart phones started defaulting to notifications for every email. A scourge.
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