Employee Sends After-Hours Email, CEO Has The Most Impressive Response

A CEO understands the value of work-life balance and prohibits employees from sending emails after work hours unless it’s an emergency.

CEO understands the need for limits

For many of us, COVID-19 has brought work home. The line between job and life has been blurred with remote work and it’s easy to feel like you’re working for all of your waking hours.

But one CEO wants to preserve his employees’ work-life balance (remember that!?).

Robert Sweeney, CEO at Facet posted on LinkedIn about a policy of no work emails or Slack messages after hours. And he’s serious about enforcing it.

When one employee tried to send an email, he sent them this response:

“Everyone is talking about the late night or over the weekend messages they get from you. You can tell people not to read them, but that doesn’t work. It makes their phone buzz late at night.

Plus, if we needed to get a hold of someone after hours for an emergency, we won’t be able to because we’ve told them to ignore after hours messages.

There is a feature in Outlook that lets you schedule an email to go out at a specific date/time. Can you start scheduling your emails to go out at 8:30am on the next business day? Only use slack after hours and on weekends when it’s an emergency.

In Outlook you just click on the down arrow on the send button and it gives you the option to schedule it to go out later.

>> Their reply: Good suggestion. Thank you
>> My response: Not a suggestion. :)”

Work-life balance is possible

Sure, a company may say it believes in work-life balance, but does your boss still permit after-work messages? Most do, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Over in Germany, the country is considering enshrining no work emails as a homeworking right. In France, companies haven’t been allowed to send their employees after-work emails for years.

And coronavirus has only amplified the need for preserving work-life balance while many of us work remotely. Just ask this woman who wanted to work less because she was helping her child learn at home (the boss said ‘no,’ for the best reason possible).

Set boundaries

If you’re in the C-suite at your company, have you considered implementing a similar policy at your work? Why not?

As for employees, you’re responsible, too. If you don’t have to initiate an after-hours message, don’t. If you don’t set boundaries, it can hurt your relationships and lead to burn-out, and nobody wants that.

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