I just came across a German-language article on Daimler’s new “Life Balance” rules and I was surprised at some of the rights that Daimler employees will get. The one that most shocked me was that from next year on employees can opt to automatically delete all emails that they receive during their holiday! Yes, delete. Not just an auto-responder that they are on holiday and will answer after they are back, but a message that the message has been deleted and the name of someone who replaces the employee during their vacation.
Don’t get me wrong, when you are an employee you don’t have to work 24/7 and vacation should be a real vacation. I guess if you don’t want to check your email during your holiday that should be okay if you are not an entrepreneur or work for a start-up. But automatically deleting messages goes way too far. Suppose you are a customer sending an email to Daimler and you get a reply that your email has been deleted and that you should contact someone else… Ridiculous.
The problem is that once one company starts doing this, employees at other companies may also want these privileges. Maybe a huge multinational can survive with this kind of rules, but there is no way a start-up could ever implement this.
If I look back at the 7 years that I worked at Daimler I never worked much during my holidays, that was just not the company culture. The work basically stopped for 1, 2 or even 3 weeks and when you came back you had to work on a backlog of emails and especially (at that time) big piles of snail mail and memos. It felt good to work hard on that for a few days, knowing that you did not miss anything. I can’t imagine coming back from a holiday and seeing an empty inbox, it would scare me not knowing what had happened while I was not there.
Next to that, a lot of work that I did was not something that someone could just take over. You had to know the background of ongoing discussions and you would need to have access to all my past emails and files to figure those out. It’s not like you just replace someone working on a production line for a few weeks.
I guess it’s good that I am not a manager at Daimler anymore, it would literally freak me out if people working for me would delete their mails during a holiday. Of course it would be a quick way to figure out which employees are the least motivated or could easily be replaced, but I guess as a manager you would know that already anyway (and try firing someone in Germany, it’s almost impossible!).
Volkswagen went even further than this last year, for some of their employees Blackberry email stops working at 6:15 PM and only turns on again at 7 AM the next morning. I wonder if this actually works, it would probably cause me more stress knowing that I could not check or answer my email.
I just started reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and the world that she describes in her book reminds me a bit of what’s happening with employee rights in Germany. Maybe my attitude toward work and employee rights has changed too much after 13 years in China? Is this the new normal in Europe or do Europeans also see this as a step too far?
Well the VW Blackberrything is just for tarriff staff, means not for managers that have individual contracts…
Marc, I’m working at your former employer and from my talks I find that the Autodelete functionality for emails is seen as quite ridiculous by most of my colleagues across various units.
Apparently, the creators of the Autodelete innovation heard about these views as well and came up with another variation: Autoforwarding to a colleague.
But: in terms of improved work-life-balance for yourself this would mean to burden someone else’s balance with your email correspondence.
In my view, restraints for workaholics can only come from within: it is the person who needs to be able to switch off and not the company or an IT system. As an intrapreneur, I often write and check emails beyond standard corporate working hours, but I can definitely spend a weekend offline if I feel like doing so.