As you know, I’ve recently moved to OggaDoon from my previous company based in London. What initially attracted me to OggaDoon was both the size of the company and the flexibility on offer; it was miles away, literally and figuratively, from my previous company which encourage an ‘always on-call’ culture.
I previously worked for a sales company where the team worked 10 hour days, glued to LinkedIn, emails and their phones. What was most surprising, and a little disheartening was that I was expected to keep the same hours and be glued to my inbox. As a digital marketer, it is my role to have an attachment to technology and trends, but outside of work hours, I keep my social media and mobile phone usage to a minimum. Honestly, if you try sending me a meme or a story, chances are I’ve already seen it.
Alarm bells rang when I was asked to download WhatsApp and join the company group chat as ‘part of my role’. When I joined I soon realised the extent to which almost all conversations in WhatsApp were, for want of a better word, irrelevant.
Highlights from the essential company WhatsApp included:
1. Hundreds of messaged exchanged between midnight and 4am on the weekends
2. Personal social photos which automatically saved to my phone (thank you WhatsApp)
3. Completely missing important, work-related questions because of constant conversations happening every day
4. Inappropriate jokes masked as ‘banter’
It seemed like WhatsApp was an essential part of the culture; keeping everyone engaged with one another. For me, it felt like an overstep into my downtime and I had a hard time separating work goings on with chilling out.
I struggled with accepting that this might be the norm for every workplace.
This story really sparked debate in the OggaDoon office where we unanimously agreed that being always connected to work leads to burn out. However, a part of me feels that it’s my duty to be on-call and checking work conversations in case I miss anything important from a colleague or client because this attitude was drilled into me during my first major job after university.
Although there is a part of me that has no issue with checking Slack outside of work hours, even if I’m on holiday – I’m so guilty of this. For me, checking work-related ‘stuff’ on my terms doesn’t feel like work because I’m checking it because I want to, not because I have to.
Let me give you an example. Imagine being sat by the swimming pool, pina colada in one hand, sun beating down on you then your phone pings: the analytics report from the latest AdWords campaign you put together comes through…
Do you:
a) Read it when you get back to work alongside all the other stuff you have to catch up on
b) Read it at a leisurely pace while sipping your pina colada and thinking about how lucky you are that you don’t have to worry about it
Ok….those might be pretty biased answers, but for me, I’d much rather just catch up on it in my own time than add it to the mountain of things I have to do when I get back. All in all though, during a normal working week all work communications should be kept between normal working hours with an hour buffer before work so everyone can hit the ground running once in the office. Do I want to have to forcibly mute my notifications? No. Would it be ideal if everyone shared these ‘work hours’? Yes.
I think it’s both unreasonable and unhealthy for employers or employees to be pressured into being ‘on-call’ when the job doesn’t demand it and any significant work done outside of work hours should be compensated with overtime pay, holiday or time off. It demonstrates that you value that employee’s input. Any work platforms such as Slack, WhatsApp etc. should be used for work conversation only, while chit chat is moved to different conversations, even if you want to keep it in Slack or WhatsApp.
Let’s avoid the blurring of lines between work and social, and prevent important work messages being missed.
