Trapped in a loop (Week 4 blog: work life permeating into home life)

One of the great things about office work is that there’s always a connection between you and the office, so if you ever want to get ahead on your work there’s always an option for you to do so – after all, if you get more work done now it means you don’t have to put as much effort in on the day right?

I could barely type that with a straight face after having worked in a job with information technology for the past 3 or so years and always being on call, but I remember when I first started how this was exactly the thought process amongst all the new employees. What we didn’t realise is that if we responded to emails after hours, it would become an expectation and subsequently a demand of the boss to make sure that we were always up to date with emails and work. This meant that our first few weeks of lazing back eventually came to bite us hard as our workloads were increased, with extra work being assigned by email (which had an auto respond when read, so the boss knew you’d viewed it) that couldn’t be easily avoided.

Get it? It's Office Space and enough people have done this topic its beating a dead horse. Ah bugger it...

In a tutorial today this was the point of the discussion – While communications technologies have allowed people to be ever more connected with the internet it now has the added side effect of connecting them with their place of work, allowing them to check emails at whatever time in the morning, never really giving them a chance to take a break. If my above example isn’t proof of this occuring I’m not sure what else I can include to demonstrate it.

But the other point that no one seemed able to address was how anyone can create a strict demarcation between work life and home life in an ever connecting world. Some students in the class pointed out that manual labour jobs often had a strict clock on and clock off time, but I remember working as a manager in retail we were often encouraged to get employees to do as much work after they clock off as we possibly can (ie empty a trash can on the way out, move some stock, etc…), and I can’t help but think of the old days where information workers would just stay in the office until late in the evening to get work done, so I don’t think that’s an option.

The other alternatives I can think of and have tried with varying degrees of success were A) don’t do the extra work. Meant I had to do more work on the day but at least I got more time off. B) be unethical in your work. This means employ every trick possible to get out of work such as re-allocating it, creating a fictitious report you have to work on and convincing the boss its real and finally setting up an auto reply for your email that says it failed to deliver to your address. C) Work harder and have the backlog cleared by the end of the day. This one isn’t even viable all the time, due to the sheer number of hours it takes to do anything even when working to the best of your ability

These three options that I saw were always something that I felt weren’t quite as productive for the business as possible, however there’s just too much of an ingrained culture in most businesses of working outside of work hours for me to see any alternative solutions other than to quit your job and try and find one with better conditions.

It’s something that I feel is going to be an increasing problem in the workforce as we grow ever more connected it means that employers gain an ever increasing control over what they can see in our lives and how they can interact with it, not just through the ideas of emails and Smartphone communication but even things such as social networking websites where they can position themselves as your friends.