@atlkate Just to clarify - when mentioning people below you, I didn’t mean direct reports, just lower levels I am at VP level with two young kids (4 & 6) and constantly push back on management and expectations (eg 7am meetings), reminding those with older kids or no kids that not everyone is at the same place in life. I hope it makes others feel more comfortable to do “normal” hours, especially outside of my immediate team!
@juliuscaesar As an executive, strongly disagree. The directs are the excuse. There is a lot of data around leaders sending out of office hour emails creating a strong culture of inability to take time off even the middle of the night. Her leadership will be aware of this data and she is using this to “scold” the other leaders for playing this nonsense.
No direct ever needed to say a word. They are perceiving the behavior.
@lilpeoplez YEP. I NEVER email or Slack my direct reports outside of work hours. I don't ever want them to feel the need to respond when it is not work time!!!
@paulbassett Man this is the way. I just left a company where I was regularly getting emails at 10pm with followups at 9am the next day like “you saw my email from yesterday right??”. I have a 4yo and a 6yo and was told that because I was salaried the expectation was that I work whatever hours were necessary to complete whatever workload they assigned….it was absurd.
@atlkate In situations like this at my job I just put a time block labeled “focus time” on my calendar that lists me as busy and auto declines any invites. I have the highest KPIs on my team so I’ve never been questioned about this.
@tbaileymusik I had started doing this, and I noticed people have no trouble scheduling meetings anyway and not caring that I declined. In my company, “focus time” seems to mean “free if needed.” So I started blocking my calendar with “DO NOT SCHEDULE”, and I block off all day on Friday because it’s the only day I can get any work done, I spend 80%-100% of all the other days in meetings. And people respect it!
People are generally turds about respecting others’ time, and it drives me wild.
@jack100m Yeah that’s my plan! I’ve only been here 10 months and I have a getaway schedule for first week of august. Planning to start the job hunt in the fall
@atlkate There's nothing worse than starting a new job and realizing early on into your tenure that it's a bad place to work. In my last job, I was eight weeks into having started when I thought to myself "oh shit. I've made a horrible mistake by taking this job." Like you, I put my head down and stuck it out for a year, and then jumped ship!
@atlkate Maybe you could have summer Mondays or Wednesdays instead? I used to work for a company with wild expectations about overworking that did this summer Friday thing. And it only meant adding four extra hours every other day plus working the full Friday. I get the coverage thing - so I proposed everyone in my team have their summer day so people got the time off perk without impacting coverage. It wasn't as cool as a 2.5 day weekend every week, but since that wasn't a real option anyway ... It was nice to have a half-day to myself instead of putting in extra hours to work a full day. My other proposal was going to be not putting in an extra hour for other days if we're stuck working 8 hours on the 5th day.
@atlkate It sounds like upper management knows how to squeeze an extra half day out of you all. There was no intention of letting you take Friday afternoons off but they dangled the carrot to get you to work more M-Th.
Sadly you won’t be able to change your work culture. You can protest by either working 9-5 every day or not working Friday afternoons. It will most likely be held against you though. As a result I would suck it up or polish up my resume.
I am at VP level with two young kids (4 & 6) and constantly push back on management and expectations (eg 7am meetings), reminding those with older kids or no kids that not everyone is at the same place in life. I hope it makes others feel more comfortable to do “normal” hours, especially outside of my immediate team!