When Is Work, Work?

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item When Is Work, Work?

  • If I answer my phone and say more than that I am not working then its work. Ie if they still want to ask questions after I have informed them that I have left work and have the right to make me work (ie call center, boss or team) I will considere that work.

    The way we are set up is that calls taking longer than 15 minutes (and that is how long I will make sure a call will take that I have to work are) will be counted as 3h work (unless on call and then only 2h). If we are scheduled as on call we have blank addition to our salaries, but need to be able to be at work in 90min. We get overtime and used to always aply to the union for extention of the max overtime roof, it got to the point that they sometime forgot to inform the worker that they had passed their overtime maximum. That was a time where all my collegues including myself destroyed our health by stress related issues, happily that has changed and overtime is no longer a problem. The change came due to us taking a stand forcingour bosses to order all overtime for a while and stop working on projects in the end of the day, the lead times that extended made the managment realise that we where not joking when we always asked for more people.

  • Steve, most DBAs and developers you know don't get overtime pay? For a DBA at least out of hours work is a given so I hope they are compensated for that fact up front in their basic pay! If not they are getting a bad deal.

    I have had a blackberry for 6 months (previously just a mobile, or cell as you call it, for on-call). Its good for the company as I can respond quicker to problems, but I am beginning to feel I am a slave to the thing, I can never cut myself off from work.

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  • I've had a blackberry now for a couple months, a moto q for a couple years before that. Note that my company is a consultancy, so the rules are a tad different, but this may be helpful to some.

    I have had a standing policy with myself that a phone call after 8PM goes to voicemail. If it's an emergency, they can leave a message and I'll get back to them. I make sure my clients know that. Not sure how the other devs in the company handle it.

    I turn off the email notification after around 6 PM or so - same thing on weekends. That allows me to govern when I check my email.

    I work from home, so I do the same thing with my work email - separate email clients; outlook is off when I'm off work.

    Since I made these changes with my email, my stress level has gone way down, and I actually have a healthy relationship with my wife. I'm not about to let a workaholic client (we all know who they are - whether the "client" is a manager or a real client) ruin my marriage and my health just because *they* can't go home at a decent time.

  • My previous employer was a 24x7x365 manufacturing company and I was part of the rotating call schedule. The plant at which I worked was actually owned by 2 companies while I worked there. The first company, which treated employees well, was, unfortunately, the Enron of the industry and went bankrupt. This company understood what was mission-critical so the time on call was fairly uneventful, you only were called when product could not be made, shipped, or invoiced because of a computer issue. My boss was also very flexible (he was on the call schedule as well) so that any hours spent working after hours was unofficially granted to us a comp time within the department. This continued when we changed companies for out department. The second company treated and still treats employees, especially exempt employees, as slaves. If they can't get their email from home at 6 am Sunday morning then you had to fix the problem, even if the problem was with their ISP! Needless to say not many members of the IT staff stayed with this company. Out of 9 employees on the IT staff, 5 were "downsized" and 3 left the company of their own volition because of working conditions.

    My opinion is that my salary is for ~40 hours per week and when I hit that threshold I should be compensated somehow. Whether with comp time or overtime pay or a raise to acknowledge the extra hours I work. I also know that if I my code has a bug that is stopping the company from working I'll work as long as necessary to fix it and not expect anything for it.

  • How about working a holiday? Last New Year's day, I was out of town enjoying the day with family. I made the mistake of answering my phone to find my boss at the other end. What I learned was that a parent wanted to look at their kid's grades and could not get in, on the holiday! This parent knew the superintendent so they called him and disturbed all of our holiday's. One of the network technicians had to go to the building since a power failure was at fault. All in all, for one parent, seven people were called for more than 12 person hours of work. On a side note, it turned out to be a good thing we were all called. The A/C evap drain line was clogged and half of the computer room floor was covered in water. Thankfully, everything is on racks so nothing was damaged.

    I certainly don't have a problem working some overtime, within reason. I knew that was a possibility when I entered this field of work. However, I do expect some sort of compensation and I also expect to be left alone for non-emergency things like my example above, especially on a holiday.

  • If you're away from work and you don't want to be called, switch your phone off. I have two phones, one is the work phone and one is my personal phone. My personal phone is always on in case my wife/family needs to get hold of me. If I get a call on that phone from a number that I don't recognise, or from a work number, then I'll happily let it go to voicemail. If I've left the office and I'm able to do some work, then I don't mind leaving the work phone on, otherwise it gets switched off.

    It might not work for everyone, but it means that I can seperate work from home life.

  • First, I would expect the waiver mentioned in the article would hold up as long as the workers were not required to be checking their email outside of work hours. If they are required to check, then they must get paid for it.

    Second, I make sure that I own my own cell phone. If the company wants to compensate me for it, that's fine, but I want to own it so that I can turn it off when I want.

    Third, In the US the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the rules for exempt workers, says that if you work any part of your salary period (Usually Day or half-day) then you worked that day and it is paid, so if you are on vacation and they call you that is no longer a vacation day, it's a work day. This should also be true of weekends, if your salary period is Day then working on a Saturday should get you another day's pay but probably won't. Most employers will tell you that your salary is a weekly pay but if that is so then when you get that phone call on vacation then the whole week should be considered work. I assume that most business get around this by tricky wording in the vacation policy (example might be calling it an out of office policy), but also because no worker is going to jeopardize their job over it.

    It should be noted that this is my own, non-lawyerly, reading of the law from when I was working on calculating overtime for a payroll system 10 years ago.

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    JimFive

  • chris.turner (9/9/2008)


    If you're away from work and you don't want to be called, switch your phone off. I have two phones, one is the work phone and one is my personal phone. My personal phone is always on in case my wife/family needs to get hold of me. If I get a call on that phone from a number that I don't recognise, or from a work number, then I'll happily let it go to voicemail. If I've left the office and I'm able to do some work, then I don't mind leaving the work phone on, otherwise it gets switched off.

    It might not work for everyone, but it means that I can seperate work from home life.

    This, unfortunately, was not an option for me. There were no employer provided phones, not even for the "higher ups". Further, my boss would not approve out of town travel (even on a holiday) if she could not get in touch with me. She wouldn't even approve a vacation day just to rest at home if she couldn't reach me. This was part of the reason I chose to leave.

  • James,

    Didn't realize that and good information to have. It's good to know since it might mean that you can your vacation back if you have to work.

    I have turned my phone off, or kept a piece of paper handy to crumple in the mouthpiece. That doesn't work as well with digital phones, but waving your hand back and forth in front of the handset does a good job of simulating dropouts 🙂

    Holidays are funny with different jobs. Some people have compensated me, some haven't. Course, I liked them when I was hourly. Double time!

    I think compensation/overtime/comp time for exempt (salaried) workers is hit and miss. Some people do it, some don't.

  • Interesting about the Fair Labor Standards Act. I haven't heard of any companies that "refund" your vacation if you've got to dial in via laptop or work via phone while of vacation. I never heard of that, maybe its something they don't want to broadcast.

    I suspect if I'm on for 8 hours or close to it, most management that I've ever had would be been willing to do something, whether it be comp day or otherwise.

  • As stated before I do not have one and probably will not ever had one for business.

    If I am forced to volunteer to carry one, it will have to have an agreement on the front end as to hours and I will not answer on my time unless they pay me for it. Why should a person work for free? If you want to take part of my home life you would have to pay far more for it. I work for my employer by choice, they do not own me, nor would I consider myself a slave to them, or the phone. When I am home I am not a work. I work at work and am on my time at home. If I choose to work at home it is on my terms.

    I've been in this business too long to do otherwise. I did my stretch of 70-80 hours a week for months on end decades back and see no need to do it again for grins or for money.

    For the time being the land lines are the only connection beyond the net. That is already enough.

    Miles...

    Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!

  • How about this policy. IT workers (Programmers, developers, DBAs) were classified as "Salaried/Exempt". Which meant you were not paid overtime, or given comp time off. Now if you did put in more than 40 hrs in the work week the client was billed for each hour you worked. Nice way to increase the companies gross margin, pure gravy. Now say you were out a day, well you got paid your weekly wage and the day you were out was subtracted from your vacation time, or paid sick leave (3 days per year), or holiday time (7 per year). When all time available was exhausted then you were paid just for the hours worked. We defined the Salaried term as the maximum you were paid in a given week regardless of actual hours worked, the Exempt term was defined as the company was Exempt from paying you overtime no matter how many hours you worked in a payroll week. Phone calls, no IT individual admitted to having a cell phone or blackberry, and no home phone was ever answered until you heard the persons voice, if your manager, you let it switch to voice mail and then waited until close to midnight to suddenly "return home" and call the manager back. Needless to say turn over in the IT staff was quite high.

    If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

    Ron

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  • There is a fine line between "going the extra mile" and being played for a sucker.

    Lawyers and accountants charge by the hour and often the minute so why should I feel guilty about drawing the line.

    If your salary reflects a high number of hours then that is one thing but if it doesn't then render unto caesar what is due unto caesar. Jesus said it and it was good advice.

    When it is my turn for a 24/7 week then that means that I have to be within 20 minutes of logging on to the works systems. In practical terms this means that means I can only go as far as I can run in 15 minutes. Although I do get paid for this it does mean that my entire family has to go without trips and treats while I am on support.

    As I am on call one week in six this isn't usually a problem but in Britain we have just had an entire summer of rain and the one weekend where it was sunny I was on call.:crying:

    The kids don't really understand that I can't take them on a bike ride, cinema trip, swimming etc when I am on call. Excessive hour don't just affect me, they affect my family as well.

    One point I would like to make is that if companies work their employees into the ground what they gain in extra hours they will lose in sickness and absence.

    My experience is that people don't work linearly. I do my best work between 07:00 and 12:00. Hours worked beyond the 8 aren't really that productive. In fact I have found that I most productive when I limit my hours to between 35 and 40 per week.

  • Previous employer, we had to provide 7 x 24 hour support. Our system supported a world-wide business. We had 3 developers/support people on call, setup with a rotatine 1st, 2nd, 3rd on-call. If there was a problem, the operations staff would call the 1st on-call. If no response in 15 minutes, call the next on-call, and so on.

    I had a greate supervisor during part of that time. When I was on-call, I turned off my pager when I was in church, and when on the pitch officiating soccer games, the pager was in my bag. If I could not be reached, there were 2 others who were supposed to be available. We actually had four developers in the rotation at one point, which actually gave us one week off rotation.

    I really liked having the pager on weekends when I worked for Data General. We got paid 1 hour straight time for every four hours on-call with the pager. If we got called, we got paid appropriately for the hours worked. I was hourly, so depending on when I got the call, it could have been straight time, 1.5x, 2x, and even possibly 2.5 x.

    They thought about having an operator care the pager for a week, but realized that would not be cost effective. Heck I'd have volunteered to caring all the time, if not called it would be an extra 32 hours pay every week.

    😎

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