A few weeks ago, Twitter went agog, with a good kind of excitement. Portugal had just passed a bill that banned managers from calling their employees after work hours, in alignment with the continuous acceptance of the current reality that remote work presents.
In the words of Ana Catarina Mendes, the parliamentary leader of the Portuguese Socialist party, “For us, this is an essential move to strengthen the boundaries needed for a good work-life balance. There should be a boundary between the time when an employer’s authority prevails, and the time when the worker’s autonomy should prevail.
“There should be a boundary between the time in which a worker is a resource in the service of the person paying their salary, and the time in which they should be the owner of a life that is not all about work.”
Her words are valid; this is 2021 and the demarcation between work-from-home, work, and home, should be clear. As indicated by the International Labour Organisation in 2020, the crisis during COVID-19 has shattered the notion that paid work and personal life are two completely different areas, and there appears to be a myth that employees always can and must be available to the employer to perform their work-related functions, thus Portugal may have taken a step in the right direction.
It isn’t the first time a country has taken such related action. In 2017, France promulgated a law that enabled employees to ignore emails that came in after work hours in order to maintain work-life balance, as quoted by the Minister of Labour.
Marie Pierre Fluery, a human resources director, said the law was necessary to help people avoid being overwhelmed by work demands.
“I think it is essential in order to preserve the health of employees,” she said during an interview with a local journalist. This was in 2017, when COVID didn’t exist in the global dictionary.
Laws like this might be healthy, but how realistic would this be in a clime like ours?
Different jobs come with diverse expectations and it’s a slightly different ballgame when you work in a strictly 9-5 environment. “9-5,” a lingo used for the corporate space, means that you resume work by 9 am (or whatever time you clock in) and leave work by 5pm, or whatever time you sign out. Depending on the industry, 9-5 could mean seven to seven, seven to eight, or nine or ten, if you add commute time plus traffic, especially if you are in a modern urban city like Lagos, Port-Harcourt or Johannesburg. Simply put, there are a lot of unofficial hours committed to work already, thus rules like this might be a great check on managers’ excesses.
The case might be slightly different if the environment encourages flexi-time, especially if it is a hybrid system, a remote work or a job with physical location where there is no definite clocking in and signing out. In this case, while there are no written rules, it is probably expected that employees deliver on the expected deliverables as and when due, and should probably reply messages or mails when required.
Whether it is a 9-5 scenario or a flexi-time setting, another crucial factor is the element of communication and the importance of personal relationships.
According to Harvard business reviews, employees respond to managers (and colleagues) who they respect or have a personal relationship with, 3 times faster than another employee with a strictly work-related interaction. Isn’t it safe to say that relationship is important, even in the workplace?
To every rule, there is an exception, and for this kind of law, there are probably a lot of unwritten expressions to its implementation.
From the peculiarity of the kind of job, or industry, to how pivotal the role of the employee is, asking an employee not to reply to his or her manager’s mail may be a solution that might create a lot of other problems.
For instance, imagine a social media manager who put out a wrong content, or an investment banker who prepared a portfolio pitch for a client making a minuscule error discovered by the manager. Such unique scenarios could require urgent responses that won’t wait till the next work-day.
Rules are good, laws are great, but as far as career is concerned, the circumstances sometimes differ.
What are your thoughts about this law? Would you love such to be enacted in Nigeria and what do you think would be the effect? Please, leave a comment below.
