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The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.
I would love an example, but can accept you can’t produce one without compromising yourself.
The current argument I’m involved in is about an online platform that people can use to give recognition to each other. HR is telling me to give my team negative performance reviews for not using it regularly.
They love to remind me that there’s an app that everyone can install on their phone. The thing is, my team aren’t allowed to use their phones at work. So, the goal is to get them to tell me in writing that using this online platform is mandatory and that my hourly staff has to do it off the clock or face repercussions which is illegal.
Our boss was freaking out over people sometimes doing some private calls during work hours and at a certain point absolutely forbade it. So yeah, people would just end the call at 17:00 sharp and switch off the work phone. It took one week before that rule was rescinded.
I always refused to put work apps on my personal phone because they would make you agree to some bullshit where they could remote access your phone or potentially wipe it. So I would refuse and say they needed to provide a company phone for me if it was that important. Most companies are either ok with this or provide a phone, except for one company. This was a software company, and literally everything else about this company was a unicorn of a job. But for some reason they wanted me to have slack on my phone and also wouldn’t give me a company phone. So I dug up an old phone, reset it to factory settings, and added slack to that so I could say I did it. Then I put the phone away and they never asked about it again. So I really don’t know what the point of that was 🤷
for some reason they wanted me to have slack
I get similar requirements from school and kindergarten nowadays. They want me to install weird apps for communications. Last school had an online portal on the web and mail. That was a no brainer but these apps?
Hello Waydroid.
Not gonna taint my own phone with this stuff. That includes WhatsApp.
A previous job of mine wanted people in my team to volunteer for being on call overnight for a week at a time.
No-one did, so they forced us. I emailed all managers involved including HR I said that I would like to opt-out for various reasons like family, mental and physical health, and also that the pay was in no way adequate for what they wanted. Again they pushed, so I replied with I’ll do it but would be unavailable most afternoons and evenings with my kids and things they have on. That I also won’t be able to answer after going to sleep because I take my mental health very seriously and need quality sleep to function.
So the first night I slept peacefully as I normally do as I have my phone set to go to DND automatically. I got called in because I didn’t answer a call that came in last night, I asked when it was, about midnight, and said well that’s because I was asleep.
Go to the next 2 mangers up, say the same thing and they say that I need to answer. I explain the email stating that I would be unable to answer calls at many times including when asleep and how no-one replied with that being a problem. One of the managers was like, wait up, you flagged this; yup; can you send me the email chain; yup. Got removed and told I wouldn’t need to worry about doing it anymore.
It found a new job shortly after that.
“No, not like that!”
…you shouldn’t have to respond in home hours regardless. Any time you spend on work during your life outside of contract is them stealing your labour.
Should be the standard anyway. Reading email and texts from work, or responding to calls, is work. Unless your contact specifies on-call hours, you should ignore your boss outside of working hours. If they really want you to respond they can pay you overtime.
I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.
Why did you, why would you, ever have work email and Teams on your phone in the first place?
