Relax – it is after 6pm!
Further to the whitepaper on the new rules of international PR I blogged about earlier this week one of my friends pinged me this interesting article that appeared in The Guardian yesterday.
Apparently new laws in France protect workers from responding to emails after 6pm. It is now illegal for workers in the digital and consultancy sectors to respond to emails after 6pm. In fact, staff will be ordered to switch off their professional phones, and companies must ensure that their employees come under no pressure to look at work-related emails or documents on their tablets or computers.
Can you imagine that?
Also according to the article, trials are taking place in Sweden to reduce work hours to just 30 hours a week (six hours per day). When I read this out just now in the office my colleague asked if she could go home then as she had already done that many hours this week.
How would this impact the PR industry? At Berkeley PR we always try hard to get the life and work balance right but the very nature of our business means that you are going to have to work late from time to time and I find it personally inconceivable that I couldn’t keep an eye on my emails after 6pm. A crisis doesn’t only happen between office hours and that is when a communications consultancy can truly add value.
What do you think of these rules? Are they practical in the PR industry in the UK or have France and Sweden got it right?
The post Illegal to respond to emails after 6pm – sound good? appeared first on Paul Stallard.
