If you must e-mail your team after hours, add this footnote.
(Because e-mailing people after hours is a bad habit)
A friend sent me this meme recently, which I thought was great.
It’s an elegant Band Aid to a bad habit that many people have.
Because, when we e-mail our team after hours, we create an expectation that they do the same.
First, we’re role modelling poor boundaries between work and home.
Second, we’re incentivising the most conscientious, helpful and/or people-pleasing team members to respond quickly to us (given many of us enter the workforce pre-programmed to mirror and serve our bosses).
Ideally we wouldn’t even read – let alone send – e-mails after hours.
But, if we insist, we should (under normal, non-crisis conditions) at least:
- Leave the finished e-mail in our drafts and send it on the next working day; or
- Add a footer to our internal e-mails, like the one in the attached photo