October 9, 2017
No agreement on Holidays and Email
Shock horror. You don’t all agree !!!
Further to my blog published in the Silly Season, about emails and holidays:
It is clear from the various responses that there is a huge variety of opinion on this subject. Some claimed to ignore emails completely while on holiday. Others thought that the question was silly: of course they checked their mails, regularly, every day, holiday or no holiday.
My own experience was that I did end up checking mails just once a day, if only to stop them building up into an avalanche. But, in terms of social media, generally: Lisa and I took the Facebook app off our phones for our summer road trip. To avoid general social media noise. Two months on, this app is still not reinstalled on our iPhones. And we seem not to know (or care much) about what is going on, on Facebook. We gave up smoking by throwing away the packet, maybe?
As for work emails: I have no easy solution. I do feel the need to check them. And I did. With a heavy heart. I am, it seems a Reluctant Remainer when it comes to keeping in touch with work. Maybe next year, I will be Braver.
Thanks to all who contributed to the holiday emails debate. Genuinely interesting. May re-run something similar next year.
Any new thoughts anyone?
4 Comments
Hi Mark,
If you are someone who genuinely cares about customers, and I know you do, I don’t see what alternative there is to checking email while on holiday. The days of companies shutting down so customers cannot get service are long gone. Our customers give us their royalty and repeat business and so in my view deserve the ability to make requests of the people they trust to direct them to how to get stuff done. I leave internal emails while on holiday but I check and respond to client emails. I think that is fair and decent. Anything else would come across as poor in my view.
Hi Andrew
Very good to hear from you. You make a compelling argument. I guess that just leaves frequency. Whether to be a once-a-day man or woman or an always-on person. I aim for the former on holiday. More of the latter when not on holiday !
All the best – Mark
Hi Mark,
I must admit I checked emails and our internal Slack channel while on holiday and only replied to client email about meeting arrangements in a couple of weeks. Maybe I’m better at delegating a lot of stuff to the guys back at base these days? I got rid of Facebook about 3 years ago and still have no desire to connect back to it. I happily use Instagram as a photo tool but certainly don’t feel tied to it as I used to with FB.
It’s worth noting that I don’t expect my team to read their email while on leave and equally don’t message them when they are out. We encourage people to organise who will cover when folks are out and we seem to be a lot better than we were at this about 5 years ago!
Thanks Mike – see you soon !!
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