Should time spent checking personal emails therefore be deducted from working time?

I don't think scanning through and possibly answering a few emails is sufficient to convert a commute into working time, particularly if you are a reasonably senior person, but there should be no penalty for anyone who doesn't do it. I choose to do it - I like to know what I'm going to walk into when I get to the office, and I also find thoughts pop into my head at the end of the working day of loose ends that can be quickly tied down. I would rather deal with them there and then than create a reminder for myself to do it in the morning.

I don't think it is helpful to talk about work-life balance. Work is one part of life, not something separate from it that must be off-set against it.

You beat me to it. I was going to open a post having read the same article ;)

The answer is yes to both Victoria. It depends on whether your preference is for Separation or Integration as the work-life balance researchers define the two concepts. Integrators will feel it gives them better balance, Separators may find it stressful.
More important in my view is the research carried out by my colleagues Gail Kinman and Almuth McDowall last year which revealed that half the workplaces they surveyed had no policy or guidelines on the use of email outside of working hours.

I think, increasingly, the concept of "working hours" needs to be seen differently by both employers and employees.

An offer of working hours, really, should be seen as a mutually-agreed estimate on the amount of time that should be taken in completing the work allocated to the employee by the employer.

If the employee completes the allocated work in a lesser time, then either the allocation is inadequate or the employee is efficient (or both), which may prompt a conversation about increasing workload and compensation accordingly.

If the employee takes longer to complete the allocated work then either the workload is excessive (in which case, overtime should be paid or salary increased, whichever best suits your business model) or the employee is inefficient - in which case, either the work is being done adequately (but slowly) and not further action need be taken or the work is not being done with adequate urgency and performance management action should follow.

Where the picture becomes confused is when the adequate completion of work *includes* a requirement for a given time window of availability or presence. A classic example is a call-centre worker who is expected to answer calls between 0900 and 1730. In this case, adequately completing their duties *implies* a fixed time-window of working but we should not confuse this with a colleague in their finance team on the same contractual hours who nevertheless leaves work an hour early because she has completed her workload for the day.

In both cases, the employees are being compensated for the commitment of resources to the job. In the case of the call-centre worker, one of those resources is a fixed amount of time. In the case of the finance assistant, it isn't: as long as the work is done in full, correctly and on time, the finance assistant can commit as much or as little time to the work as she needs to.

In this example, the finance assistant may be answering emails or running calculations as part of her commute. Her call centre colleague in the seat next to her, though, cannot start answering calls before the call centre opens at 0900, so he is free to play Candy Crush or do the crossword.

This may seem unfair, but the pay-off for the time-resource worker is that they have a resource (time) that they can sell to their employer when there is a demand: i.e. they can earn overtime. The non-time-resource worker cannot: if it takes her an hour longer to complete her reports this week because they were held up by a software crash, that's just bad luck.

In the context of the OP, then, most time-resource workers cannot use their commute as working time - so for them it would not count as working hours. Non-time-resource workers, meanwhile, are simply completing their workload, as contractually agreed, so it still wouldn't count as working hours.

I've certainly 'allocated' my commute in the past as working time - in reality, just a mental exercise rather than a clocking-in/clocking-out, but when I know I need the time, half an hour on the train can be very useful to achieve certain non-confidential tasks. When my children were younger, and less prone to be staring at a screen themselves in the evening, I felt this was a better compromise than working in the evenings.

The other thing I've done is used my commute as study time in the past - I was doing my law qualifications, and the only way I could manage the commitment was to allocate a certain amount of reading/prep to each of my journeys. It was exhausting, but fortunately not for too long!

In reply to Anna:

Hi Anna

I had not come across the concept of separation v integration before and it makes a lot of sense - that would be why it's no stress to me to deal with emails on the train and I am slightly flummoxed by the expression work-life balance. Obviously, I know what people mean by it but I don't find it that useful as a way of looking at my life. As I said above, work is not a thing apart from life, it is one of the things in our lives. Likewise, being a member of this forum is another thing in my life and I dip into it during the hours I am in the office. Where someone else would take a smoke break or a tea break, I have refreshing little dips into a debate. As Robey says, my work is about doing what I have to do to get everything done, not being present at a desk for a specified number of hours.

I have read about Millennials in the workplace being mystified by Boomer managers expecting them to put their phones away until lunchtime. Perhaps they are integrators too?

In reply to Robey:

Well put Robey. I'm increasingly hearing the phrase "work is something we do not a place we go to" and for many people that is the case. Unfortunately there are also many employers who continue to assess these workers on the amount of time they put in rather than the results they produce!

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

In my experience Elizabeth this is one concept that seems to resonate with people whenever I do a talk about work-life balance. It seems there are more Separators (by preference) out there than we might imagine. Being told about the continuum often gives them 'permission' to separate. Some have told me they feel expected to always integrate which doesn't suit them.

Both preferences have pluses and minuses - I explain this in a short blog post here: thebalancedleader.wordpress.com/.../

The important thing is to accept that just because you're an integrator not everyone around you will be - and to not fall into the trap of expecting them to be.

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

I am more of an integrator albeit I do not meet the typical demographic for such an approach give my age and lack of small children.
I find the distinction very helpful

In reply to Peter Stanway:

I am finding this discussion fascinating. I work in a fairly traditional environment (City law firm) where a high value is placed on the amount of time bums are on seats. However it is also a knowledge industry, so should theoretically do better by looking out output rather than time.

I agree with Robey's view, but have seen little of that attitude in my working life, so it still feels pretty radical to me. Are there organisations, or even pockets of organisations, that really operate like this for those roles for non-time resource workers?

That concept of separators and integrators is useful, thank you. It is easy to assume that others have a similar attitude to work that you do and this spectrum is a neat way of explaining those differences.

In reply to Claire:

It's interesting that many managers in my experience seem to veer between one perspective and another without really thinking about it, depending upon circumstances.

For example, if a high-performing employee arrives fifteen minutes late after being stuck in traffic, a manager will often think nothing of it because she knows he will make up the time by working harder and nothing will be lost. Meanwhile, a less well-regarded employee who arrived five minutes earlier might be told to take the time off their lunch break or to work it back by making sure they are ten minutes early tomorrow.

There is a correlation between a flexible attitude to "working hours" and SMART objectives. If a manager knows what to expect from her team and has an effective tool to tell her who is achieving this and who isn't, she is less likely to fixate upon who is on time and who isn't. She is ultimately going to be judged not on whether her team is at their desks on time but on whether her team is achieving the targets the company has set for it.

In non-time-resource teams, an obsessions with timeliness is often a proxy for the inability to measure effective performance in any other way. At the highest level, if a Director or similar is concerned with whether staff are at their desks or not, it's a signal that perhaps the company doesn't know what it should be measuring or doesn't have an effective tool to measure it.

I've read the article and although it does pose raise some interesting points, I would strongly disagree with this.

Most people really check their emails during morning commute because they choose to rather than because they are asked to do so by their employer.

In reply to Juraj Kecso:

Interesting point Juraj. Does that mean only the things an employer explicitly asks people to do (presumably line manager expectations, job descriptions), is what should be considered as work? Or at least working hours? How would an implicit culture come into that?

In reply to Victoria Dmochowski:

Indeed. I think many many discussions on this Community demonstrate that if the employer treats employees as grown-ups and with respect, they in turn will put in 'discretionary effort'... and if not, people will head out the door on the dot of 5 (or whatever). There is the written contract but also an unwritten one - the 'give and take'.