In reply to Victoria Dmochowski:

Personally, yes. How many people really check their emails during their morning commute because:

a) they have work emails set up on their personal phones
b) there's not much else to do on the train anyway (other than reading Metro, watching the coutryside, talking to strangers, sleeping...)

In reply to Steve Bridger:

Agree with you. It is a question of give and take and being treated as an adult but also behaving like one.

I also sometimes check my emails when on a train, but would I expect my company to pay me for it? Probably not.

For me, I don't see a definite line between work and home and therefore for me, checking emails out of hours isn't a problem, just as sorting out work for my hobbies while I'm at work equally isn't a problem!

In reply to Sam:

To Juraj's point, I would add a cautionary note that, whilst an employer may not explicitly ask or tell an employee to check their emails during their commute or outside working hours, we can wind the question back to my point about non-time-resource workers: the mutual agreement is that the workload we are given is reasonably completeable within the contractual window.  If, on the other hand, the workload is of such a volume that completing it *requires* emails and other work to be done outside normal working hours, the employer is in breach of that agreement.

Whether there is a legal case to argue for more money in such cases is questionable, but it is certainly a moral breach which is going to impact upon an employee's morale, with a knock-on impact on performance and retention.

So whilst I broadly agree that it's not compensatable time, employers - and their professional operators in this area, HR managers - should not fall into the trap of just shrugging our shoulders and saying "well, it's their choice".  Our behaviours as a company - what we measure and what we reward - will drive the behaviours of our employees, and not always to our best interests!

To Sam - on a personal level, I completely agree with you.  Waking up at 3am with a brilliant solution to an intractable contract issue (which usually turns out to be less brilliant in the cold light of day), or rehearsing my negotiation position on a difficult consultation while I shave isn't paid time, so surely my employer should allow some give and take when I take five minutes to book a ticket to a strategy gaming event at the weekend between investigation reports.

In practice, however, I find that few employers and even fewer managers are prepared to see it this way.  The best fix*, though, is to wind back to performance over time.  My boss may not be best pleased to see me browsing my karate instructors' FB group, but the odds of me being challenged are diminished if I am otherwise giving him excellent, timely work.

All the same, though, there is the well-established phenomenon of Availability Heuristics, in which we ascribe more truth or value to things we perceive often.  If a manager routinely sees you doing things in work time that aren't work, even if your work is excellent and you do additional work outside work time, there will be a tendency to see an employee as uncommitted, distracted or lazy.  This is another reason why I have encouraged my own company to adopt SMART objectives for every team and individual (not fully adopted, yet, I hasten to add) - because it's hard to make sensible judgements of performance when all you have are the biased and fallible perceptions of managers.

I've lost count of the number of dimissals I've been forced to execute because of perceptions that weren't based on firm evidence.  That's not to say that they weren't fair dismissals or even good decisions - just that, objectively, I couldn't say with confidence that the decision actually led to an improvement in overall company performance.

*I should add that the other good fix is to make sure you sit so no one can see your computer screen. ;)

In reply to Robey:

So is the debate really about whether more value is placed on input rather than output?

Sarah Churchman, Chief Inclusion and Well-being Officer at PwC shares similar thoughts here: https://www.cipd.co.uk/news-views/changing-work-views/future-work/thought-pieces/well-being-aspirations-everyday-reality 

She also talks about how the gap can be bridged between our well-being aspirations and the reality of how we actually fare at work.

In reply to Victoria Dmochowski:

For me the debate is about whether employers should be providing more guidance about emails in general and access "out of working hours" in the face of flexible working and an #AlwaysOn culture.

There's an interesting article here on this subject:

www.hrmagazine.co.uk/.../

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

Good spot, Elizabeth.

This:

The loyalty and flexibility I’ve been shown I think I’ve given back in spades... You can’t simply build a wall between work and life. Instead let’s work out how to live life well at work, and get the job done.

In reply to Elizabeth Divver:

I blame it all on the change to terminology. We used to call it work-family balance and in the US many researchers still do. And the research historically focused on women. That was because women entered workplaces structured for men who were husbands with wives to do all the non-work stuff.

Then somebody decided we should be more inclusive of those who don't necessarily have a family (think someone who dropped on the planet with no parents that might get old, siblings that might need support etc :) ) So we renamed it work-life balance. The 'life' bit really being shorthand for all those things that are not strictly work - it could be personal admin, recreational activities, studying, community volunteering etc etc. So how do we label that?

And as an aside, research earlier this year by the charity Working Families revealed that modern fathers are finding the work-family balance as challenging as mothers do.

In the meantime countless bloggers are spending time writing about how the terminology is wrong (and how we should aim for blend) rather than offering credible suggestions on how to make it right.

For me, this is about 'culture'. As Peter Drucker is famously quoted as saying, "Culture will eat strategy for breakfast every time". If your company culture tends towards counting every hour spent 'at' work and defining it as such (industrial age model), then my guess is that will set up a culture where employees will start to become resentful of being asked to do more than their 'monitored' hours. If, however, employees are treated like adults and feel empowered to do what they have to do to get the work done (knowledge worker age), then it will be an arrangement that will work both ways. When the time is right, an employee will feel engaged and deliver discretionary effort (to deliver against the vision and values of the company), which may include checking emails during a commute - giving valuable time back. Equally, when they need some time back from their employer for, say, a family or personal matter, they will get it without question because the employer knows they deliver on their role brief - they are effective. In my experience, work at getting the culture right and this becomes a redundant question.

In reply to Simon:

I absolutely agree Simon. Developing a great culture is essential. Translating that into a policy is equally important so people know what is expected of them. Colleagues of mine did some award winning research last year which showed that over half of organisations have no policy on accessing ICT out of hours leading people to fend for themselves and resulting in our "AlwaysOn" culture (www.bbk.ac.uk/.../dr-almuth-mcdowall-awarded-prestigious-ian-beardwell-prize)