Should checking emails on the commute count as 'working hours'?

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.

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.

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?

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'.

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...)

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!

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. ;)

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.