On the 1st of January 2017, France brought in some new legislation to improve productivity and work-life balance.
Any worker in a business with over 50 employees has the right to completely ignore work emails outside of their working hours.
There are a number of reasons for this. One is that the number of tribunals around work-related stress has increased significantly in recent years and another is that employers are understandably concerned about how job pressure will ultimately affect productivity.
If you don’t live in France working for a business with over 50 employees, what can you do to find the balance you need?
Your email etiquette is a good place to start.
You might even go as far as to have a workplace policy around emails and it could look something like this:
Don’t unnecessarily CC colleagues – Does that person really need to receive this email? The more you clog up a person’s inbox, the less likely they are to be responsive in the future.
Don’t default to “reply all” – Say you receive a mass email informing your team about a meeting. If you reply to that, does the whole team really need to receive it or just the sender?
Be strict with attachments – Do your signature images go on to your emails as attachments? This can be a nightmare if you are left opening each one just to make sure it’s not important. If you do need to attach something, ask yourself if it could go in the body instead.
Do you need to send the whole thread? – Some emails need context for sure, but before you send them on, ask if your receiver needs to see your conversation about that holiday you went on recently or the bug you just got over.
Subject line message – Sometimes the subject line can say it all. “John Smith called, please call back” for example. Stick EOM at the end (end of message) and your recipient knows they don’t have to open the email.
Can it be skim read? – Can your email be summarised in bullet points? Can the important bits be in bold? Whatever you can do to make the email as easy to skim read as possible will always go down a treat.
NNTR – I hadn’t heard of this before but make it known to the world that NNTR exists (no need to reply). It’s not rude, it’s a good out from having to A) write and send a reply and B) cuts the chances of you getting contentless responses like, “Ok Jane”.
Productivity is a complicated thing and sometimes it can be down to something a bit more complicated than emails.