It's after 5PM: Don't you even THINK about replying to that email

Clearing out a bunch of 'saved for later' articles in my feed reader this past weekend and I came across this gem from our pals at the Washington Post - France may pass a law allowing people to ignore work emails at home. Here is all you need to know on this, (in case you couldn't figure out the gist from the on the nose headine):

Among a host of new reforms designed to loosen the more stringent regulations in the country’s labor market, France’s labor minister, Myriam El Khomri, is including a provision that would give employees the right to ignore professional emails and other messages when outside the office. It would essentially codify a division between work and home and, on a deeper level, between public and private life.

El Khomri apparently fleeced this idea from a report by Bruno Mettling, a director general in charge of human resources at Orange, the telecommunications giant. Mettling believes this policy would benefit employers as much as their employees, whom, he has said, are likely to suffer “psychosocial risks” from a ceaseless communication cycle. As reported in Le Monde, a recent study found than approximately 3.2 million French workers are at risk of “burning out,” defined as a combination of physical exhaustion and emotional anxiety. Although France is already famous for its 35-hour workweek, many firms skirt the rules — often through employees who continue working remotely long after they leave for the day.

I know what my (primarily) USA-based readers are thinking right about now. Likely some combination of 'Those French don't know what it takes to compete in the modern economy', 'It is too late for that idea, technology has made the walls between work and non-work just about irrelevant', and 'You will never get the raise/title/office/parking space you want without working ALL THE TIME'.

At least here in the USA, the vast majority of advice and strategery around helping folks with trying to achieve a better level of work/life balance seems to recommend moving much more fluidly between work and not-work. Most of the writing on this seems to advocate for allowing workers much more flexibility over their time and schedules so that they can take care of personal things on 'work' time, with the understanding that they are actually 'working' lots of the time they are not technically 'at work'. Since we all have smartphones that connect us to work 24/7, the thinking goes that we would all have better balance and harmony between work and life by trying to blend the two together more seamlessly.

And I guess that is reasonably decent advice and probably, (by necessity as much as choice), that is what most of us try and do to make sure work and life are both given their due.

But the proposal from the French labor minister is advocating the exact opposite of what conventional (and US-centric), experts mostly are pushing. The proposed French law would (at least in terms of email), attempt to re-build the traditional and firm divide and separation between work and not-work. If this were to pass, then if it is outside of your 'work' time, then feel free to ignore that email. No questions asked. No repercussions. At least in theory.

An interesting, if very Frecnch-sounding idea.

But here is the question I want to leave with you: What if the French are right about this and the commonly accepted wisdom and advice about blending work and life is wrong?

What if we'd all be happier, and better engaged, and more able to focus on our work if we were not, you know, working all the time?

What if you truly shut it down at 5PM every day?

What would that look like?

PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 237 - 4 Ways to Take a Successful Retreat

HR Happy Hour 237 - 4 Ways to Take a Successful Retreat

Recorded Wednesday March 2, 2016

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guests: Laurie Ruettimann

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish talked with Laurie Ruettimann.  Laurie is a former Human Resources leader turned influential speaker, writer and strategist. She owns a human resources consultancy that offers a wide array of HR services to human resources leaders and executives.  You can follow her blog at http://laurieruettimann.com.

Since Laurie and Trish each went on retreats recently, Steve talked to them about the things that made a retreat valuable and rewarding that are easily replicable for a weekend/day/a few hours away.  We also tied the discussion to ways that leads to a more human approach to work.  Finally, we wrapped up the show by discussing Globoforce's WorkHuman event.  WorkHuman is happening in Orlando from May 9-11 and is a place to learn about how to create a more human workplace.  

You can listen to the show on the show page here, or by using the widget player below:

You can learn more about WorkHuman here - http://bit.ly/whtrmctw and show listeners can use promo code WH16TM300 for $300 off your registration.

This was a fun show and I hope you take a break from work to give it a listen!

And remember to be sure to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour on iTunes or your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' and you will be sure to never miss a show.

You probably can only do one important thing each week

I caught this piece the other day on Business Insider - When to Schedule Your Job Interview, that quotes some research from Glassdoor from a few years back which indicates that all things being equal, the optimal time for a candidate to schedule a job interview is 10:30AM on Tuesday.

Even without data to back up that claim, it at least makes intuitive sense to me. Mondays are terrible for everything. Many folks mentally check out by Fridays. That leaves Tuesday - Thursday as options for any kind of important meeting, like a job interview. Let's automatically remove anything after lunch, as you never know how a heavy meal, quick workout, or a couple of shots and a Schlitz are going to have on the interviewer.

So that leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Let's rule out Thursday since it is close enough to Friday to catch a little of the 'Is it the weekend yet?' shrapnel. Now we are in a tossup between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. And since even by only Wednesday, lots of folks might already be thinking 'How can it only be Wednesday, this week is taking forever?', Tuesday seems like a safer choice. As for a time - use the Goldilocks approach - not too early, not too late (and too close to lunch), which lands you at 10:30AM. 

As I said, it makes perfect sense, but it also sounded terribly familiar when I read the advice.

I feel like i had heard some variations of the 'Tuesday at 10:30AM' advice before. 

As it turns out, it is pretty common scheduling advice for other kinds of work/business events as well. This piece recommends scheduling important presentations for Tuesdays.  And this article also strongly suggests a combination of 'Tuesday' and 'late morning', (also known as 'Tuesday at 10:30AM), is an optimal time to conduct any type of negotiations.

If I had more time, and I wasn't staring down the weekend myself, I would do some more searching and I am pretty sure I'd find a bunch more examples of how Tuesday mornings are the best time to do anything important at work. So Tuesdays at 10:30AM it is.

Which is good to know and sort of sad at the same time. We work ALL OF THE TIME. We are chained to our email 24/7 with our 'smart' phones. We are (mostly), evaluated and assessed by our success in the workplace.

And yet there is only one 'good' time each week to do anything important. 

Tuesday at 10:30AM.

It's only Friday right now, so you have a couple of days to plan your attack for next week's sliver of time where you can actually do something important. 

Don't blow it. It won't come around again for an entire week if you do.

Have a great weekend!

LIVE TONIGHT: The #HRHappyHour Show : From HR Pro to HR Consultant

HR Happy Hour 236  - From HR Pro to HR Consultant and Back Again

Broadcast LIVE Thursday March 3, 2016 - 8:00PM EST

Call in 646-378-1086

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Robin Schooling, VP, Human Resources, Hollywood Casino

This week on a special LIVE show in our traditional Thursday at 8PM timeslot, Steve and Trish will welcome friend of the show and HR leader Robin Schooling to talk about life as an HR leader, as an HR consultant, and the key differences and challenges in performing both roles successfully.

In addition, Steve and Trish will grade each others Oscars predictions, we'll share some exciting upcoming show news, and we will take your calls and play along LIVE on the Twitter backchannel - just use #HRHappyHour to join in.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below:

Reminder, you can find, listen, and subscribe to the show on iTuned or using your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to add the show to your subscriptions and you will never miss an episode,

It will be great to be back on the air LIVE this Thursday at 8PM ET - we hope you can join the fun!

CHART OF THE DAY: How large is the 'gig' economy?

In my 'What HR should and should not be talking about in 2016' piece from early January I had the 'gig' economy listed as one topics that we collectively needed to stop talking and thinking so much about this year. By way of refresher (mostly for me), here is what I said in January about the 'gig' economy:

"The 'Gig' Economy - Here's the thing about the rise in importance of the so-called 'Gig Economy', it is quite possible that its growth as a percentage of the labor force has been generally exaggerated possibly due to the oversized coverage that the largest Gig company, Uber, has received over the years. According to this Wall St. Journal piece from last July:

Far from turning into a nation of gig workers, Americans are becoming slightly less likely to be self-employed, and less prone to hold multiple jobs. Official government data shows around 95% of those who report having jobs are accounted for on the formal payroll of U.S. employers, little changed from a decade ago.

If Uber and its ilk were fundamentally undermining the relationship workers have with employers, that shift would be showing up in at least some of the key economic indicators. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, or even a few million, may have dabbled in the gig economy, but in the context of the 157 million-strong U.S. labor force, the trend remains marginal.

It is possible that since there are likely more 'Gig' workers in coastal 'elite' cities like New York and San Francisco, and folks in these cities dominate the conversations in the media, that it just feels like the Gig economy is fast becoming the dominant form of work. But the data just doesn't reflect that, at least not yet. And it likely will not in 2016 or in 2018 or maybe even in 2020. So for now, it makes sense to think about your labor force composition, sure, (just like it always has), but massive, fundamental changes in that mix of labor is not typically top of mind for most organizations."

So that was my take in January and two months later I have not really seen much if anything to make me think any differently about how important/influential the 'gig' economy really is to the vast majority of workers, organizations, and HR leaders. Today's CHART OF THE DAY courtesy of the JPMorgan Chase research folks seems to back that conclusion up.

Taken from a three-year study of over 1 million JPMorgan Chase customers, the survey titled 'Paychecks, Paydays, and the Online Platform Economy' attempted (among other things) to get a better understanding over a three-year period just how important the 'gig' economy was/is in terms of worker participation levels and contribution to overall individual income. The entire report is interesting, but the chart I want to share is below, on the overall participation rates in 'gig' work. Here is the data, and the as you demand, some FREE comments from me:

Apologies if some of the figures on the charts are a little tough to read, so I will just repeat the headline numbers - in Sept. 2015 the final month of the study, about 1% of individuals earned income from the 'gig' economy. In the second chart we see that in the 3-years of data up to Sept 2015, that about 4% of individuals had at any time earned income from the 'gig' economy.

So 1% of JPM's surveyed customers were active on Uber, AirBnb, EBay ,and the like in Sept 2015 and 4% of people overall at some time earned some income from working (or selling things), on one of these platforms.

While both figures represent significant growth in the reporting period, both were growing from incredibly small starting points. The truth is that the vast majority of people are not participating in these platforms and the ones that are, (another major section of the survey data), are using it as a supplement to more 'regular' forms of income, i.e. 'normal' jobs. Said differently, the chances are the only Uber drivers you have ever met are the ones that have driven you somewhere.

To get back to my original point from January, while we read lots and lots about the 'gig' economy, its actual impact and influence on most worker's lives is not all that significant, at least not yet. If you are at all interested in this kind of data, I encourage you to check out the full JPMorgan Chase study here.