New Week, New Headlines: Is AI Taking or Augmenting Your Job & The Legal Right to Disconnect

Holy hell the work news is hot this week. And here are the main stories we wanted to jam about....

Topic 1: Is AI Taking or Augmenting Your Job
AI is reshaping work and jobs -sometimes illuminating them. Sometimes augmenting them. Strap in as we dissect what it takes for companies and employees to be AI-ready, because when it comes to AI, silence is not golden—it's a red flag. Companies that are proactive in preparing for the integration of AI stand to benefit significantly. We take you behind the scenes of industry leaders like Amazon and AT&T, who are pouring resources into employee development and reskilling initiatives. This not only prepares their workforce for an AI-augmented future but also signals a commitment to their employees' career longevity.


Topic 2: The Legal Right to Disconnect
California's 'right to disconnect,' which aim to foster work-life harmony in this new digital age. The digital transformation of the workplace has  led to a blurring of the lines between professional and personal life. We reminisce about the days of indestructible Nokia phones and the infancy of Wi-Fi—technologies that have since improved collaboration but have also contributed to the 'always-on' work culture. The rise of remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic has only intensified these expectations, prompting legislative efforts to ensure employees can disconnect from work during off hours. Links to articles: 

• CNBC Article
• Global HR Lawyers lus Laboris publication
• Sogolytics Blog: What is the “Right to Disconnect” and When Will the US Adopt It?
• NYC Right to Disconnect Legislation Proposal
• NYC National Law Review Article

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Boundaries between work and personal lives have progressively gotten worse over time, especially in the US, mainly because of technological advancements beginning in the 1970s.

Speaker 2: 0:14

Ooh, 70s yeah, my best friends in town too. We were just talking about this. The other night. Life just felt slower in like 80s, the 90s. It just felt slower.

Speaker 1: 0:26

It was.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Hey there, friend.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Hey Mel, how are you? I'm good. How are you? How was your weekend?

Speaker 2: 0:52

Listen, the dog ate raw pizza dough. A bit of a counter surfer. Ended up at the Del Lewis Hospital, which is, if you're in Portland, oregon, amazing organization. Yeah, dog was drunk. Dog got drunk off of raw pizza dough. Look it up, it's a thing. Got my dog wasted. This weekend we spent some time at the Del's. I'll tell you, though, fun fact, she's fine, she's amazing, great dog, very well taken care of. But I got to tell you I met a lot of really nice people in the waiting room. Yeah, I'm like that's a place to meet people.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Yeah, Emergency vet. You hope to never be there, but when you are it's like the nicest group of people on the planet.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Thousand percent, thousand percent, a lot of different animals Saw an iguana some birds, a cat named Tito.

Speaker 1: 1:34

I love it. I love it. It's a great place to make friends. I see Got a little tipsy on Saturday night?

Speaker 2: 1:35

Yes, she did. How are you? How are you? How was your weekend?

Speaker 1: 1:38

I am good. My weekend was good. My niece was here from Florida for her sweet 16. So we spent. Yeah, it was so nice to see her and celebrate her and she told me she listens to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:51

Yeah, what's her name? Hi Skye. What's up, Skye? Thank you for listening All right.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Friends, this is your work. Friends, I'm Mel and I'm Francesca.

Speaker 2: 2:18

We're your 2HR friends with no filter, here to get you through all the work shit. We're here with new week, do that? So I want to talk about this article and want to talk about what's happening more broadly with AI and, probably more importantly, what you can do about it as an employee and an organization. That's a mouthful Mel. What are you talking about?

Speaker 1: 2:35

I am talking about California's recent proposed legislation for the right to disconnect from work. And so yeah, I'm going to cover why it matters a little bit of the timeline on how the hell did we get here, guys, and what you and other organizations can do to support this.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Like it, let's do it. The New York Times came out with an article. The worst part of a Wall Street career may be coming to an end, and what they're talking about is how artificial intelligence tools can replace much of Wall Street's entry-level white collar work, and it's asking some really tough questions about what is the future of these entry-level jobs in Wall Street. What I found interesting about this article is Wall Street's not the only industry where this is happening, and so I not right, we're seeing it all over.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Not at all.

Speaker 2: 3:30

The legal industry, accounting industry, consulting, there's so many industries, Massive right, and so I wanted to talk a little bit about what they were talking about in this article then what employees can do to see how prepared is their organization for AI. Here's what's happening in Wall Street A lot of these Wall Street careers and, I would argue, a lot of white collar jobs. The structure of the jobs haven't really changed over the last decade, meaning you come in, you're entry level for the first few years, you're learning the job, and then you graduate up to management and then maybe middle management, and then you're a senior leader or an executive of the company and we grow with the levels up. We're learning more and more complexity of the job as we get up to management, senior management, et cetera. Those entry-level jobs are really thought of as learning the job, learning the industry, learning the skill.

Speaker 2: 4:26

But what's interesting about a lot of these entry-level jobs is they can be considered very tedious. You see the running jokes around oh my God, I'm just in PowerPoint all day, or I'm just in Excel all day and I'm just churning. And when you counteract a lot of undergrads thinking they're going to come out of undergrad doing strategy work and then they get thrown into these entry-level jobs and they're not doing strat until 15 years later. It's this huge disconnect of I thought the job was going to be this and then I'm dumped into this like PowerPoint job.

Speaker 1: 4:56

Yeah, I did campus acquisition so I was always very honest with folks about, hey, this is what you can expect. So they knew what they were getting into. This is what the gig is. The first couple of years, especially for interns, who might have a very different exposure your day-to-day as a full-time entry hire that's not necessarily going to be your experience.

Speaker 2: 5:18

AI is going to impact that.

Speaker 1: 5:20

And it has already impacted it.

Speaker 2: 5:22

There's a reality here. I do not care where you sit, what job you have, what industry you're in, your job will be impacted by AI 100%.

Speaker 1: 5:33

My niece is a server at a chain I will not name and she's been a server forever. She just recently took a part-time gig at that chain. I was like how does it feel to be there? She was like it's really easy actually, because I'm essentially just a food runner now, because everything is automation. They order at their table, they pay at their table. All she has to do is check in, bring them drinks, be courteous, stop by, but it's not the same be courteous, stop by but it's not the same.

Speaker 2: 6:09

Yeah, yeah, we've been seeing automation and AI starting to change something as basic as like a self-checkout aisle or things like what your niece is going through with a server where you can have a QR code and you're using automation workflow, right and going on. And what's interesting is it's starting to creep into different parts of the job market, which is in these white collar jobs, yeah, and in any of those scenarios there's these decision points that leaders have around how are we going to leverage automation? How are we going to leverage AI in doing business? And there's a lot of different ways they can do that, but for the most part, there's two decisions on the table what are we going to automate and what are we going to augment with AI? We're already starting to see both Automation.

Speaker 2: 6:51

Fortune just came out with an article 4,000 jobs since last may have been fully replaced by AI, and they think that number is absolutely conservative. We're seeing that with organizations widely reported Duolingo, klarna, dokken they have replaced employees with AI. There's also a shit ton of opportunity to augment, because for as many stats that have come out to say that 300 million jobs will be replaced by AI, there's equal a number amount of data. That said, ai will create more jobs than it takes away.

Speaker 1: 7:23

I believe that Jobs are going to change significantly, but it's going to be a shift.

Speaker 2: 7:28

It's going to be a shift, organizations can come in and say we're just going to do full replacement. Or there's another scenario where we can start to think about wow, how can we make jobs more interesting? How can we take those entry-level jobs and actually have employees do more sophisticated, more interesting work? How can we reshape the way we do work? How can we even think about the different types of work that we can do and improve this for all? And that's the opportunity statement that I think a lot of organizations need to be looking at need to be looking at.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Yeah, agree, I'm excited actually that it's going to do away with a lot of this entry-level administrative quite frankly bullshit that gets dumped on new hires and then they're not happy with their job. When do you start to see turnover within an organization, starting at year three, yeah, because for two years straight you've had them just grinding away in Excel or PowerPoint but there's no real exposure experience. People are looking and grow from mentorship, from apprenticeship. You can't complain about someone having a communication problem when all you're doing is having them draft emails and then you send them notes about your changes. That's not how you train people to be good employees or effective employees in their role. So I think this is actually an incredibly exciting time.

Speaker 2: 8:49

I think it is too. The article mentioned bank executives. They're debating how they want to use AI. Right, all organizations. They're thinking about this. I would argue there's also a lot of organizations that have been planning and strategizing and doing something about it as early as 2015. Agree, so if you're an employee again I go back to what we said earlier no matter where you sit, your job will be affected by AI. How is it going to be augmented or automated is in the hands of the leadership that is running your organization, and so what I wanted to talk about are four things you can look at to see how prepared is your organization for AI, and what can you look at to see which way might they be going? Okay, okay, these are Francesca Ranieri's signs for that. All right, so let me know what you think. I'm curious if you agree or disagree with these, but this is based on being in this work for a long time.

Speaker 2: 9:52

This is what we typically see. One is strategy. Do they have an AI strategy? How simple is it? How clear? And what you should be able to do is, if you're any employee or any stakeholder, understand what that strategy is. What are the investments they're going to make? How are they going to allocate resources? How are they going to measure success? That simple Do you get it? Is it easy to understand? Do they have it?

Speaker 1: 10:20

If that's not posted on your internal intranet, that's a red flag.

Speaker 2: 10:24

I think that's not posted on your internal intranet. That's a red flag, I think that's super fair.

Speaker 1: 10:26

Not hearing about it in a recent town hall. I'm talking about within the last year. That's a red flag.

Speaker 2: 10:31

Yes, I totally agree with that. Again, easy to understand friends, Easy to understand.

Speaker 1: 10:37

And I want to just add I think it's okay if your org is having the conversation. They might be playing catch up. They might not have all the answers. The important thing to know is that they're willing to have the conversation and they are having the discussion and they're thinking critically about it and they're curious about it and they're open with their employees about it. Yep, you don't need to have all the answer, but you need to be talking about it. You can't be like an ostrich with your head in the sand on this one.

Speaker 2: 11:05

My belief, too, is that it's going to take the collective intelligence of the organization to really pull through this. Well, investment, what is the investment in AI infrastructure in your company? What is the investment in talent? Two things you want to look at. One is your company bringing in talent? Are they hiring talent? Are they establishing organizations that have AI talent in them? I would be looking at that. The other is in employee development. Let's go back to what we talked about earlier your job will be impacted by AI. Okay, we have known this. We have known this for at least a decade and, by the way, this is not just Francesca and Mel saying this. Companies have been thinking about this and doing something about it in terms of reskilling their workforce. Let me give you two examples right off the bat Amazon in 2019, $700 million in upskilling their employees for this. At&t in 2018, $1 billion to resale their employees. They've been in it, they've been doing it, they've been thinking about it. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:15

Let me give you a number just to give you some inside scoop here. On average in corporate America, most organizations will spend $1,900 a year per employee on corporate training. That's including things like your onboarding, your management development, all this good shit, compliance training it's $1,900. That is average, that is table stakes, and it's low. It's very low. When you look at organizations that have positioned themselves to take advantage of thinking about how we can augment with AI, they are spending closer to $10,000 per employee. I would ask what is your organization spending on reskilling and training their employees? Ask for a dollar amount that will give you a sense of how invested is your organization on augmenting versus automating.

Speaker 1: 13:12

Yeah, agree, l&d doesn't sit in benefits, but I would count that as another benefit that you get. So when I think of your employment package, that's a number I'd want visibility into, even if I'm in the interview stage, offer stage, being able to ask for that number.

Speaker 2: 13:27

Yeah, a thousand percent. There's two other ones I want to talk about. Okay, Third one I want to look at is what is their appetite for change? Are they hugely resistant to change IE? Are they implementing technology they should have implemented 10 years ago? Do you get the comment that's really not how we do it here. When you offer new suggestions, do you get the sense they want to do it their way and not be open to a lot of other ideas? Are they resistant to change? Or do you see your organization open to innovation, open to change, doing things progressively? That's something else you'll want to look at. Listen, no one really knows how AI is going to turn out, so the more you can be willing to try to think about things differently, which means that you need to be open to change. That's something else to look at.

Speaker 1: 14:13

If you can't find that strategy online and you ask the question where can you find it and you get not the nicest response to that or ignoring you, then I would watch out for that.

Speaker 2: 14:24

I totally agree with that. And the last one I will look at is where are they spending their cash? Where are they spending their money? Long-term investment in capability building, long-term investment in tech, long-term investment in things about structuring the organization to do work differently? Are they looking at long-term or are they looking at short-term decisions where it looks like they're playing catch up? That's something else to look at. Again, this is gonna take some of the longer term play, the longer term investment as opposed to short term. So, strategy investment what's their appetite for change? Where's that cash going? Those will be things to look at in terms of how ready and how will your organization be handling AI? Yeah, the last thing I want to look at is and Mel, you've talked about this before do not wait for your organization.

Speaker 1: 15:15

No, do not, do not. I like to say, regardless of what your org is doing, you should be like Madonna, constantly reinventing yourself. You need to pay attention to this. Don't wait for your org to tell you what they're doing. Make sure you're taking your own steps.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Thousand percent. Two really easy ways to do that, and I would encourage everyone to do it and have fun with this. Y'all have fun with it. It's the job you're planted in today. But how can you do your job today and augment that? Augment it with a chat GPT day, and augment that, augment it with a chat GPT with a co-pilot. That's a very simple, free way to do it. Is there a way you can do that within the bounds of your organizational policy? I would look at how you can do it. You can today. Every job can do that. The other is to think about the art of the possible for yourself. What could your job, what could your career arc look like with this kind of technology at your hands? Might this open up other opportunities for you.

Speaker 1: 16:14

Oh, I'm so for this. I love this. I read a CNBC article and we'll link to that in the show notes. A bill has been proposed in California by the San Francisco Assemblyman, matt Ganey, to allow employees the right to disconnect outside of working hours.

Speaker 2: 16:29

Nice.

Speaker 1: 16:29

So, if passed, this would make California the first state in the US to give employees the actual legal right and this is important. Many companies have policies, but this is a legal right, so there are ramifications when they're not followed to ignore non-emergency calls or emails during their off time. If the bill becomes law, any employer who violates this would be fined a minimum of $100, I think, per infraction. But don't hold me to that. Why this matters. Boundaries between work and personal lives have progressively gotten worse over time, especially in the US, mainly because of progress, of technological advancements, beginning in the 1970s.

Speaker 2: 17:15

Ooh, 70s yeah, my best friends in town too. We were just talking about this. The other night. Life just felt slower in like 80s, the 90s. It just felt slower.

Speaker 1: 17:26

It was. It was Look 70s through the 80s. This and you and I are gen x cuss millennials, so zenials over here we lived through this entire period and can directly speak to this experience.

Speaker 1: 17:39

Um so in the 80s, 70s and 80s this was the rise of pcs and mobile phones, so personal computers became more common in the workplace. That really started to set the stage for more sophisticated work-related software and communication tools. Like I was watching a movie recently I don't remember if it was Working Girl or something else, but it was talking about Excel finally coming out and I was like shit, it's so weird, something so commonplace today, like back then it still didn't exist.

Speaker 2: 18:12

Yeah, like you think about where bookkeeping was done, it's, that's a people literal books, or yeah, that wasn't that long ago. It really wasn't. It really wasn't it really?

Speaker 1: 18:22

wasn't All good things. I am a fan of tech. I think there's so much progression with tech and so many good things. But with a fan of tech, I think there's so much progression with tech and so many good things, but with it, you need the ethical considerations, including how does this impact people and are we using it for good, or are there negative impacts for people that need to be addressed? And then mobile phones began to appear. We saw car phones. I think the first mobile phone I saw was Zach Morris. Saved by the Bell was like.

Speaker 2: 18:46

Oh, like the suitcase one.

Speaker 1: 18:47

Yeah, look, they were super bulky expensive but, it did start the trend towards constant connectivity. Yeah, I can see it. I can see it.

Speaker 2: 18:58

You're always available.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Yeah, or did you ever go to the hotel? The phone was in the bathroom and you're like who the hell is in here having a conversation? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 19:05

Also gross, absolutely gross, what's happening. Fecal matter is situation yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:11

Anyway, okay, all right, all poop jokes aside, 1990s, the internet and email happened. I joked about this in one of our last episodes. I had to take a quiz to use the internet at Fort Feet. I still remember. Like the AOL, yeah, you get your disc 500 free hours. Do you remember your first chat room?

Speaker 2: 19:30

I remember my first chat room.

Speaker 1: 19:32

And now, when I think about the wild west of the internet that we were a part of, I'm like Jesus.

Speaker 2: 19:37

I'm lucky nothing ever happened, yeah like you didn't get abducted or something.

Speaker 1: 19:41

Yeah, your mom is like Faces of death. No, faces of death, don't worry about it. All right, don't look that up.

Speaker 2: 19:49

If you know they just don't, absolutely don't, don't look that up All right.

Speaker 1: 19:52

So 90s widespread adoption of the internet email started to really revolutionize workplace communication, because now communication could be sent instantly and globally. Before that it was snail mail and interoffice memos.

Speaker 2: 20:08

I remember fax machines which are still super long.

Speaker 1: 20:12

It was slow, I not lost. Someone accidentally threw the message out and then by the late 90s, email had become essential for business communication and that really started to set the expectation for timely responses. We were still in the early days of this stuff, but it was like oh, you got an email, so you need to respond ASAP.

Speaker 2: 20:39

The rule of thumb. It's been the rule of thumb for a while. It was 24-hour response time If you didn't respond within 24 hours. No, it was seen as negative.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Yeah, that was my experience in my first internship and my first work experience. It was like that's the expectation, otherwise, what are you doing? Yeah, you're not in it to win it. In the 2000s, smartphones and Wi-Fi came about. It's not too long ago before it was really greater accessibility to mobile phones because they were now mass produced and less expensive. They weren't the bulky phones of the 80s and they were pocket phones. My first phone was a Nokia.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Yeah, these are huge man 2002.

Speaker 1: 21:22

The last of my friends to convert, I was like hell. No, I won't do it. My Nana's still taking messages, hard messages for me, for my friend. She's like I'm not your secretary.

Speaker 2: 21:31

Yeah, like the Nokia had text messages on it. It had that like little game. Yeah, see it was indestructible as well. Thousand percent, but it was again to your point. All this stuff becomes faster it becomes cheaper.

Speaker 1: 21:43

And now?

Speaker 2: 21:44

organizations are paying for your phone. They're paying for your plan.

Speaker 1: 21:46

But I will say, in the early start of phones things were still relatively expensive. With your cell phone, do you remember? I couldn't call anyone until 9pm because otherwise it was like cost per minute. And then text messages I was charged 10 cents per text for those.

Speaker 2: 22:04

Yeah, my first phone was in 1999. It was a Motorola flip phone for 60 minutes a month Again, this is no text messages. For 60 minutes a month it was $99.

Speaker 1: 22:14

It was expensive.

Speaker 2: 22:15

Yeah, it was $99.

Speaker 1: 22:16

It was expensive. Yeah, it was expensive, but again, that definitely played into instant accessibility. Wi-fi also not a thing.

Speaker 2: 22:24

We used to get cables, yeah, everything was hardwired Ethernet.

Speaker 1: 22:29

Now Wi-Fi exists, and not just in personal homes but public places. So access to the internet without a need for those wired connections really started to facilitate work responsiveness outside of working hours. So now it was an expectation Again good technology, but it was making people things a little bit worse in the work world 2010s. Not too far ago, cloud computing came out with online storage, collaborative tools where you can work on the same document with your friends in different locations. So collaboration is improving and access to documents is improving Things like Slack Teams.

Speaker 1: 23:13

But this started to really blur the lines and, as you just recently pointed out, now not only are you managing your email, but instant messages coming in from people like ding, ding, ding and this expectation you need to stop what you're doing in the flow of your day to respond. So now you spend your day responding and now, when you're commuting, you're getting texts, you're getting emails. There's this expectation you're checking email before the next day, before you start your day. It's just taken over. How many times have you logged in on a Sunday to prepare?

Speaker 2: 23:47

for your week. Now we're at the point where people feel stressed at home because they feel like they're missing something at work. You have multiple channels your email, your Teams, your text, the document that you're supposed to be in. It's like you're going to miss something.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Yeah that, and your workplace monitoring that and using it against you if you're not responsive enough. 2020s here we are. Covid-19 forced that global shift to remote work for a lot of people, significant number of people. That really accelerated the use of digital communication tools and solidified their role in our daily work routine. Again, these tools are not a bad thing Great for productivity, great for collaboration but what we also saw was a real increase on this always-on concept of work and home, and that line just completely blurred. This is just the timeline of how we got here, folks, but we can do something about it right. So who else is doing this? A few good examples New York the New York City Council put forth a proposal for the right to disconnect law in 2018.

Speaker 1: 25:00

It did not go through. It did fail, but there were key reasons why. I think these are bogus reasons. I'm not quite sure why they weren't addressed in the legislation or rewriting of the bill, but I'm going to highlight a few of these. No surprise business opposition. There were significant opposition, particularly from industries that required flexibility and employee responsiveness due to the nature of their work, Primarily concerns being that this would cause operational difficulties and impact on customer service. My thought when I was reading this was sounds like a you problem and not an employee problem. So what?

Speaker 2: 25:40

do you need to do to figure that out To your point? If you need something to be always on, there are interventions and how you structure jobs like shifts, right that you could pull. It doesn't necessarily need to be that you need to have someone always on.

Speaker 1: 25:53

Correct yeah, someone always on Correct yeah, or if you're not going to do shift work. What are those roles within your organization that would have something come up that requires responsiveness, where you have that as an exception in your policy, like these are the exceptions of when we would reach out to you and you're in agreement, when you're getting into that employee contract, legal and practical concerns. So there were questions around how are they going to enforce the law and implementation questions were raised like worried about legal ramifications of restricting communication, especially in scenarios where quick decision making is crucial. They didn't give an example of that, but I'm just thinking do you mean if there's a disaster and HR needs to send that communication to everyone and note to employees? Again, I go back to what you just mentioned.

Speaker 1: 26:42

Those are exceptions to the rule that you include in your policy or you have shift workers that are there to be responsive to those things. And there was a lot of cultural resistance not surprising, because in the US we love to work. There was pushback around legislating work-life balance, where businesses felt we really shouldn't be legislating this. It should be handled through company policy. I disagree, because the reasons we have these legislative bills and these laws is to protect employees' rights, because we can't always rely on company policy to do that, clearly because we haven't been able to do it and people are in a dire burnout stage consistently. Yeah, so places that this is happening, and happening really well, according to the CNBC article, and then I also looked up a global employment journal and we'll link to that in the show notes France.

Speaker 2: 27:36

They have been.

Speaker 1: 27:37

Yeah, France, baby France.

Speaker 2: 27:41

Je m'appelle. I like this.

Speaker 1: 27:45

All right. So they were a pioneer in this area, establishing a right to disconnect in 2016. Employers with more than 50 workers must negotiate specific terms that allow employees to refrain from using digital tools related to work during non-working hours. Behind that is Spain Spain's legislation passed in 2018, granting employees the right to digitally disconnect to ensure respect for their rest time, personal time and family privacy. I like that they bundled it that way. I like that there was a reminder like oh hey, folks have family outside of work. We need to include that in here.

Speaker 1: 28:24

You know, maybe they want quiet time to put their kids to bed, I don't know. Italy they've included this as part of their broader worker statute, which has been updated to address the challenges, especially proposed, that have come with remote work. And then in belgium, they updated their legislation recently to enforce the right to disconnect more robustly within the private sector and, since april of 2023, employers with 20 or more employees are required to incorporate this right into collective bargaining agreements or work rules. And in Ireland, in 2021, they introduced their code of practice for employers and employees on the right to disconnect, which includes the right not to routinely perform work outside your normal working hours. So people are doing it and they're doing it well.

Speaker 1: 29:14

Salaried employees, man yeah, salaried employees are really taken advantage of in this space. It's not to say nobody else is, but when you're a salaried employee, whatever that expectation, whatever that cultural norm is, that's the expectation for you. You could be working 60, 80 hour weeks at times because there's an expectation of responsiveness. 60, 80-hour weeks at times because there's an expectation of responsiveness and, depending on what's going on, you need to be on call or available and you're taking advantage of people at that point and it causes psychological issues, health issues. It's just not good all around.

Speaker 1: 29:50

I have a call to US employers here get ahead of the legislation and differentiate yourself as an employer with employees. This doesn't mean disconnect days or disconnect weeks. We've seen that in recent years and that's great. It's lovely when everyone can disconnect together and what I often hear is it's great because it means we don't have to feel guilty about taking that time away. And I'm like how about we make that a daily practice where you don't need to feel guilty about having a personal life outside of your work life? So here's a few ways you can do that Establish clear policies that respect workers' private time.

Speaker 1: 30:31

Ensure employees are not obliged to engage in work communication during their off hours, that's, evening and mornings. They're not obliged. Make that clear. If your organization doesn't have policies around this yet as a team leader, make that clear. If you choose to do those things, that's on you, but that is not my expectation. It's as simple as stating that to your team.

Speaker 1: 30:55

Build this practice into your work culture altogether. Culture is the way folks work around here. If anyone doesn't know, simply that's what work culture means. So build it into your org from the top down. Make this a regular practice. Make this an expectation of everyone and you can tie it to things like for leadership that's a performance metric because you care about your people's mental health and that they're not on the brink of burnout and build this into employment contracts. Every job has unique requirements. We get it. We just talked about the potential need, if you can't do shift work, that you might need to build in expectation exceptions for certain roles. But what's not okay is not addressing it or waiting for the legislation to happen to make these changes. These are doable changes that can happen in a month.

Speaker 2: 31:42

Yeah, a thousand percent. And I just want to reiterate your very good points on what a team leader can do, because to me, listen, nothing's an emergency number one Shadow of a leader, right? Your team is going to do what you do as well, so don't send emails off of work hours. Delay receipts Delay receipts.

Speaker 2: 32:02

Yeah, if people say they're going to work on PTO, tell them to not work on PTO. And, by the way, you don't work on PTO. Do not be sending emails on your PTO, do not be playing the busy badge of honor. Yeah, let's just stop Stop.

Speaker 1: 32:17

Stop, okay. I want to give two employer examples of folks who are doing this. There's a company called Zensurance. They have recently implemented policies that restrict communication outside of standard working hours, which is nine to five. And then Volkswagen have completely blocked emails to certain staff during evening and morning hours, which the focus is to protect their employees from burnout and overwork. So I wasn't sure what certain staff meant, because I'm like why isn't this applied to everybody? But it's a step in the right direction. Again, don't wait for legislation. Be an employer that gets ahead of this and that you value this. I promise you your existing employees will thank you and prospective employees are going to say holy shit, that's revolutionary, because no one else is really doing that.

Speaker 1: 33:16

Mel, it was awesome to talk with you today. You, too, we have an exciting new series coming up, don't we? Next week, we do, we do, we are starting an interview with CEO series and we have our first CEO joining us. So that's exciting.

Speaker 2: 33:24

In the meantime, where can they catch us, Mel?

Speaker 1: 33:27

You can catch us on Instagram at your Work Friends Podcast. You can catch us on LinkedIn at your Work Friends Podcast group. You can also watch us on YouTube at your Work Friends Podcast Group. You can also watch us on YouTube at your Work Friends Podcast, so check us out there. You can visit our website yourworkfriendscom and if you want to get in touch with us, send us a note at friend at yourworkfriendscom. Bye, friends.