Do your managers expect employees to check their emails and other messaging options after hours or on the weekends? (That's sort of everybody, isn't it.) Well, here's an FLSA alert for you, taken from a recent report from Forbes.
Chicago police officers, who are expected to regularly check BlackBerrys after their regular shifts, are seeking overtime pay for "off-duty" BlackBerry time. While the former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daly thought the suit was silly, the Feds don't. It took them two years to decide, but they approved the suit to move forward. In fact, they invited all of Chicago's Bureau of Organized Crime officers through the rank of lieutenant to join the suit.
'Unless an employer can prove that its workers who check emails are overtime-exempt professional, executive, or administrative employees, it could be liable for failing to pay for such "off duty" work,' Jim Burns wrote in this February piece, "Do After-Hours Emails Trigger Overtime Pay." He didn't have to spell out for us, did he? We can easily picture the expensive mess in our mind's eye.
If you haven't thought about this overtime issue before, here are a few suggestions for policy changes. If they don't suit your jobs or work flow, it may be a good time to have a chat with your labor attorney!
- The most straightforward -- not issuing smartphones or PDAs to non-exempt employees. But it's not an option for lots of businesses.
- Directing non-exempts to limit their reading of, and response to, emails to business hours. (And following up when you find their managers are asking for more.)
- Reminding non-exempts to avoid off-duty work and specifically mentioning that includes checking their email.
I'm sure that many of you have found more job-specific ways to deal with this, too. If you've had success with other types of practices or policies, could you please include it as a comment? This could be a big hairy one for some of your colleagues.
Margaret O'Hanlon is founder and Principal of re:Think Consulting. She'll join Ann Bares and Dan Walter of the Compensation Cafe to speak the unspoken -- Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communication -- in an upcoming book. Margaret brings deep expertise in compensation, career development and communications to the dialog at the Café. Before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal with Towers Watson. Margaret is Deputy Director of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Pacific Plains Region. She earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Creative writing is one of her outside passions, along with Masters Swimming.
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