The French Can Officially Ignore Work Emails Out Of Hours

It’s January 3rd; the first day back at work and the official end of the festive lull. It’s a two-sided coin because, on the one hand, it feels great to begin again, to come at it all with renewed energy but on the other, many can feel overwhelmed getting to grips with the barrage of general back-to-workness. The key is to take it in your stride and try to envision getting a decent work/life balance – January needs to be taken a day at a time after all.

One of the best ways to gain momentum when it comes to your workload is to clock out of emails once you leave the office. It’s a fairly straightforward ask, yet so many feel unable to do this; driven to check one final mail at 10 PM. How should we go about implementing this? Well, as with many things in life, we should do as the ever-chic French population just did, make it an official law that no employee is obligated to clock in once they clock out.

French workers now have the “right to disconnect” and ignore business emails that arrive after work hours.

“These measures are designed to ensure respect for rest periods and balance between work and family and personal life,” the Ministry of Labour in a told CNN.?The new regulation, instated on January 1st of this year, requires companies with 50 or more employees to create terms for handling out-of-office emails.

Ireland needs to get on this out-of-hours-email-ban train and stat.?Thanks to technology, the scenario of work spilling into our personal time?has become normalised, the French are turning this on its head and what we want to know is, will and can we follow suit?