Toronto-area School Board bans after-hour emails

It looks like teachers and staff at the Peel District School Board will see a major cutback on “homework” this year, thanks to a request from Tony Pontes, director of education, for employees to stop sending emails between Friday at 6pm and Monday at 7am.

“(Email) was one of the predominant distractors in our survey (of staff) … and one we have to be realistic about,” Pontes told staff at last week’s back to school meeting, according to a report by the Toronto Star. “Some of you know this means a big rush of Monday morning emails — yes it does. It also means we are counting on you as adults to determine what is an emergency — there is no email police on this one . . . but this is what school leaders asked for.”

While Pontes didn’t call it an official policy, the banning of work emails outside of work hours is becoming a new tool for pushing back against the increasing encroachment of work on life as a result of many companies allowing employees to bring their own devices or use company phones.

Stuart Rudner, founding partner of employment focused law firm Rudner MacDonald, says he’s curious to see how serious the PDSB – which is the regions largest employer with 15,000 staff and teachers – will take its new initiative.

“What will be interesting to see is if there are people, supervisors or managers or anyone with authority over others who abuse it or disregard the new rule,” says Rudner. “Teachers are unionized, so it wouldn’t likely (end up in the) collective agreement but it may be something that becomes contentious, if you have something like, for example, administrators sending emails on the weekend and then you have teachers that feel as though they have to read them.”

He points out that setting up policies surrounding after hour emailing is becoming more common. France, for example, stirred up discussion earlier this year when it created legislation requiring companies with 50 employees or more to put policies or programming in place to limit after-hour emails.

While the emphasis is often put on using these policies to protect employees’ work-life balance, Rudner says these sorts of rules also protect employers.

“It’s good to have a policy in place which talks about things like when emails are sent, when you need to respond to them, how quickly you need to respond,” says Rudner. “Unless something is said very clearly about what the expectations are, people are going to make assumptions – if you hand them a BlackBerry or give them access to email on their iPhone then they’re going to assume that means they’re expected to check their email 24/7.”

Which, says the employment lawyer, could result in a hefty overtime bill for the company down the road.

“I hear this all the time ‘well I’m playing them a salary so that covers all their time it doesn’t matter how many hours they work,’ ” says Rudner. “Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t matter how you’re paid… you can be entitled to overtime even if you have an annual salary.”

So it’s up to employees to know their policies and keep track of overtime. And if employers catch employees overstepping the boundaries and there’s an email ban policy in place, it could call for discipline.

“If you don’t enforce the policy, it’s going to be meaningless,” says Rudner. “Otherwise I think we’re going to see a lot more claims for overtime because people are responding at night and on the weekends.”