A controversial(?) thread for #WorldMentalHealthDay
In the last few years there's been a trend for email signatures to include flexible working wording e.g.
I choose to work flexibly & send emails outside normal office hours. No need to respond to my emails outside yours.

That people are talking about flexible working and are positively advertising that this is something that they can do is brilliant. There are so many reasons for choosing or allowing flexible working.

Whether that be the night owls who work best at 11pm or those of us with caring responsibilities for which flexible working is the only way we can marry school runs and employment.

But I want to take a moment to think about the impact that sending emails outside of ‘normal’ working hours might have on people receiving the email.

The work-life balance the sender achieves might be negatively impacting on the work-life balance of the receiver.

Before the ‘but people don’t have to read the emails’ comments come in. Not everyone is able to ignore or switch off emails because of personalities (anxiety or people pleasing or sense of duty etc.) or because people are on-line checking diaries etc. for their home life.

It can be particularly difficult to receive an email from a manager and not respond to it especially if you are in a more junior position or your position feels precarious or you are on a temporary or fixed-term contract etc..

So a plea for use of a really quick solution. For people (including myself) who sometimes work outside of normal hours can we use the email functionality that allows you to delay the delivery of emails. On Outlook it’s just a couple of clicks - in the tags tab.

You can set delivery for the future so emails arrive in recipients’ inboxes during their normal working hours.

You can also do this for team members that don’t work on certain days – reply but delay the send to their normal working days.

Plus here’s the other thing. If you do this, the date and time stamp still show the original send time so those email signatures that positively advertise flexible working can stay….

HT @BMatB while I can't do this on my outlook at work others might be able to https://medium.com/@BMatB/delaying-email-sending-outlook-vba-dbfd41a6ad01