EVERYBODY IS LAZY!! (But I don’t mean you!)

Last week, under an agreement with labor unions, Volkswagen agreed to deactivate e-mails on German staff Blackberry devices during out of office hours.  This decision will affect 1,154 workers at the company's six plants in Germany.  The e-mail system will be disabled from half an hour before the start of work and half an hour after the end of work.  I think if the employees are important enough to be issued company-owned Blackberrrys, they should be prepared to use them 24 hours a day.

John Tschohl author of “Achieving Excellence Through Customer Service,” summed it up perfectly when he said in response to the shut-down, “What they should do is announce to their customers: 'We only work business hours and after that we have no interest in communicating with you. If you have a problem, go to our competition.'" 

Every story on this subject used the statistic that employee burn-out in Germany is blamed for almost 10 million sick days a year.  That number sounds large until you compare that to the population of Germany which is almost 82 million.  If only half of that population, 41 million, were employed (throw out babies, sick and elderly) that equals ONE QUARTER of a day per person for this supposed employee burn-out!  What is the big deal about that?  Employees probably LIE about taking a sick day at least twice a year—that would mean a loss of 82 million days due to lying.  More productivity would come from having lie detector tests than shutting off e-mails.

Reuters  reported that, “German IT body Bitkom published a study this year showing that 88 percent of German workers are reachable for clients, colleagues and bosses by e-mail or mobile phone outside of working hours, compared with only 73 percent two years ago.”  So that is bad because why?

I have owned a cell phone since they were the size of huge briefcases and probably weighed twenty pounds to lug around.  I have had an AOL e-mail address for twenty years.  I want to be reachable and those who don’t are just plain lazy!

People should be happy they have a job instead of complaining about 24/7 accessibility.  If one doesn’t want to be reached on vacations or weekends, take a job where the workload does not back up if you are not around.  But if one has a position where one has to be available, stop complaining!

In 1999, DATELINE NBC profiled me as one of the hardest, fastest working people in the country.  During the interview, reporter Rob Stafford asked me if I ever took vacations.  I said, “No.”  My theory was if one takes a vacation to do nothing then there would be nothing to do.  What fun would that be?

By the way, with the exception of my sister and Michael Harkavy, the title of this blog does refer to you!