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Exempts "on call" issues
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Exempts "on call" issues
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Our Exempt employees are given Blackberry's and expected to respond in a timely manner, however, the company is working on a policy that requires (tied to performance reviews) all Exempt employees to
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Exempts "on call" issues

posted at 7/16/2010 8:22 AM EDT
Posts: 4
First: 7/1/2010
Last: 7/16/2010
Our Exempt employees are given Blackberry's and expected to respond in a timely manner, however, the company is working on a policy that requires (tied to performance reviews) all Exempt employees to respond in a timely manner in the evening (before 10:00), holidays and weekends. We are getting push back from employees because they are concerned that the requests will not be reasonable, for example, someone postpones working on a report until the weekend but expects someone from Accounting to respond on the weekend to assist with their report. If they are not "on call" they will get a bad performance review.
Has anyone dealt with this type of issue before?
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Exempts "on call" issues

posted at 7/16/2010 8:36 AM EDT
Posts: 1103
First: 3/16/2007
Last: 8/19/2011
We would have never allowed on-call for issues like that. Facility issues (utilities, flooding, break-in for example) Serious incidents (employee death, ambulance involved in employee injury, etc) and IT failure (IT department only). Nothing else was considered worthy of on-call and were separate performance issues.
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Exempts "on call" issues

posted at 8/4/2010 3:29 PM EDT
Posts: 160
First: 12/5/2002
Last: 4/26/2011
Sounds like a very intrusive policy. While it is OK to mandate that salaried exempt employees be available during certain times, like 9-5, it sounds like the company wants them to be available at all times outside of sleeping hours.

Is the goal here to drive all of your exempt employees to quit?

You did not say what the scope of issues were to be addressed by this "on call" policy, but the example suggested that

Since management is exempt, my tounge in cheek advice would be to have your exempt employees stage a protest by calling management at 9:59 with some trivial issues and I think after a few times the policy will not seem like such a good idea.

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