Email Sending Hours
In order to help your company comply with the various "Right to Disconnect" laws that many countries are implementing, we have added some new features in HR Partner that will hopefully help you to comply with these regulations and enable your employees to have a better work/life balance.
What does "Right to Disconnect" mean?
Basically, the RtD laws state that your employees do not have to act on company emails outside of their normal working hours - basically, they deserve some time off free from thinking about work.
Within HR Partner, our email server generally send out reminders every few hours, 24 hours per day. This can result in some emails hitting your employee inboxes in the middle of the night, or very early or late in their working day.
While they don't have to respond to these emails, sometimes even seeing them hit their inboxes can cause anxiety or distraction and put them into 'work mode' when they should be resting.
Delaying Emails
We recently added a feature on some employee and applicant emails whereby you can delay sending the email out for some hours by selecting the delay time at the bottom of the email sending window.
This will help to perhaps delay the email until the next day, however sometimes this time delay may not line up exactly with when your employee will be back at work - especially if you are sending bulk emails to many employees who may work in different timezones.
This is where the concept of 'sending hours' comes into play.
Setting up Sending Hours
By default, email sending hours are turned OFF in your system. To turn it on, and to configure it, you can go to Setup > Tools > Email Hours.
🔐 Please note that you will need to have admin permission to "View the Message Log" in order to see the Queue and make changes to Sending Hours.
In this screen, you can set up the rules around when emails are sent from your HR Partner company.
Here is an explanation of the options at the top of the setup screen.
| Enable Email Sending Hours | This is the master flag that turns the sending hours feature on or off completely. |
| Timezone Priority | This is the timezone calculation that will be used when determining whether it is 'safe' to send emails out. You can choose either the Employee's timezone, which may differ depending on where they are located, or else you can use the Company timezone, which fixes the times for everyone. |
In the Sunday to Saturday boxes, you can turn on the switch to specify if emails will be sent out on that day, and you can set the Start and End time that emails will be permitted to flow out of the system. Each day can have different times if needed. For example, you may want to start sending emails earlier on a Monday morning, or stop sending them after 3pm on a Friday etc.
The times you set here will be dependent on the 'Timezone Priority' you set above, i.e. whether they will be Employee or Company timezone start/end times.
You can also use the 'Quick Setup' option above to quickly set some basic rules instead of doing it day by day.
Once saved, the system will then check every outgoing email to see if it 'fits' within these windows before sending them out. Messages that are scheduled or sent outside of these windows will be placed in the Message Queue until they fit the next sending window.
When you go to your message queue via Setup > Tools > Message Queue, you will see this notification at the top if you are outside of your normal sending times.
The time shown here is in your own admin user timezone, so it might look a little different from the times on the setup screen if you are in a different timezone from the company default timezone.
Please be aware that email sending hours will only apply to reminders, notifications and assignments for Employee and Admin users. Emails for your job applicants or external parties will not be restricted by sending hours as they fall outside the scope of the legislation for almost all countries.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens if I click 'Send Now' in the Message Queue on a previously scheduled email, when I am outside the normal sending hours?
Even if you click the 'Send Now' option on an email outside of the normal sending hours, the system will NOT send that email out immediately. Instead, the email will be re-scheduled until the next available sending window. If you need to send an urgent email immediately, we suggest you disable Sending Hours, send the message, then re-enable Sending Hours again from the configuration screen outlined above.
What happens if I send an email delayed by 4 hours, but the delay puts that email outside of the normal sending hours?
The email will simply be re-scheduled again to fit into the next available sending window.
But I actually want to send my employees a reminder on Sunday to fill in their timesheets by Monday morning first thing. Reminding them on the Monday will be too late!
In this case, we suggest setting up your sending hours to include a small window on the Sunday, say between 2pm and 3pm on Sundays which will allow reminders to go out to your team at that time. Bear in mind though, that this will send ALL queued reminder and notifications at that time, not just the timesheet ones.
I want my applicants to get their emails after hours though, as we sometimes need to schedule interviews or follow ups before the next working day?
At this point in time, Applicant and other external emails are not restricted by the email sending hours system, so will be sent out immediately (or as per the delay you place on the email when creating it).
Can I turn off the sending hours at any time?
Yes you can - there is no problem with enabling or disabling the sending hours restrictions at any time. There is no risk or losing emails in the queue by doing this.
Do I HAVE to implement email sending restrictions for my employees?
At this stage, we don't know of any legislation that enforces this for employers, however we think it is a nice option to have, to avoid bombarding your employees outside of their normal working times, and to help you comply with any legislative guidance in the easiest possible way.