Respecting Off Duty Workers

This article will present some best practices to respect your off-duty workers with Beekeeper.

Set Expectations

Fairplay Rules are the rules of behavior, or code of conduct, within your Beekeeper app. They help you lay the groundwork for a respectful mobile communication culture. You can customize the Fairplay Rules and set them up so that each employee must agree to them prior to logging into the app for the very first time.

If you’re concerned about your hourly workers feeling obligated to use the app outside of work hours, make sure you explicitly outline your expectations in the Fairplay Rules. You can also outline your expectations for managers, to avoid behavior that may make your frontline workers feel like their off-duty time is not being respected.

These rules, while not legally binding, should lay the groundwork for more respectful usage. If you’d like more information about how to draft agreements that promote respectful use of Beekeeper, please reach out to support@beekeeper.io, or to your Customer Success Manager.

Example Fairplay Rules

1. Beekeeper is meant to make it easier for all employees to access work-related information and contact coworkers. It is not required that employees use Beekeeper. Participation is voluntary.
2. All employees, including managers, should not expect responses from team members who are not currently on-duty.
3. All employees should refrain from contacting coworkers who are not currently working whenever possible. Use of Beekeeper when off-duty is prohibited.
4. All employees are encouraged to mute notifications when clocking out of a shift, and leave them muted until clocking back into the next shift.
5. Our company’s regular cell phone policy applies when using Beekeeper.
6. The company’s anti-harassment and anti-discrimiation policies extend to the use of the company’s Beekeeper system.

Mute notifications

All Beekeeper users have the ability to mute notifications. From your navigation in the Beekeeper app, you can choose to mute all Beekeeper notifications or all group chat notifications, or you can selectively mute notifications for certain streams.

In addition to push notification settings, you can also adjust your email notification settings.

Not ready to mute notifications for all of your group chats? 

In addition to account-level notification settings, you can mute notifications for specific groups from within the group chat.

Set Up Availability Status Subheading

It’s fine to encourage employees not to contact their off-duty coworkers, but what if they don’t know who is on duty and who is off-duty? Global Admins can turn on and display an Availability Status subheading right in 1:1 chats to help solve this problem.

With Availability Status, every single employee can access up-to-date information about their coworkers' job titles and availability status before sending them messages.

Availability Status gives managers and employees the information they need, when they need it to respect hourly workers' free time when they are off-duty. The information can even automatically sync with your HR tool to keep vacation information and job title up-to-date.

For more information about how to activate this subheading, visit Availability Status Help Center article.