The unfortunate part of this is that once people start responding to e-mails at 12AM, suddenly everybody is expected to respond at 12AM. It's a race to the bottom when separation from work and home life isn't really mandated.
I've faced this first hand as I switch from one company to another. In my previous place, we enforced a hard limit on when we could be expected to respond, and nobody ever messaged me on slack/ sent me an e-mail after that. At my new place, people are constantly e-mailing and messaging into the small hours of the night. It's tiring to watch.
There are German companies where the email server doesn’t deliver Emails until the next morning. This obviously works best if all are in one time zone, but it’d be amazing if one could set: working from X to Y and emails just stop arriving after Y.
The expected part is very much a culture thing that doesn't have to happen. My coworkers work all kinds of weird schedules, so there really is no basis to assume that someone will respond at a specific time if you haven't scheduled that with them, and it works just fine. I guess in a place where only a few people deviate that might be trickier to establish.
I've faced this first hand as I switch from one company to another. In my previous place, we enforced a hard limit on when we could be expected to respond, and nobody ever messaged me on slack/ sent me an e-mail after that. At my new place, people are constantly e-mailing and messaging into the small hours of the night. It's tiring to watch.
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