On episode 84 of The HR Famous Podcast, longtime HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee come together to discuss business travel during the pandemic, sending late-night emails, and whether you should opt-out of a group message.

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Show Highlights

3:00 – KD asks Tim what his favorite OG from old-school rap is. He loves LL Cool J, and JLee likes Dr. Dre because of his purple satin suit.

5:15 – KD has been hitting business travel hard over the last few weeks. He has been in four different locations after not having much at all for the last year and a half. He has really started to notice the different mentalities to Covid precautions/mask-wearing in different parts of the country.

8:00 – KD was surprised by the strict mask mandates that were in place in Las Vegas when he and Tim were there for a conference.

11:00 – JLee is happy that the housekeeper at the hotel that KD stayed at felt empowered enough to enforce a mask-mandate policy.

14:30 – On a Southwest flight recently, KD heard the initial reactions of Southwest employees to a vaccine mandate.

17:00 – Tim mentions how some airlines offered early retirement to pilots during the pandemic and are now begging pilots to come back to work.

20:00 – KD wrote a post recently titled, “Are you a jerk for sending an email at 9 pm?” KD references a study where they looked at this and they found that receivers of late emails overestimated the quickness of response needed.

23:00 – JLee thinks that people in their mid-career won’t care when emails are sent and more senior employees may be more careful with their messaging.

25:30 – If the future of remote work offers more flexibility, Tim thinks that email send time doesn’t matter as much anymore (with caveats).

28:45 – There are folks out there that are very anti-after-hours emails.

32:00 – Tim doesn’t understand the people that want to have their cake and eat it too. How are we going to be working flexibly and then also defining after-hours?

37:30 – JLee thinks it’s a power move to opt-out of group messages, like group texts or chain emails. KD thinks it’s better to opt-out instead of not participating at all.