Out of hours contact

Personal Assistants
1

Hi, I have been a personal assistant for a few years and an area of conflict that keeps arising is contact by the gentleman I look after outwith my working hours. He is looked after by his Mum and Dad and has plenty of support when I am not with him. I am trying to set a boundary now that, generally, he does not contact me outwith my working hours by WhatsApp, email etc. I feel like I couldn’t switch off from my work. I wonder what my rights are with this and what are other peoples experiences. Thanks

2

You could take a look in your contract. Typically one is only expected to be ‘on’ when one is actually being paid during your working hours. Unless it’s a salaried position I guess. You could try:

  1. Requesting extra pay to cover extra contact
  2. Requesting that the person you support refrain from contacting you out of working hours for any non-essential reason
  3. Inform the person you support that they can contact you, but that you may not look at the message or respond to it until your next shift.
  4. If the person cannot control their communications, consider setting up a separate email and/or get a cheap phone for them to contact, and block them from your personal email and phone no. They would be easier to ignore during your time off.

There’s probably more options I haven’t thought of. Are you worried about coming over as unreasonable or intolerant or something? It’s fine to want your private time to be yours.

3

Hi Josh,

Thank you for your response and the great advice. To answer your last point, yes I feel I was maybe coming over as being intolerant or unreasonable, which I probably am not. I know I do my job to the best of my abilities and have a good relationship with the chap I look after but I just need to be able to switch off when out of work, as I have lots of other commitments. The man I look after has Downs Syndrome so he struggles with boundaries. I get on well with him and his family so I did’nt want to cause offence by drawing my own boundaries. I was just reaching out on here to see what other like minded folk thought.