The ‘right to disconnect’ is a good idea, but making it stick is another matter

Advocates of the 'right to disconnect' scheme describe it as a win-win scenario for employers and employees. Photo: Oscar Wong

Two unrelated but connected paths towards the future of work have emerged in the southern hemisphere in the past month.

On one of those tracks is a new “right to disconnect” law. Workers in Australia are legally allowed to refuse to respond to workplace communication outside of contracted hours. Advocates of the scheme describe it as a win-win scenario for employers and employees, saying that workers who can rest and recharge in their downtime are more likely to be focused during their contracted hours, which can in turn only benefit the institutions and companies they work for. The policy also sets out clear guidelines for any needs-basis or “fair” out-of-hours contact.

On the other path, there is the head of an Australian mining firm who wants to maximise productivity during working hours by holding its office workers “all day long”. Chris Ellison, managing director of Mineral Resources in Perth, said during a presentation of the company’s fiscal performance that he didn’t want employees to even leave the building to buy a cup of coffee as it was bad for the firm’s bottom line, in comments reported by the BBC. The company’s western Australia offices are said to have a range of facilities to keep employees on-site, which echoes the pre-pandemic era when tech firm workers were said to be at work all the time, chewing up the dozens of hours every week at well-appointed, never-leave campuses.

Many would argue that both paths inevitably intertwine.

Mr Ellison’s maximum-output, high-performance, hold-employees-captive philosophy sits both comfortably and uncomfortably with the idea of clear boundaries between work and life and uninterrupted leisure time. But it also signals a new frontier in the pandemic-driven saga of what the future of work looks like.

The concept of the right to disconnect is not unique to Australia. France introduced similar legislation eight years ago and requires all but the smallest companies to detail when employees can disconnect. Other countries, including Germany, Canada and the Philippines, have similar laws in place in an attempt to mitigate against overload.

Several European companies instituted regulations and requirements years ago, back in the era when the BlackBerry was the smartphone of choice firmly tethered to its user’s hand, requiring employees to set down their devices over the weekend. An AFP report published in 2014 quotes one top European executive as saying: “I take a last look at my BlackBerry on Saturday morning and then I put it aside for the rest of the weekend. I don’t have to read my emails simply because someone somewhere is sending them to me.”

Set aside for a moment any incredulity about the choice of technology back then and recall, perhaps, that many knowledge workers had a slimmer portfolio of platforms to manage in their daily lives, with a lot of decisions and the business of work often driven by email. The concept of managing your inbox to zero was a popular response to the realities of digital working back then.

A decade later, most of those knowledge workers navigate an ever-expanding app-and-digital platform-driven world designed to improve communication, productivity and transparency, but also increasing the chance of facing issues such as workplace burnout and stress-related problems. For workers of today, their email inbox might be the least of their worries.

Some have already pointed out that the right to disconnect is a nice idea in theory, but no more than that. In time we will see what the workload of the Australia’s Fair Work Commission turns out to be. The FWC is charged with dispute resolution if companies and their workers are unable to resolve work-related issues themselves. If their caseload becomes busy, it probably means the regulations are effective but contested.

Those who sit in territories outside such regulatory frameworks will also wonder about the practicality of the “right to disconnect” rule and may point to their suitability in some commercial environments in a world where your smartphone powers almost every part of your waking world, be it for work or leisure.

While many people rightly yearn for equilibrium in their work and life, you can also easily imagine a world where those performative and cliched interview questions – like “why should I hire you”, “where do you see yourself in five years’ time” and “what’s your greatest strength”, which favour half-truth responses about relentlessness, always-on mentalities and resilience – are being met with incredulous silence, as the candidate replies “disconnected from you outside contracted hours”.

But something should give, even if government legislation on disconnection might be considered unnecessarily interventionist or unworkable in some industries.

In truth, the answers should be coming from the boardrooms themselves. Far better for companies to have charters, their own regulations and culture statements to guide them and be held accountable to, than for a nationwide regulatory framework. Far better, too, if other solutions are trialled simultaneously, such as the four-day week experiment in Dubai over the several weeks of the summer. Experiment, not mandate, could be a guiding principle.

With the five-year anniversary of the pandemic-induced work-from-home world soon upon us, it’s still unclear what the future of knowledge work truly looks like. We’ve developed an entire vocabulary to describe what’s going on, from hybrid to the great resignation, from quiet quitting to silent layoffs, from coffee badging to resenteeism, and so on, without ever really seeing it through a longer lens. We’ve witnessed a sequence of small changes after a period of fundamental uprooting.

Don’t be surprised if some version of “highly connected weeks and disconnected leisure time” becomes the next big trend, as employers and employees tussle over what’s fair in work and life and navigate a discussion on balance and value.