Is the right-to-disconnect the start of a workplace revolution?

Workplaces are built on tension. There’s the typical back and forth between how much you’re paid for the work that you do, the modern tug-of-war over returning to the office, and the everyday struggle between your priorities and deadlines.

And this week a new one joined the fray when Australia’s first right-to-disconnect laws came into effect on Monday. It means that anyone who works for a company with more than 15 employees now has the legal right to ignore all work communications outside working hours when it’s deemed to be reasonable.

The newly introduced legislation is not going to alter how we work overnight, but it might just be the start of a revolution.Credit: Stephen Kiprillis

Experts from either side have hailed or savaged the new law, depending on their viewpoint, but I’m here to offer a more hopeful one.

For the last few years I’ve been heavily researching, writing and speaking to experts about the way we are currently working. The more I discovered, the more alarmed I became. Almost every indicator we have to measure the health of our workplaces has been heading in the wrong direction.

Overwork? Going up. Burnout? Rising. Apprehension? Increasing. Disengagement? Up, up and up.

In 2023, the Centre for Future Work and the Australia Institute found that employees they surveyed reported they worked an average of 5.4 hours of unpaid work a week, adding up to more than 7 weeks of unaccounted overtime each year.

The point of the law is not so workers can be lazy, shirk responsibility or give two fingers to their bosses.

I channelled some of my dismay into my new book, Work Backwards, that aims to address some of the imbalance in our public debate about work. Where, I wondered, were the loud voices shouting out that the way we are working is fundamentally broken? Why are we not all demanding that something dramatic must change to alter the current trajectory of our relationship to work?

Maybe, just possibly, the new right-to-disconnect law is the moment we’ve been waiting for.

Of course, it’s not going to alter how we work overnight, but it might just be the start of a revolution that forces us to rethink the role and importance we place on work, often to the detriment of everything outside it.

We are not alone in contemplating these tricky questions. Almost a decade ago, France mandated that every company with more than 50 employees establish clear guidelines for after-hours communication, followed by countries from Spain to Slovakia, Argentina to the Philippines.

Many good workplaces would already have their own version of a ‘right-to-disconnect’ in place, based on transparent conversations with managers and healthy boundaries. But for not-so-good workplaces, there’s now a legal reminder that people need to have a life outside of work, and that time should be fiercely protected.

The point of the law is not so workers can be lazy, shirk responsibility or give two fingers to their bosses. The extremely logical reason for them is that happy workers are better workers. If you want a content and healthy employee in the workplace, you need to give them space and time to be content and healthy outside it.

I’m an optimist at heart, which means I choose to see through the fog of uncertainty around this new law to recognise the hope on which it is built. I hope that the right-to-disconnect can be the start of an overdue conversation we need to have around genuine life-work balance.

I hope it means that every workplace will learn how to treat employees with the respect they deserve, especially around the number of hours they’re contracted. I genuinely hope that it will foster long-term changes to how we as a nation currently think about overtime and overwork.

But I’m also a realist. I know it’s going to take time for workplaces to grapple with it all. It might be full of tension at the start, but eventually the fabric of our workplaces will remould themselves around the happiness of workers, and that’s when we’ll know that the revolution is here.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.