The right to disconnect

The right to disconnect became Australian law under section 333M of the Fair Work Act, inserted by the Closing Loopholes legislation. It commenced on 26 August 2024 for employers with 15 or more employees, and on 26 August 2025 for small business employers.

An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from their employer outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. The right extends to work-related contact from third parties such as clients.

What interests me is what happened next. A full year of national data now exists, and it shows the law working exactly as intended for one group of workers while the problem relocated onto another. That result deserves more attention than it has received.

I am not a lawyer and nothing here is legal advice. What follows is what the law says, what the evidence shows, and five practical ways to treat the right to disconnect as an opportunity rather than a compliance chore.

What the law says	What the evidence shows	The shift that transforms
The right to disconnect, definedThe right to disconnect lets an employee refuse to monitor, read or respond to out-of-hours contact from an employer or a work-related third party, unless the refusal is unreasonable. It is a right to ignore rather than a ban on contacting anybody.	It worked, and the load movedNational measurement after the first full year found unpaid overtime stabilising among full-time employees while rising among part-time and casual workers. The least protected group absorbed what the most protected group put down.	A conversation rather than a server shutdownBlocking email at night treats a symptom and teaches nothing. The obligation the law actually creates is on organisations to question management practices built for a workplace where nobody could take the machine home.

What the right to disconnect actually says

Section 333M gives an employee the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact outside their working hours, where refusing is reasonable. Employers can still make contact. What changed is that ignoring it stopped being a career risk, because the right to disconnect is a workplace right protected against adverse action.

The right itself, and its limits

The Fair Work Ombudsman describes the right as covering contact or attempted contact from an employer or a third party such as a client, with the reasonableness of any refusal depending on the circumstances.

All modern awards now carry a right to disconnect term, added by the Fair Work Commission. Employees covered by an enterprise agreement should check whether their agreement addresses it separately.

Two points get missed constantly. The law does not prohibit an employer from sending a message at nine on a Sunday evening. And the right belongs to the employee, which means an organisation cannot discharge it by switching off its own servers and calling the matter closed.

What makes a refusal unreasonable

Reasonableness is assessed against factors set out in the legislation. The reason for the contact matters, along with how it was made and how disruptive it was, whether the person is compensated for being available or for working extra hours, the nature of their role and level of responsibility, and their personal circumstances including caring responsibilities.

Those factors do real work. An on-call engineer paid an availability allowance sits in a different position from a marketing coordinator who is not.

The practical consequence for an employer is that your contact practices now need a rationale you could explain to a third party. Most organisations have never articulated one.

What happens in a dispute

Parties must attempt to resolve a right to disconnect dispute at workplace level first. If that fails, either side can take it to the Fair Work Commission, which has broad powers to deal with it, including making orders.

Those orders run in both directions. The Commission can order an employee to stop refusing contact, and it can order an employer to stop taking certain actions. Nobody has an automatic win here.

Separately, because this is a workplace right, punishing somebody for exercising it exposes an employer to a general protections claim. That is the part with real consequences attached.

What one year of the law revealed

The first full year of the right to disconnect produced a result nobody was predicting. Unpaid overtime among full-time employees stabilised, which suggests the law is doing its job. At the same time, the burden shifted onto part-time and casual workers, who hold the least bargaining power in the labour market.

The scale of unpaid overtime in Australia

The Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute surveys Australian workers annually for its Go Home On Time Day report, now in its seventeenth year. The numbers are large enough to reframe the whole conversation.

The most recent survey found that Australian workers average 3.6 hours of unpaid overtime a week, equivalent to 173 hours or more than four and a half full-time weeks a year. At median wage rates that costs each worker $7,930 a year, and the economy $95.78 billion.

For scale, that figure exceeds what the Commonwealth spends on the NDIS and aged care combined. The personal toll shows up too, with 42 per cent of workers reporting physical tiredness and 37 per cent reporting feeling mentally drained.

The displacement nobody planned

The interesting finding sits underneath the average. Full-time employees averaged 3.8 hours of unpaid overtime a week and their position has stabilised, which the report’s author attributes in part to the right to disconnect.

Meanwhile part-time and casual employees aged 18 to 24 now perform the most unpaid overtime of any group, averaging 4.7 hours a week. The lowest paid workers in the economy are absorbing the largest share.

Read that as a management finding rather than a policy one. The work did not disappear when full-time staff stopped answering at night. It moved to whoever felt least able to say no.

If you employ casuals or part-timers, that displacement is happening inside your organisation right now, and no compliance document will surface it.

The autonomy paradox, and the duty sitting alongside it

European research on remote work named a pattern worth knowing. Autonomy moves from being an asset, meaning the freedom to choose when, where and how you work, to being a liability, meaning the obligation to absorb an increased workload on your own time. The same feature does both jobs.

In Australia this connects to an obligation that predates the right to disconnect. Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work names high job demands, low job control, poor support and low recognition among the hazards a business must eliminate or minimise so far as is reasonably practicable.

An organisation running on permanent availability is generating several of those hazards at once. The right to disconnect gives you a lever on the problem, and the work health and safety duty gives you the reason to pull it.

Five ways to make the right to disconnect useful

Applying the law grudgingly produces a policy document nobody reads. Five approaches turn it into something that changes how your organisation works, and none of them starts with the IT department blocking anything.

Build a disconnection charter with your people, not for them

The right to disconnect is as much a duty on organisations to question outdated management practices as it is a right for employees. It goes considerably further than closing servers at the weekend or adding a line to your email signature saying no immediate reply is expected.

A charter built collaboratively puts managers and their teams on the same footing, which matters because managers frequently suffer most from the culture of unconditional availability. Many of your people are being protected by a manager who is absorbing the pressure personally.

1. Start from a model. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes plain-language guidance, and your industry association will usually have a template. This gives you the sections you cannot afford to skip.
2. Start from your people’s actual problems rather than from what the law says. Identify the issues by role and by level, since a warehouse supervisor and a business development manager experience out-of-hours contact very differently.
3. Present the findings internally and run voluntary working groups, with each team responsible for drafting one part of the charter.
4. Consolidate and harmonise the groups’ work, then build it into your induction material and your management training rather than filing it.

Accept that the organisation is not the only cause

Organisations and their managers are not solely responsible for professional exhaustion, and managers are more exposed to burnout than the people they manage. Exhaustion also arrives from over-commitment, hyper-connectivity, fear of missing out, work addiction and perfectionism.

It arrives from people not daring to raise a problem with their manager, and from not recognising their own tiredness as work-related in the first place. Without excusing anybody, workers are participants in their own exhaustion.

This is slippery ground, because the task is restoring a sense of balance to committed people without disengaging them. The work happens individually, helping each person locate where commitment ends and self-harm to their own health begins.

Practical starting points: screen time reports that show people their own connection habits, prompts that appear when a message is sent outside hours and offer to schedule it for the morning, and sessions on hyperconnection and information overload that are open to everyone rather than to managers alone.

Stop confusing balance with separation

A lot of us still carry a model of work built for an era when the machine or the worksite physically could not come home, which made work and leisure hermetically separate. That separation was a property of the equipment rather than a moral principle.

The task now is balancing private and working life rather than walling one off from the other. Booking a holiday from your desk is normal. Children running around the table while you work from home is normal. Turning over a work problem at six in the evening is normal. The term for it is blurring, and it describes a search for balance rather than a failure of discipline.

This is the basis of my HR design approach, which considers the experience lived by the person before the result received by shareholders. The right to disconnect is inseparable from a wider conversation about culture and quality of working life.

Four moves make that conversation concrete: identify the toxic uses of your tools, since nobody experiences a Saturday evening email the same way; co-build the behaviours and values that follow; offer workshops to everybody rather than to managers only; and treat the moment as an opening to rethink how deep work and collaboration coexist.

Update your management practices while you have the excuse

Checking email on a weekend is not automatically a problem when it comes from your own professional conscience. It becomes one when you feel obliged to because of a toxic management culture, or when you are checking compulsively for reasons that have nothing to do with the work.

The right to disconnect does not reduce to treating your managers as harassers and your people as children by asking IT to block email at night. That treats symptoms and leaves the causes intact.

Managers can maintain a culture of instantaneity without ever deciding to. This is where my concept of the manager as enabler applies, with its role of protecting the team from outside pressure. Add to it the responsibility of helping people hold their own balance, and the requirement to be exemplary in their own digital habits.

1. Introduce the idea of digital ecology and digital quality of working life.
2. Run a digital debrief with each team to identify and prevent the psychosocial risks specific to the tools.
3. Maintain a digital etiquette, restating the rules for email, chat and whichever platforms you use. Yes, we are still here. Nobody copies the entire organisation on a reply, and email sits at the very bottom of the urgency chain. My piece on writing emails in five lines covers the rest.
4. Manage the information flows deliberately across email, collaboration tools, chat and video.
5. Develop empathy across distance. Train managers to ask their remote team members how they are going, which sounds as basic as it is, and to set aside dedicated time to discuss workload, hours and working conditions.
6. If you are an executive, do exactly the same with your managers.

Get out of grey remote work

Grey remote work describes informal working from home, regular or occasional, covered by no agreement, no policy and no variation to anybody’s contract. It exists because somebody allowed it rather than because anybody designed it.

Without any framework, nobody can tell whether the right to disconnect is being respected, because nobody has established when the working hours actually are. That is what I call level one remote work: unplanned, unstructured, with no consideration of the person’s working conditions and usually paired with micro-management.

Three moves fix it. Establish a genuine remote work policy, even with two people, defining how the week is organised, which tools are used, and which moments are for connection and which for disconnection. Introduce the rule that anything short of an emergency can wait. And resist replacing the conversation with pop-ups and alarms.

One detail gets forgotten. The right to disconnect covers moments inside the working day as well as evenings and weekends, which matters for a parent working from home during a child’s nap.

Compliance, charter or culture, which approach fits you

Three levels of response exist, and they cost very different amounts of political capital. The right one depends on how much out-of-hours contact your operating model actually requires, rather than on how much appetite you have for a project.

Three approaches compared

The deciding question is whether out-of-hours contact in your organisation is occasional and genuine, or structural and denied. Structural contact will defeat a policy every time.

Approach	What it delivers	Its blind spot	Fits you when
Minimum compliance	A policy document and a briefing, meeting the legal requirement	Changes no behaviour, and misses displacement onto casual staff entirely	Out-of-hours contact is already rare and your risk is procedural
Collaborative charter	Agreed norms per team, built by the people who have to live with them	Erodes within two quarters unless managers are held to it	Contact patterns vary by team and nobody has ever discussed them
Culture and work redesign	Changes to workload, coverage and who is expected to be available	Slow, and it exposes resourcing decisions leaders would rather not revisit	Out-of-hours contact is structural, meaning the work does not fit the hours

Signals that tell you which one you are in

Four signals separate a procedural problem from a structural one, and all four are visible in data you already hold.

• Out-of-hours messages cluster on the same two or three senders, which is a behaviour problem and responds to a conversation.
• They cluster at month end or during a known peak, which means your resourcing is designed for the average rather than the peak.
• Permanent staff contact has fallen and casual contact has risen, which is displacement rather than improvement.
• Managers are sending more out of hours than anybody else, which usually means they are absorbing a load nobody has counted.

How I can help you with the right to disconnect

I work with organisations treating the right to disconnect as an opening rather than an obligation, which means the conversation is about management, performance and how work is organised rather than about email curfews.

Keynotes and awareness sessions

A keynote suits an organisation that has published a policy and seen no behavioural change. Sessions on hyperconnection, information overload and digital ecology are open to everybody rather than to managers alone, which is the point.

I use the organisation’s own message timing data where they will share it, because a room recognises its own pattern faster than any argument I could make.

Charter workshops and manager training

Charter workshops run the collaborative process described above, with working groups drafting the sections that affect them. The output is a document their colleagues recognise rather than one HR wrote alone.

Manager training covers the digital debrief, the etiquette, the information flows and the empathy work, and it connects to my wider work on managerial transformation, since a manager who cannot protect their team cannot enforce anybody’s right to disconnect.

Conclusion: the right to disconnect is a conversation, not a curfew

The law is in force, it applies to organisations of every size, and it gives employees a protected right to ignore you after hours. That much is settled and it is the least interesting part.

What the first year of evidence shows is that a right exercised by the people who have bargaining power can push work onto the people who do not. Check your own numbers by employment type before you decide the problem is solved.

Communication technology is what the Greek philosophers called a pharmakon, both the poison and its remedy. The right to disconnect is an excellent occasion to open a conversation in your organisation about how work is organised, and a poor substitute for having one.

Frequently asked questions about the right to disconnect