In March last year, the Senate Select Committee on Work and Care made recommendations to address employees’ work hours and the right to disconnect which, if implemented, will require a radical rethink of employees’ work weeks and their right to leisure time.
Some will say bring it on because there are certain professions that need a wake-up call about what they expect from their employees’ time.
The Senate Committee recommended the following:
- The right for workers to disconnect outside of work hours
- Annual reporting to the Fair Work Commission on workplace rostering and flexible work practices
- The Fair Work Commission to review the 38-hour working week, and
- Trialling a four-day work week in diverse sectors and geographical locations.
They also said that the right to disconnect from work during personal time during the week and on weekends should be protected by law.
Fine, but what are the unintended consequences and does one size fit all?
Does one size fit all with the right to disconnect?
My wife is a teacher and I work in reputation management. A lot of my time is spent dealing with client issues and managing crises.
I have two simple questions to test the Senate Committee work hour recommendations:
- Should parents or the school have the right to contact teachers in the evening or on weekends and expect them to respond outside of school hours?
- Should a client or my managing partner have the right to contact me out of work hours if there is a crisis or an issue?
In my book the answer to the first is no unless of course, something urgent has happened—a fire at the school, a child in the teacher’s class has had a serious accident or illness.
The answer to the second is a resounding yes. My career, let alone my ability to work in crisis management, would have been severely hampered if I or my employer had stuck to what the Senate Committee is recommending. I made a choice long ago that my clients and colleagues know that I am available anytime to deal with a crisis. In any case, in this game, the media certainly don’t care when they phone you about an issue or crisis that is running hot.
Could the right to disconnect from work hamper career progression?
This, I believe, will depend on the profession or sector in which you work.
In the professional services sector, I have personally witnessed abuse by people in positions of power hounding employees for work that is either not urgent, a result of their own time mismanagement or over-promising on delivery deadlines to clients.
This practice needs to stop. It places undue stress on employees, creates a toxic work culture and stifles collaborative team environments. The companies that stand by and let this happen will reap a withering employee value proposition and people will simply leave.
Employees have choices. I choose to work in crisis management. I love what I do but with that comes the acceptance that I am available when a crisis is in full swing. It’s required for the task.
As unpopular as this comment may be, I can’t have employees working with me on a crisis who are not prepared to do the same. If they choose to work in crisis management that is what is expected. It’s a choice that comes with demands which fall outside of what the Senate Committee has Recommended.
However, if things do go sour, one of the unintended consequences could be that the employee cynically claims they were not given the right to disconnect outside of work and that they worked more than the 38-hour work week.
Getting the balance right with the right to disconnect
There will always be employees and employers who abuse the system. As a result, there are some industries that absolutely need clearer boundaries. For example, health and community services workers, frontline workers, shift workers, etc. all need this type of legislation. However, there are other businesses where it could cause more harm than good.
A little common sense will go a long way to assisting. For example, technology has made it extremely easy to reach out to employees after hours; teams, text, Slack, email, WhatsApp, and so the list goes on.
To deal with the right to disconnect, we have set up on our email system an automatic prompt which, after 5:30pm says: “Do you want to send this email outside of work hours?”—simple but effective.
A while back I used to send an email after hours and I’d write, in bold in the subject line: Please don’t read or act on this until tomorrow or Monday. I reckoned that was thoughtful of me.
How wrong I was. An employee pointed out to me in one of our Stop, Start, Continue meetings that irrespective of my ‘thoughtful’ subject line, the email still caused stress because it would hang over their heads the whole evening or weekend.
I have, in the main, stopped doing this.
Businesses that have an entrenched culture of forcing staff to work excessive, unreasonable, long and sometimes unsafe hours deserve this legislation. But there are others who will suffer and then there are always those employees who will abuse the system.
The best we can do as employers right now is to talk about how we can set up the changes that are coming with the Right to Disconnect legislation.
We all have a right to family time, private time and work time, so getting the balance right will be the key.
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