Working Time, Availability and the Right to Disconnect

When the office closed, the end of the working day lost its physical marker. For many people the day now ends when they decide to stop, which in practice means later and less completely.

Beyond wellbeing, this raises obligations that vary by jurisdiction and are increasingly enforced.

General guidance, not legal advice. Working time rules differ substantially and change.

Where the law engages

Maximum working hours and rest periods. Many jurisdictions set limits on weekly hours and require minimum daily and weekly rest. These apply regardless of where the work happens, and remote work makes breaches harder to detect and easier to commit.

Records of hours worked. Several jurisdictions require employers to keep accurate records for at least some categories of worker. Remote work does not remove the duty, and an employer who cannot show hours worked is in a weak position if challenged.

Overtime. Where non-exempt employees are concerned, work performed outside scheduled hours is generally compensable whether or not it was authorised — including checking messages in the evening. "We never asked them to" is not usually a defence if the employer knew or should have known.

Right to disconnect. A growing number of jurisdictions have introduced explicit provisions, typically requiring employers to establish arrangements on out-of-hours contact. Details vary from a duty to negotiate a policy to more specific restrictions.

The practical exposure

The realistic risk for most organisations is not a dramatic enforcement action. It is the accumulation of unrecorded work by non-exempt employees, discovered during a dispute about something else.

A person who checks messages for twenty minutes each evening is performing compensable work in many frameworks. Over two years that is a substantial claim, and the absence of records tends to be resolved against the employer.

What to put in place

State expected working hours for each role and location. Not as surveillance — as a defined boundary that both sides can point to.

State whether out-of-hours contact is expected. If the answer is no, say so explicitly, because in the absence of a statement people assume yes.

Use scheduled sending. The single most effective intervention available. Managers write when convenient; messages arrive in working hours. It costs nothing and removes most of the implicit pressure.

Define urgency separately. If there is a genuine need to reach someone out of hours, give it a distinct channel and use it only for that. Where everything arrives through one route, everyone monitors everything.

Keep records where required. For non-exempt roles this is not optional, and remote work is not an exemption.

Watch the pattern, not the individual instance. Someone active late occasionally is normal. Someone active late every night is either overloaded or unable to stop, and both are the manager's problem.

The manager sets the real policy

Whatever is written, people observe what senior people do.

A manager who sends messages at 11pm has established that 11pm messages are normal, regardless of any assurance that no reply is expected. A manager who visibly stops, and is visibly unavailable, establishes the opposite.

This is the part that cannot be delegated to a policy document.

Where it is genuinely difficult

Distributed teams across time zones have no shared working day, so someone's working hours are always someone else's evening. The answer is not to pretend otherwise but to be explicit: define each person's hours, do not expect responses outside them, and rotate the inconvenience of any unavoidable overlap meeting.

Roles with genuine on-call requirements need a proper rotation, compensation where required, and a defined boundary — not an informal expectation that everyone is reachable.

High-autonomy roles where people prefer irregular hours can be accommodated in many frameworks, but the arrangement should be documented rather than assumed.