The Right to Disconnect: Can we ever leave work?

Professor Sir Cary Cooper, 50^th Anniversary Professor of Organizational Psychology & Health, ALLIANCE Manchester Business School, University of Manchester explores the concept of switching off.

Albert Einstein once wrote: “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction, the world will have a generation of idiots”. 

Although communication technologies (the emails, the smart phone, Ai, social media platforms, etc) have supported working people as communication tools, but they have also severely overloaded many. Over seven years ago, the National Forum for Health & Wellbeing at Work (an employer network of around global 50 employers) highlighted that one of the leading causes of workplace stress was email overload, leading to work spilling over into people’s private and family life. A whole new field of ‘technostress’ emerged around this time, exploring the impact of email overload on the health and wellbeing of employers, and on their productivity as well. The evidence is clear that email overload, since the advent of the smart phone, has led to increases in employee stress and work adversely affecting family life, as many people are working evenings, at the weekends and during their holiday periods – more then they did before the smart phone.

Concern for mental wellbeing

The good news is that employers and governments have become concerned about the levels of workplace stress and lack of mental wellbeing, which is now the leading causes of long term sickness absence in most developed countries. In the UK, the recent 2024 HSE figures show that around 50% of all long term sickness absence from work are the common mental disorders of stress, anxiety and depression – the single biggest source of absenteeism, and, in other surveys, ‘presenteeism’ as well.  

Although many organisations in the public and private sector are beginning seriously to tackle mental wellbeing, few have put any controls or specific guidance on email useage, particularly out of office hours. Nearly five years ago, France recognised the damage to employee health of email overload that they passed the ‘Right to Disconnect’ law, which in essence said no managers should send emails out of office hours to their staff, that means at night, over the weekend and while they are on holiday. Indeed, a British company in France was the first organisation to be fined over 60,000 Euros for breaking the law. Since then, Spain, Portugal and Germany have followed France’s lead with similar laws. The new Labour government has indicated they will also be considering a similar law or guidance in terms of its employment law strategy. 

The flexible issue

There are both positives and negatives about this ‘right to disconnect’ law.  The main downside is that this law may interfere with an employer’s flexible working policy, where people may want to spend time with their children after school but work in the evenings. Another issue is should it be a law or guidance? The former is more punitive and may put off employers who then put obstacles in the way of a truly right to disconnect policy. The main positive is that managers will have a legal mandate to consider the issue of work-family balance, and in the long run may see that it pays off in terms of higher employee commitment, lower labour turnover, lower stress-related ill health and higher productivity. Given we are in the era of talent retention and attraction, an organisational policy of providing people with more autonomy over their work, which enables them to spend more time with their family and friends, should mean they will get more positive traction among Z-Gen and Millennials who want more balance in their life. As Freud wrote in his book Civilization and Its Discontents in1930: “the daily work of earning a living affords particular satisfaction when it has been selected by free choice”. It is about time that HR actions their most often heard mantra “the most valuable resource is our human resource”– if HR wants to retain and attract the next generations this may be one way to do it!