One year on, is our right-to-disconnect law actually working?

1 week ago 3

Opinion

September 4, 2025 — 1.27pm

One year ago, Australia enacted monumental legislation to try to change the way we work. Joining countries such as France, Argentina and the Philippines, the right-to-disconnect law said that every company with more than 15 employees had to establish clear guidelines for after-hours contacts.

For the first time, workers had the legal right to ignore all work communications outside their usual hours, when it was deemed to be unreasonable or not urgent. Last week, the law grew stronger by extending to businesses with fewer than 15 employees too.

A year ago, Australia enacted a new right-to-disconnect law. But has it had any effect?

The law was enacted in part to address the rise of the “infinite workday”, where an always-on office culture has led to overwork, disengagement and increasing levels of burnout across all levels of business.

It was a valiant attempt to protect Australian workers and recognise that careers are marathons, not sprints. But now that we’ve been living with the right-to-disconnect law for 12 months, is it working?

Well, not yet. Research from HR platform HiBob, which surveyed more than 2000 Australian workers, found that just over half of workers were aware of the law and less than a third felt confident enough to actually use it in their workplace.

This large gap between intention and implementation means 32 per cent of employees say they still regularly receive work-related communications outside standard hours, while one in five feel pressure to respond to such communications, despite what the law says.

It’s going to take small actions, repeated over and over, to slowly affect the change that we all desperately want to see.

“The lines between home and work life have become incredibly blurred, especially in hybrid and remote settings,” says Anna Volkova, HiBob’s head of people and culture for the Asia-Pacific and Japan.

The results aren’t entirely unexpected. As the law has applied only to large companies so far, 5 million Australians who work for smaller businesses have not been covered.

It also takes a long time to change an ingrained working culture, and our lived experience of being “always on” has slowly accumulated over decades and will take longer than a year to undo.

There are ways that workers can help to hurry it up, though. Every employee should politely insist that their workplace has a clear policy on after-work communications, and that everyone knows what that is so the company can be held to account.

Once there’s a clear policy, it’s time to integrate the policy into your teams, with modelling starting from the top. “Managers should lead by example,” Volkova says, “using tools like ‘delay send’ instead of late-night emails, having open conversations with their teams, and setting clear norms around availability.”

It’s also up to individual workers to take responsibility for their own behaviour and what they will accept. “Employees can support this by switching off notifications after hours and communicating their own boundaries, helping to build a healthier balance together,” Volkova says.

The right to disconnect is not going to change our work culture overnight, or even after 12 months. But the next time you reflexively go to fire off an email, tap out a text or call a colleague outside work hours, pause to think whether it can wait until you’re all back online.

Culture shifts on this scale take time, and it’s going to take small actions, repeated over and over again, to slowly effect the change we all desperately want to see.

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

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