Laws to prevent burnout may prove too rigid for those relishing the flexibility of working from home. By Peter Griffin.
A new "right to disconnect" law went into effect this month, covering 65,000 Belgian civil servants, and is likely to be extended soon to the private sector as well. It follows similar edicts passed down by European Union nations, including Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland and France, which was the first to enshrine it in law, in 2016.
The Europeans have led the world in pushing back on the encroachment of technology into citizens' lives. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) the EU passed in 2018 has arguably had the biggest impact, beefing up data privacy and protection. Major fines have been dished out to companies for non-compliance.
The largest so far, worth €746 million, was last year levied against Amazon, which Luxembourg's privacy regulator found had used its advertising targeting system without proper consent from its online shoppers.
The right-to-disconnect movement is another seemingly progressive move, this time to prevent overwork and burnout. But it seems best suited to "punch in, punch out" jobs in factories and supermarkets, rather than the legions of 21st-century knowledge workers.
The one good thing that Covid-19 gifted us was breaking Kiwi employers' obsession with having eyeballs on their staff during business hours. They were forced to trust people to get their work done from home, using Zoom and a host of other apps. Many people loved the flexibility that came with it. The work still got done and, in many cases, far more efficiently.
No longer did people have to face the morning commute five days a week to sit in a dreary office cubicle. They could put on a load of washing while a boring Zoom conference call proceeded in the background, or write a report first thing in the morning, then knock off earlier to take the kids to the park. Most office workers have now settled into a hybrid work pattern, working at home at least two days a week and saving office time mainly for meetings and teamwork.
It is still unclear what the long-term effect of this will be on productivity, employee well-being and the dynamics of collaboration between colleagues. But the pros would seem to outweigh the cons as long as there's mutual understanding between employers and workers about what constitutes a reasonable workday and the volume of electronic traffic that's acceptable in the evenings and on weekends.
France is holding firm on its rules, breaches of which can result in fines. It updated its advice to reflect this new world of teleworking, advising that a normal workday is the same if you are working from your dining table or your desk in the office. But there are grey areas. Many employers have installed software on employees' work devices to monitor how much time they spend in work applications. Is running the software after business hours a breach of the law? What if employees use work devices for personal use? Should they be booted off their work-issued computers and phones after 5pm?
It really comes down to trust and a decent culture in an organisation that gives workers the autonomy to do their work at their own pace, with a focus on the outcomes rather than the process. I doubt a right to disconnect would work for Kiwis.
Indeed, recruitment company Hays surveyed workers across Australia about the French law and found only 39 per cent of employees thought a similar law should be adopted there. The rest didn't like the idea, or didn't think it would work, while 6 per cent said a similar policy was already operating in their workplace.
We should embrace our more flexible and mutually beneficial ways of working, and log off when it suits us.
