The Right to Disconnect: What it Means for Psychosocial Safety at Work
Since the 26th of August 2025, every Australian employee (small business included) has had the legal right to refuse unreasonable contact outside their working hours.
But this isn’t just an employment-law compliance question. Safe Work Australia’s Model Code of Practice names ‘role overload’ (high workloads or job demands) as a recognised psychosocial hazard, and defines it in part as shift structures or hours of work that ‘do not allow adequate time for workers to recover.’ This indicates that employers have a WHS duty to identify, assess and control out-of-hours contact within their HR policy.
What is the right to disconnect, and what counts as ‘unreasonable’ contact?
The right to disconnect gives employees the ability to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact — calls, emails, texts, Slack, anything — from an employer or a third party outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. It doesn't ban after-hours contact outright. It shifts the question to whether the refusal to engage with it is reasonable, and that's assessed against five factors: the reason for the contact, how it was made and how disruptive it is, whether the employee is compensated or reasonably expected to be available, their role and level of responsibility, and their personal circumstances, including caring responsibilities.
An emergency contacting an on-call manager is a difference case to a routine email sent at 9pm to someone with no after-hours allowance.
It’s worth looking beyond the legal definition, because the research on why these policies actually work (or don't) maps cleanly onto Bolman and Deal's four organisational frames model of leadership, and it explains why a written policy is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
Structurally, the law itself is well defined, but implementation lags behind it. A 2024 study in the Journal of Industrial Relations found that five years into Right to Disconnect legislation across Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, only 45% of workers reported their company even had a formal policy. The authors indicated that “the implementation of a right to disconnect policy on its own is insufficient to bring about cultural change in the workplace” (Josserand & Boersma, 2024).
From a human resource perspective, disconnection is vital for employees’ sustained wellbeing and long-term performance. Sonnentag’s stressor-detachment model, one of the more established findings in organisational psychology, shows that psychological detachment from work during non-work time is what allows recovery to happen; without it, stress carries over and compounds rather than resetting.
Research on Australia’s implementation has pointed to leadership ‘passive resistance’ to disconnection requirements. Moreover, a meaningful share of after-hours engagement is driven by employees themselves, chasing visibility and career advancement, not by explicit employer demand.
Culturally, constant availability still reads as commitment in a lot of workplaces, sometimes described in the literature as ‘digital presenteeism,’ where being seen to respond becomes a proxy for being seen to care, regardless of what the policy says on paper.
The structural fix seems straightforward: if a role genuinely requires after-hours availability (on-call, client-facing, senior enough to carry it) - that expectation, and what counts as reasonable contact within it, belongs written into the contract, not worked out case by case after something's already gone wrong. But contracts only cover the roles meant to be contactable. For everyone else, silence from leadership isn't enough; an anxious or ambitious employee will read "no one's telling me to respond" as risk, not permission. What actually shifts that is leaders modelling healthy boundaries themselves — disconnecting visibly, and actively encouraging their teams to do the same, rather than permitting it quietly and hoping the message lands.
Sonnentag's 2024 research on leader support for recovery found this kind of modelling flows through directly to how well employees actually detach from work. Disconnection from work is what the wider research ties to sustained performance and lower turnover, not a wellbeing perk with no bottom-line case behind it. So, a year on from the law taking effect, has any of that actually started to happen?
One year on: has it actually changed anything?
The honest answer is: partly. A January 2026 survey of 1,019 Australians (Antenna, on behalf of ADP) found 38% of working Australians are still contacted outside their contracted hours at least once a week, and 21% say they're unable to disconnect from work at all. A quarter reported work-related stress had affected their personal relationships in the past year.
Set that against the before-and-after picture from Robert Half's research: 87% of workers reported after-hours contact before the law came into effect in 2024. A year into implementation, 77% of employers reported improved team work-life balance, and 93% said they'd made practical changes as a result: updated communication protocols, manager training, and workload redistribution were the three most common. So the law hasn't eliminated after-hours contact. It has shifted employer behaviour in a measurable way, and given employees language to push back that didn't clearly exist before.
So what does this mean for employers?
Start by putting expectations for employee contact in writing, and train managers on what does and doesn't count as reasonable contact. The three most common employer responses in the Robert Half data are a reasonable starting checklist in themselves — updated communication protocols, manager training, and a look at whether workload (not just hours) is what's actually driving the after-hours contact in the first place.
None of this is a one-off policy fix. It's the same territory as any other psychosocial hazard: something that needs to be built into how a workplace runs, not bolted on after a complaint.
This is the same thinking behind Be Buoyant: Better Learning's psychosocial safety training program, built to help organisations turn obligations like this into practical, everyday habits rather than a policy that sits in a drawer until something goes wrong.
Explore Be Buoyant for your workplace and equip your staff with the tools to thrive, and at the same time reduce risk and absenteeism associated with psychosocial hazards.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Yes. Small business employees gained the right to disconnect on 26 August 2025. Larger employers, with 15 or more employees, have been covered since 26 August 2024.
-
There's no fixed rule. Reasonableness is assessed against five factors: the reason for the contact, how disruptive it is, whether the employee is compensated for availability, their role and seniority, and their personal circumstances.
-
Safe Work Australia recognises high job demands, including after-hours availability, as a psychosocial hazard. Unreasonable contact can therefore raise both a Fair Work Act issue and a separate WHS obligation for employers.
