The end of late-night emails from the boss? Employment solicitor at Morecrofts, Charles Millett, looks at a workforce’s rights to ‘disconnect’ outside their working hours. AS our working culture has evolved in the technological era to keep pace with the times, an inevitable consequence has been the huge increase in out of hours email, text and WhatsApp communications between employers and their staff. Thinking back 20 years or so, it would have been the norm to ignore any emails sent after leaving the workplace and to deal with them the next day. The same would have applied to emails sent while somebody was on holiday. Now that most of us have smartphones, we are never far away from our emails and by virtue of that fact, we are only a passcode or screen face recognition away from the workplace at any given time, whether that be first thing in the morning or the last thing at night. The sudden increase in remote working that has been necessitated by the response to the Covid-19 pandemic
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has increased the expectation that many employees should read and check their emails, text messages or WhatsApp messages outside of the normal working hours. Of course, the very phrase “normal working hours” may different from one person to the next, so that somebody working a different shift pattern from a work colleague may well be communicating with their colleague outside the colleague’s working hours without intending to do so.
has been read, the employee is probably already back in “work mode” and thinking about what was in the email.
The Office for National Statistics has found that 35.9% of the UK’s employed population did at least some of their work from home last year. These people on average did around six hours of unpaid overtime each week, much of it possibly taken up by reading communications from their employer and colleagues and responding out of normal working hours.
If it is mere guidance, it may not have the desired effect, as if an employee believes their employer expects them to respond out of hours, it is likely they will still feel an obligation to do so.
In France, it has been an entitlement for the past four years for an employee to “disconnect” from their work. In Ireland, a new code of practice was recently introduced to require employers to include messages on emails to remind their staff that there is no requirement to reply to emails out of hours. How effective this will be is debatable, as by the time the email
The Government’s Flexible Working Taskforce is currently looking at hybrid working and how this will operate in practice. Importantly, this will include considering the right to disconnect. What remains to be seen is to what extent the encouragement to disconnect from work will be guidance rather than strict law.
We should also remember that as we are no longer members of the EU, any rules passed by the EU to reflect this trend and to limit out of hours contact with employees across its member states will not be applicable to workers in the UK.
