Should we have the ‘right’ to disconnect?

Fifteen months in and the great working from home ‘experiment’ rumbles on. 

Love it or loathe it, many of us will need to carry on working remotely for EVEN longer, after the four week delay of so-called ‘Freedom Day’.

For workers up and down the country, this means a continuation of social distancing and the various other measures that make a full-blown return to the office impossible. Even the most introverted of us are now craving at least SOME sense of normality and human interaction beyond the formality of a pre-arranged Zoom call.

Remember bumping into your colleagues for a chat in the kitchen? Yeah, that. 

Could burnout become the new pandemic?

Fatigue and burnout is everywhere right now. Many organisations are finding their staff turnover rates are on the up, and engagement rates are on the decline. This week we’ve seen that dating app Bumble has announced that its employees can take a whole week off fully paid to combat growing stress in their teams. 

Many with less sympathetic employers won’t be so lucky.

So what’s causing this? Perhaps things like feeling the need to bring our A-game every time we have to jump on a video call. Or that we no longer have that time to decompress during a commute home. Or that we feel like we need to be ‘present’ on Slack until late in the evening. 

Perhaps it’s the opinion of many employers that their staff can handle MORE work now that they have additional ‘time’ on their hands, when in reality the mental capacity of most people has dropped. 

We are still getting our heads around living through ‘unprecedented’ times, after all.  

The thing is - overworking and worse, presenteeism, was a problem BEFORE the pandemic started. And something that was meant to provide MORE flexibility (i.e. remote working) has, in reality, resulted in less.

The lines are now blurred between work and home. Work used to be something you went to, and then could leave at the office at the end of the day, should you so wish to. Whilst home used to be the place of safety where you could keep the stresses of the outside on the other side of the door.

Now, work lingers in your home like a bad smell you can’t escape from. Even for those that aren’t particularly bothered about climbing the career ladder, its presence can always be felt. 

Learning to live with remote working

Of course, there are HUGE benefits to working remotely, and there’s no doubt that it’s something that should be here to stay in the long-term. 

Being able to work from wherever you want was a trend that was growing pre-pandemic, and quite rightly so. Since the first lockdown last March, many organisations have woken up to the fact that they can operate this way. In fact, 50 of the biggest employers in the UK have said that they plan to move to a hybrid model on an ongoing basis. 

Remote working is something that employees want too, even if things aren’t quite perfect just yet. We’ve already seen an uproar at Apple and Google when their staff were told they would need to come back to the office for at least part of the week. An internal letter sent by Apple employees to their leadership team stated that their decisions around ongoing remote working practices had already forced people to quit. 

Let’s not forget - these are seen as some of the most desirable places to work in the world. If people are willing to leave jobs there, it’s more than likely that employees will leave in droves if their not-so-well-known organisations don’t adapt to the changing times. 

Could the right to disconnect be the answer?

So people want flexibility, but we can also see that remote working isn’t quite there just yet. The solution here seems, at least on the surface, like a fairly simple one...
We need to ensure that employees are able to balance their work and their home lives effectively. 

This is why it’s been great to see a debate about introducing a Right to Disconnect law in the UK in recent weeks. This would make it illegal for employers to contact their employees outside of usual business hours.

The Right to Disconnect is a law that is already in place in a number of countries, including some of our nearest neighbours - France and Ireland, in a bid to improve the work-life balance and therefore mental wellbeing of their populations. 

Momentum is growing behind the movement. Initially proposed by the Prospect union, it now also has the backing of the Labour party. Whilst the government has stated it’s not looking at making remote working the default post-pandemic something that they’re considering, they are looking at ongoing flexible working practices as part of their manifesto.

But will it actually happen?

It will be interesting to see where this debate takes us, and whether this is something that we will see introduced in the UK. On the one hand, making this law may force employers that tend to take advantage of their employees to respect their down time, and prioritise their wellbeing. From an employee perspective, it might get those that bring burnout on themselves through overwork to think a bit more about how time away from work is beneficial for them and their health.

On the other hand, could such tough restrictions actually be counterproductive? As we move towards a world of greater flexibility, where people want to work at the times that feel the most productive for them, could banning the flow of communication at certain times mean that those with a preference for later hours or a more flexible schedule are forced into working at very prescribed times of the day? 

Right now I think that making out of hours communication illegal is a big move that needs very careful consideration for the arguments on both sides. Though one thing’s for sure - burnout is very real, and something has to change.

In the meantime, we need to make sure our employers and employees are educated around the benefits of a healthy work life balance, that our people are looking after their physical and mental wellbeing, and having regular days off by using their annual leave quotas, and that we’re making it ‘ok’ to switch off for the preservation of our health.  

By Sean Butcher