This summer, The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard. Today, with Ariane Ollier-Malaterre and Sabrina Pellerin, we are taking advantage of the holiday season to examine the right to disconnect.
Why a right to disconnect? Smartphones, tablets, instant messaging and online collaboration platforms: these tools offer much-needed flexibility and a sense of control over the times and spaces in which we work. But they further erode the boundaries between work and personal life, increase the duration and intensity of work, and taint rest periods with guilt and ruminations.
The consequences on stress and mental health are now evident, as is the drop in productivity linked to lack of concentration and the loss of creativity and involvement linked to fatigue.
The right to disconnect is an essential component of the necessary digital regulation in our lives. In an article published in Stanford Social Innovation Review in January, we analyzed the state of practices and presented three recommendations to public decision-makers, employers and union partners.
Modalities that are too or not flexible enough
Ontario and several countries, including France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Argentina and Chile, have passed legislation. As work requirements and contexts vary, the terms and conditions for exercising this right are most often referred to employers and union negotiations. For example, French employers have an obligation to negotiate with staff representatives to establish mechanisms for regulating digital tools, in order to ensure respect for rest periods, holidays and personal and family life.
In addition, organizations with 50 or more employees must negotiate with their union representatives and develop a policy, or failing that, a charter, detailing how this right is implemented. That said, in the absence of clear sanctions, the result of these laws is mixed. Thus, although this right has existed in France since 2017, few companies seem to comply with it.
On the other hand, some employers impose draconian restrictions to guarantee disconnection. For example, Volkswagen management and union representatives signed an agreement in 2011 blocking access to emails on smartphones between 6:15 p.m. and 7 a.m. This agreement made history, and other companies adopted similar practices, such as the multinational Henkel, which declared the same year an “email amnesty” covering the week from Christmas to New Year. That said, these measures are easily circumvented by social media and other instant messaging tools.
What a challenge to establish flexibility without also creating rigidity! To move in this direction, here are three recommendations from research on the paradoxes of permanent connectivity.
First recommendation: ensure that the right to disconnect is applicable to all. Legislation should cover the maximum number of workers. Currently, employees of small organizations are often excluded. For example, the law in Ontario applies to employers with 25 or more employees and excludes federally regulated organizations. In addition, there is a need to protect frontline workers, such as those in the health sector, who may be penalized if they do not receive a call or schedule change from the employer.
Second recommendation: work to ensure that the organizational culture supports the exercise of this right. Many workers feel the need to signal their engagement by being visible on Teams or Slack and quickly responding to emails, calls, and messages outside of work hours. If workloads are too high and organizations still expect quick responses as proof of engagement, the right to disconnect is ineffective.
It is essential that leaders, managers and human resources succeed in calibrating workloads, changing cultural norms around availability and responsiveness, and promoting the benefits of disconnection in terms of resourcing and of mental health.
Third recommendation: respect individual preferences and realities. The right to disconnect is only realistic and beneficial if everyone can exercise it independently. There are times of the day when we are more productive, and some need to deviate from the traditional 9 to 5. For example, many parents fragment their working day by taking care of the children at the end of the day. afternoon and resuming their duties in the evening. Some prefer to integrate work and personal life seamlessly rather than segmenting them into fixed periods in advance.
Trusting employees to manage their work time in a way that enables balance and performance—within organizational guidelines—can be a solution. For example, workers could commit to disconnecting a certain number of hours per week and a certain number of days per year, while continuing to position their working hours according to the demands of their work and their preferences and personal realities.
In all cases, exercising the right to disconnect calls for self-regulating worker behaviors to establish realistic and protective boundaries between work and personal life.
A social project
The right to disconnect is necessary and has many benefits for workers, employers and society. The establishment of strong but flexible legislation requires the collaboration of public decision-makers, employers, union representatives, managers, researchers and workers on the model of what the Advisory Committee on the right to disconnect has proposed. It is up to us to continue this essential project!