Lawyer Monthly - August 2021 Edition

19 AUG 2021 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM HOW WOULD A ‘RIGHT TO DISCONNECT’ CLAUSE IN THE EMPLOYMENT BILL WORK? with work out of hours; and a duty to respect another employee’s right to disconnect. The code does not specify what ‘normal working hours’ are. The code also addresses the issues of doing work in different time zones and asks employers to manage expectations that their staff doing international business will only reply to emails during their own working day. It recommends training for managers to spot those not obeying the rules. So, with the UK lagging behind putting in place safeguards for overworked employees, the calls for a Right to Disconnect clause to be included in the Employment Bill – due out later this year – remain louder than ever. Just this month the trade union Prospect asked the Government to legislate to ban out-of-hours emails from bosses and for a legally binding Right to Disconnect. Some argue that this is not strictly necessary, as there is already legislation in place to protect employees. The Working Time Regulations put a limit on the working week, but we know that many employees are asked to opt out and many in managerial roles are not considered to be bound by these limits anyway. In any event, the issue is not necessarily the number of hours being worked, but the timing of those hours. If a manager is choosing to home-school and play golf during the daytime but then do all of their work at night, why should their direct reports have to be answering emails or sitting in on Zoom calls late into the night? Employees might argue that not preventing managers from demanding answers or calls late at night contravenes an employer’s obligation to provide a safe place of work, enshrined in the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. But realistically, is an aspiring young employee desperate to make a good impression going to raise their head above the parapet and make that claim? The first a business will know is when they leave or fall seriously ill and then it is too late. This is certainly the view that the Irish Government took when it implemented their code, which is there to supplement existing laws on working hours and safe places of work. It may well be that employees who have been successfully working from home for over a year may feel that a return to the office will set some boundaries to their working day, and so employers planning to downsize and reduce their office space might find that demand for those returning is higher than they think. Is legislation the answer? Probably, but faced with a shrinking talent pool and potential employees being much more focussed on work-life balance, employers are also going to have to lead the way with their own policies to attract the staff that they want. These policies must be applied consistently from the top downwards to be a success. There is no real excuse when simple technology can assist a manager eager to commit their thoughts and questions down in an email and get it out as quickly as possible. Use the delay function in Outlook (options/delay delivery) – then the creative juices can flow at 2 AM while ensuring that the email is delivered within working hours. There also needs to be an education process for managers to understand that emails arriving late, or demands for late calls, can be seen as bullying and giving off the impression of a manager not in control of their own workload. How many times when an email popped into an inbox These policies must be applied consistently from the top downwards to be a success.