The right to disconnect in Australia isn’t a future obligation. It’s been law for employers with 15 or more staff since August 2024, and for small businesses since August 2025. If your policies still treat after-hours contact as a grey area, you’ve got a significant compliance risk.
The question for HR teams was never whether the law applies. It’s whether your managers actually behave as if it does.
What the Law Actually Says
Section 333M of the Fair Work Act gives employees the right to refuse to monitor, read, or respond to work-related contact outside their ordinary hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. The law doesn’t stop a manager from sending an email at 9 pm. It gives the employee grounds to leave it until morning. That distinction gets missed constantly.
Genuine on-call arrangements, safety-critical contact, roles where after-hours availability is factored into the job and rewarded accordingly, none of that is the target.
Habitual pings to staff who aren’t paid for the interruption? That’s exactly the behaviour the law was built to catch.
What Counts as “Unreasonable” Contact
The Fair Work Commission looks at the reason for the contact, how disruptive it is, whether the employee’s compensated for availability, their seniority, and their personal circumstances. A senior manager on a leadership allowance sits in a different position to a junior admin staff member juggling school pickups. Same after-hours message, two completely different legal outcomes.
It’s often easier to prevent legal action in the first place, and that’s where behavioural insight earns its place in the conversation. Extended DISC® profiling won’t settle a Fair Work dispute for you. What it does is show you how different people can react before a dispute ever starts. A high D-style employee may be more inclined to challenge an unreasonable expectation directly, while a high S-style employee may be more likely to accommodate the request and avoid creating conflict. Same policy gap. Completely different warning signs.
Running regular employee engagement surveys alongside an Extended DISC® assessment will give you data to back the instinct: who’s actually being contacted, how often, and how it’s landing.
Why This Matters Beyond Compliance
It’s the businesses that ignore the line between work time and personal time, treating availability as free and endless, that end up losing good people. Employee retention takes the hit long before any Fair Work complaint does.
Treat the right to disconnect as a box-ticking exercise, and you’ll miss what it’s actually telling you. After-hours contact creep is a symptom. Sometimes it’s understaffing. Sometimes it’s blurry role boundaries. Often it’s just a leadership habit, visibility mistaken for output. Fix the policy without touching the habit underneath it, and the same problem shows up somewhere else within six months.
Get ahead of it and retention follows. Staff who aren’t fielding Sunday-night emails stick around. They’re more switched on while they’re there, too.
Building a Right to Disconnect Policy That Works
Start with an audit.
- Who’s sending contact after hours, and why?
- Define what “reasonable” looks like for each role in writing; don’t leave it sitting in a manager’s head.
- Train managers specifically; most breaches come from habit, not malice.
- Build a real escalation path, so staff raise concerns with you before they raise them with the Fair Work Commission.
This isn’t only about dodging a stop-order application. It’s about protecting the productivity gains and culture that you’ve spent time building.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, they still can. What’s changed is you now have a legislated right to leave that message until morning, unless responding would genuinely be reasonable given the circumstances.
It does now. Large employers, 15 or more staff, have been covered since 26 August 2024. Small businesses joined them on 26 August 2025. There’s no size exemption left standing.
Not if they’re exercising the right reasonably. Try to punish someone for that, and you’re looking at a general protections claim, not just an awkward HR conversation.
It goes to the Fair Work Commission. Almost always, they look for conciliation first. If that doesn’t settle it, the FWC can hold a hearing and hand down binding stop orders.
Not automatically, but it helps your case a lot, especially if the employee’s actually paid an on-call allowance. Contact built on a vague, unpaid expectation of availability is the pattern the FWC keeps ruling against.
Want evidence that your HR policies actually hold up under scrutiny, not just on paper? Get in touch with our team to talk through how our assessments can provide behavioural insight and engagement data that will help you measure whether you’re letting your staff disconnect.
