The country’s fresh-faced Labour government is drafting legislation that would outlaw late-night WhatsApps, emails, and Slacks and potentially fine dissenting bosses heftily.

While commonplace across Europe, legislation giving workers a “right to disconnect” has lagged behind in the U.K., but now might become more European if reported changes to work culture are implemented.  

Special relationship

The U.K. has often been a special case in Europe, separated from most of the continent by a body of water and by its exit from the EU in 2020.

It has leaned on its historic links with the U.S. to attempt to build business partnerships, but its work culture hasn’t always tended to follow suit.

U.K. employees typically enjoy more of a work-life balance than their counterparts across the Atlantic, enjoying more annual leave and working fewer hours.

They’re also much less work-oriented than those in the U.S. and, indeed, anywhere else. Data analyzed by King’s College London last year found just a quarter of employees said work was very important or rather important to them, a fraction of the share in the U.S. and France.

The new U.K. Labour government is considering edging closer to its European peers to enshrine more rights in an employee’s working day.

The Times reported that the government may force employers to introduce “right to switch off” policies, legally requiring them to agree to workplace boundaries with their employees. 

This could dictate expectations for the working day and the level to which bosses can contact employees over email, WhatsApp, or workplace messaging services after hours.

Employees could be in line for hefty compensation if their employers breach these guidelines or don’t have any “right to switch off” policies in place.

“It has to be specific to each workplace and therefore it has to be something that businesses and their workforce agree among themselves rather than a diktat—and we’re conscious of the disproportionate impacts of these sort of policies on smaller businesses, that will factor in to how we draft it,” a source from the U.K. government told The Times.

The right to switch off

Looking across the rest of Europe, the U.K. is playing catch-up.

In 2013, Germany banned employers from emailing their workers out of hours, except in an emergency.

France moved in 2017 to force companies with 50 or more employees to establish hours when they could and couldn’t message their employees.  

More legislation swept across Europe after the COVID-19 pandemic after remote work blurred the lines between home and the office and gave employers more opportunities to call on their workers at irregular hours.

Research has shown that out-of-hours contact can negatively affect employees’ well-being, ultimately harming their long-term productivity and creating an increasingly strained boss-worker dynamic.

In 2021, the Portuguese government banned bosses with more than 10 employees from contacting their staffers after hours, with fines for dissenters reaching up to €10,000.

The U.K. government is still examining how its “right to switch off” policies would work in practice, but changes to compensation could see fines similar to those in Portugal.

In Ireland, where the U.K. is understood to be taking its lead, the government introduced “Right to Disconnect” guidelines that called on employers and employees to agree on reasonable expectations for out-of-hours contact.

However, there’s no guarantee that more rigid boundaries will be what all employees want. 

Some employees hailed the flexibility that remote work afforded them, helping them work when they were most productive rather than the mandated nine-to-five.

The bosses, though, grumbled that this created a “dead zone” between the typical working hours of 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.