Tech Could Help Employers Make Australian ‘Right To Disconnect’ Laws Work

Technology could soon help IT leaders and their employers manage the workloads of tech teams and broader workforces within reasonable working hours, according to software firm Avaya.

Phil Zammit, Avaya’s vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, China, and India, told TechRepublic that technology has enabled an “always-on” work culture, especially in front-office roles. During the pandemic, this trend expanded to back-office or support roles, such as call centres, as traditionally structured office jobs went remote, blurring the lines between professional and personal life.

However, Australia’s “Right to Disconnect” laws, introduced for larger employers in August 2024, may prompt businesses to leverage technology once again — this time to optimise workflows and enforce healthier work boundaries across their organisations.

Right to disconnect now enshrined for Australia’s tech workforce

Under Australia’s new right to disconnect laws, employees at organisations with more than 15 staff members can decline to monitor, read, or respond to employer contact outside of working hours in some situations. This policy applies to both direct and indirect members of the technology workforce, which the Technology Council of Australia estimated at approximately 935,000 workers as of mid-2023.

The new employee right hinges on whether out-of-hours contact is reasonable or unreasonable within the specific context of each situation and has yet to be tested before Australia’s Fair Work Commission. This means that any contact between IT leaders, managers, and technology workers outside standard hours will require careful consideration of the right to disconnect.

Zammit said anecdotal feedback shows that all organisations Avaya is engaging with in the Australian market are conscious of the need to comply with the new right to disconnect laws across their workforces.

However, he said it was “a little bit of a wait and see and watch sort of scenario,” as organisations seek to balance the new compliance requirement with “the reality of just getting stuff done.”

“Organisations are … increasingly working towards a principle of focusing on the customer first,” Zammit explained. “If you work in a service organisation, from a tech or non-tech point of view, and there is an issue or a fault with a customer, I think the question is how do you balance the need for all hands on deck, in that moment of distress, with a right to disconnect scenario?,” he asked.

For instance, Australia’s tech industry had to extend working hours when a global Crowdstrike-related Windows outage occurred on a Friday afternoon, requiring tech teams to address the issue over the weekend.

Balancing productivity with employee work-life balance

Working outside scheduled hours is not unusual in Australia.

Research from the Australia Institute in 2022 found that 71% of workers had done work outside of scheduled hours. These employees were, on average, working six weeks of unpaid overtime per year, equating to $8,000 per year or $315 per every two weeks. Over a third (38%) reported that overtime was an expectation in their workplaces.

The most common reasons given for overtime work included:

• Having too much work (36%).
• Staff shortages (28%).
• Fewer interruptions working outside normal hours (26%).
• Managers’ or supervisors’ expectations (23%).

Technology had enabled some of this expansion in working hours, Zammit said, alongside globalisation, which was seeing more employees work more frequently with teams in different time zones.

However, the pandemic caused more employees to focus on work-life balance. Zammit said people are often now choosing employers partially based on philosophies around work-life balance. This is the case in the tech industry, as a survey of 506 tech leaders conducted by Remote found that 58% were losing tech workers to rivals who offered better flexibility.

“It becomes really difficult for an employer that is trying to increase productivity always,” Zammit said. “If you start thinking about the impact of the right to disconnect, but also creating the right work-life balance, you have to be very conscious, deliberate about not imposing a 24 hour operating model.”

Technology could bring workforce balance and business growth

While technology has been part of the problem, Zammit believes it can also be part of the solution.

In the future, organisations may apply the sophisticated methods used to manage peaks and troughs in contact centres to front-office workers, enabling them to optimise workloads across teams and better safeguard the right to disconnect.

“Most organisations that run a contact center of scale, they’ve become extremely sophisticated at managing the peaks and troughs — from a forecasting point of view, workforce management, optimisation, all that type of stuff,” Zammit explained.

“There’s an in-built tool set around how to navigate and operate to minimise those scenarios; if you have a peak event, let’s say it’s end of quarter, end of month … most of those large scale contact centers are very, very intelligent in terms of operating the resourcing scenario.”

AI is also now being used to remove workload, such as serial task work, to flatten peaks and troughs.

“In some ways, contact centers are ahead of the game here, versus the non-contact center or the front office … that don’t have those systems to manage productivity,” Zammit noted.

However, he added that organisations must also address concerns about employees feeling overly monitored by software. In the future, companies may extend workforce-optimisation strategies to more front-office roles to create a “more efficient operating model” across the board.

This approach could benefit employees by prompting more regular working hours and improve customer experiences by ensuring they interact with happier, more satisfied employees. Zammit said a better agent or employee experience often leads to a better customer experience, which in turn increases the potential lifetime value of a customer.