Your best people rarely announce that they are burning out. They answer the late email, join the optional call, and keep the Slack dot green well past dinner. By the time it shows up in an exit interview or a spike in short-term absence, the damage is already done.
The right to disconnect has moved from a fringe idea to law in a growing list of countries, and it is landing on HR desks as a compliance task. Treating it as only that is a mistake. The policy is the easy part. The harder, more valuable work is reading the always-on strain in your own teams before it turns into a wellbeing problem you have to clean up.
What the right to disconnect actually is
At its core, the right to disconnect gives employees a protected right not to engage with work communication outside their agreed hours, and protection from penalty when they switch off. France legislated it first in 2017, requiring larger companies to negotiate disconnection agreements, and Belgium, Portugal, Ontario and Australia have since followed with their own versions. The Netherlands has a bill in parliament, so for many NL and BE employers this is shifting from "nice to have" to "prepare now".
The intent is simple: protect rest. The reality inside most organisations is messier, because the pressure to stay reachable is rarely written down. It lives in norms, in the manager who emails at 22:00, and in the quiet belief that responsiveness equals commitment.
The signal hiding in your always-on culture
Remote and hybrid work blurred the line between on and off, and the data shows how far. According to Eurofound's analysis of telework across Europe, almost half of remote employees in some countries reported staying available to respond outside their normal hours, and one in four said they were contacted about work every day outside working time.
That constant availability is not harmless. Eurofound's review of company practices found that teleworkers are twice as likely to exceed the 48-hour working week, take insufficient rest and work in their free time, with knock-on effects on their physical and mental health.
For an HR leader, this is the early-warning layer that sits underneath your lagging indicators. Long before turnover rises or absence climbs, always-on behaviour is quietly eroding recovery. People who never fully switch off do not stay engaged. They stay exhausted, and then they leave.
Why a policy alone will not fix it
Writing a disconnection policy feels like progress, and it is a necessary floor. But policies do not change culture on their own. Eurofound's company research is blunt about this: a soft approach built on awareness, training and managing out-of-hours contact is more common than a hard technical shutdown, and high-level buy-in with regular reinforcement is critical for any of it to stick.
In plain terms, if your leadership team sends messages at midnight, no policy document will convince your people that switching off is safe. The behaviour of managers is the policy, whatever the handbook says.
This is where most right to disconnect efforts stall. HR ships the policy, ticks the compliance box, and then has no way of knowing whether anything actually changed on the ground.
What HR can measure before it becomes a problem
You do not have to wait for the annual survey to find out. Always-on strain leaves a trail, and continuous listening is how you read it early.
Light, regular pulse check-ins can surface the questions that matter. Do people feel able to switch off after work? Is after-hours contact the exception or the norm on their team? Do they feel pressure to be constantly reachable? Tracked over time and split by team, these signals show you where the always-on culture is concentrated, usually well before it appears in your absence and turnover numbers.
The value is in the trend and the location. One tired week is noise. A team whose "able to disconnect" score has been sliding for a quarter, while its workload sentiment drops, is a team you can reach before someone hands in their notice. That is the difference between a wellbeing programme that reacts and one that prevents.
A practical starting point
You can make progress this month without waiting for legislation.
Start by measuring the reality, not the intent. Add one or two questions on after-hours contact and the ability to switch off to your next check-in, and read the results by team, not just company-wide.
Then make the norms explicit. Agree, per team, what "reachable" means and what genuinely counts as urgent. Ask managers to model it, because their behaviour sets the real standard.
Finally, close the loop. Share back what you heard, name one thing you will change, and watch whether the signal moves. A right to disconnect that people actually feel is worth far more than one that only exists on paper.
The organisations that handle this well will not be the ones with the best-worded policy. They will be the ones that can see the strain early and act while it is still a check-in question, not a resignation.
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