A work message received after hours may be brief, but the pressure to respond can last all evening. When this connection becomes routine, work remains on people's minds even during time off, expanding the task of protecting workplace mental health from individual stress management to organizational work design. For the right to disconnect to translate into real rest, organizations must address workloads, response deadlines, and emergency procedures alongside rules that discourage unnecessary contact.

* Protecting workplace mental health requires attention to both individual resilience and working conditions. Counseling and psychological support offer greater scope for prevention when accompanied by adjustments to workloads, deadlines, and responsibilities.

* The burden of after-hours contact can last longer than the few minutes needed to process a message. Organizations must also reduce the expectation of constant availability and anxiety about the consequences of not responding.

* The right to disconnect requires both permission to stop working and systems that keep work moving. Rest should not depend solely on individual resolve; backup staff and clear handover arrangements are also necessary.

* Lower absence and high levels of online activity do not, on their own, establish that an organization is healthy. Employers must also examine whether people work while ill or handle tasks during leave.

* Allocating the time saved by technology is becoming a new management challenge. If additional capacity is filled entirely with more work, productivity improvements may leave employee recovery behind.

***

At 8:47 p.m., a familiar name appears on a phone screen. The message is polite: "Could you check just one figure in tomorrow's meeting materials?" One figure should be easy enough. The employee opens a laptop and finds the file. But the figure does not match another department's data. An earlier report needs checking, and a message goes out to the person responsible. While the employee waits for a reply, the evening becomes working time again.

In this plausible everyday scenario, sender and recipient experience time differently. For the sender, it is a brief point to pass on before it slips their mind. For the recipient, it is a new task that requires deciding whether to act now or wait until tomorrow. Even if the message says "No rush," there is little flexibility if the answer must be included in the next morning's meeting.

The burden can persist after the task itself is finished. The phone stays close in case further questions arrive about the revised materials. Notifications interrupt a film; a glance at the screen breaks attention to a child's story. It is difficult to say that work is continuing, yet equally difficult to feel free of it. What fragments time after work is often the possibility of work restarting rather than the volume of tasks alone.

Here, the interests of employees and business leaders meet. Employees want an uninterrupted evening, while leaders want necessary work completed on time. Problems arise when there are no rules for reconciling those needs. When quick responses fill the gaps, the organization can easily assume that everything is running smoothly. The additional time spent and the rest postponed remain invisible.

The right to disconnect makes these hidden conditions visible. It refers to a right not to monitor or respond to work communications outside working hours, although its precise scope and exceptions vary across systems. In organizational practice, it means distinguishing when contact can be made from when a response is required, and deciding how to share responsibility for urgent situations.

The first question in a discussion of disconnection therefore cannot be limited to "Can we send messages at night?" It must also include "Why does this need to be checked at night?" The solution depends on whether there is a genuine emergency, a decision left unresolved during the day, or information held by only one person. The time of contact is the visible symptom; underneath it lies the flow of work.

Business leaders often first feel the operational consequences of ill health when someone is absent. A prolonged absence leaves gaps in customer service, approvals, and schedules. Colleagues divide up the work, and managers reset deadlines. In an organization with little spare capacity, the gap created by one person's health problem can become another employee's overload.

The September 2025 health and wellbeing report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) records average annual sickness absence of 9.4 days per employee, up from 7.8 days in 2023. The overall survey involved 1,101 professionals and managers involved in HR decision-making. The absence figure is a trimmed mean based on 305 responding organizations that supplied the relevant data. It should be distinguished from national statistics directly measuring absence across the entire UK workforce.

Mental ill health is identified as a leading cause of long-term absence. This does not establish that after-hours contact caused the increase. Health status, workforce composition, personal circumstances, and other factors can all contribute. Employers should focus on creating conditions that enable people experiencing health problems to remain in or return to work, rather than attributing the issue to a single cause.

A decline in absence also warrants closer examination. In the same survey, 36% of organizations with homeworking employees say homeworking has reduced sickness absence. At the same time, 35% report an increase in people working while unwell. These are employer observations, but they illustrate why lower absence cannot simply be equated with adequate recovery.

Having the option to work from home on a day when someone feels unwell can help. The point at which an option becomes an expectation, however, needs attention. Consider an employee who says they cannot come to the office and is asked to join just one video meeting, followed by just one revision to a document. Each request may seem brief, yet together they can turn the day into one without rest.

Leave contains a similar trap. If employees continue checking messages despite high leave utilization, there is a gap between rest on paper and rest in practice. If work accumulates during leave and employees must deal with it alone after returning, they may log in while away to reduce the burden. Encouraging leave should therefore be accompanied by scrutiny of how work is allocated before and after it.

In a joint announcement in 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimate that depression and anxiety account for approximately 12 billion lost working days globally each year and around US$1 trillion in lost productivity. These figures do not refer exclusively to conditions caused by work. They do, however, demonstrate that mental health concerns span labor participation, business operations, and economic performance.

The questions used to assess a healthy organization must extend beyond attendance. Can employees rest when they need to? Does the work of someone on leave keep landing on one other person? Does the same burden await them when they return? These questions mark the difference between counting people at work and building an organization in which people can keep working sustainably.

How would it feel to return from leave and find hundreds of emails in the inbox? Half a day disappears into reading requests that arrived while away and separating resolved matters from unfinished ones. Before leave, there is a rush to finish in advance; afterward, there is a rush to catch up. Repeated experiences like this can make checking a little during the holiday seem the easier option.

Daimler's Sustainability Report 2014 describes an approach to this problem. Employees in Germany can choose to have incoming emails automatically deleted while they are on vacation, with senders given the email address of a colleague covering for them. Instead of storing requests in the vacationer's inbox, the system directs work toward someone who can respond at the time.

The essential feature is that automatic deletion works alongside a designated substitute. Deleting an email removes a request from the inbox but does not resolve the underlying task. A route to another responsible person is needed to address customers' and colleagues' needs. This is a historical practice documented in the report, not a claim that the same arrangement applies at every workplace today.

The question it raises about leave design remains clear: Where does work go while a person is resting? Does it remain in the vacationer's inbox, pile up on one colleague, or get shared across the team? Understanding that flow reveals the resources and authority needed for someone to step away.

A 2021 company case study report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions also describes Volkswagen's technical approach. For the employees covered by the arrangement examined, connections between the server and work smartphones are restricted from the evening until the next morning. The system creates a boundary in the delivery channel before employees must decide whether to ignore another notification.

The BMW case in the same report centers on agreed working hours and availability. Employees and managers coordinate the conditions under which contact is possible, without requiring constant availability outside agreed working hours. One approach uses technical restrictions and the other workplace agreements, but both distinguish the ability to make contact from an obligation to respond.

Neither approach can simply be copied into every company. Organizations serving overseas clients or operating shifts need different contact times for different employees. A blanket cutoff could hinder someone working in another time zone. The priority is to design arrangements that allow each person's working hours and rest to coexist, rather than making everyone stop simultaneously.

The lesson for business leaders is less about buying a program than developing the ability to cover work. It involves sharing the location of information, designating someone who can make decisions during an absence, and telling customers whom to contact. The capacity to make rest possible is embedded in familiar management responsibilities: handovers, information sharing, and the allocation of authority.

One question about introducing a right to disconnect is whether urgent work will go unanswered. Businesses have a practical need to maintain services. Yet the need for an emergency response can be separated from the expectation that every employee remain available. Clear responsibility can, in fact, create opportunities to reduce time spent passing messages around and gaps in accountability.

Australia's system helps explain the distinction. Rather than making all out-of-hours contact unlawful, it recognizes an employee's right to refuse to monitor, read, or respond to contact unless that refusal is unreasonable. Within the national workplace relations system, the rules apply to employees of non-small businesses from August 2024 and to employees of small businesses from August 2025.

Assessing whether a refusal is unreasonable involves considering why and how contact is made, its disruptive effect, compensation for availability or additional work, the employee's role and responsibilities, and personal circumstances including caring responsibilities. This differs from treating receipt of a message as an automatic duty to respond immediately. It considers both the operational need and the circumstances of the person doing the job.

Official guidance from Australia's Fair Work Ombudsman includes an example of a consultant who finishes at 4 p.m. to collect young children. When an urgent client request arrives, the supervisor considers the consultant's caring responsibilities and asks another consultant to handle it. This is an illustrative scenario explaining the rules, not a judgment in an actual dispute.

The manager does not abandon the client's request. The manager changes who responds. Urgency is separated from the assumption that the original contact must perform the task. Such a choice requires another employee to have access to the necessary information, the authority to act, and time to do so. The right to disconnect returns, once again, to the question of work coverage.

Organizations also need to define urgency concretely. Safety issues, service outages, or circumstances in which delay would cause losses that are difficult to reverse differ from routine progress checks. Without criteria, a sender's anxiety or convenience can become urgency. When everyone calls their request urgent, employees struggle to know what can wait.

For roles that legitimately require night-time responses, hours of responsibility, backup arrangements, compensation, and recovery conditions should be clarified in advance. If repeated exceptions are resolved each time through employees' sense of duty, actual workloads and staffing needs remain obscured. Employees' evenings and weekends effectively absorb the cost of a formal response system.

Nor does the existence of a policy make the problem disappear. A 2023 report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, drawing on a survey concerning Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain, finds widespread out-of-hours contact in companies both with and without right-to-disconnect policies. However, 92% of respondents in companies with a policy report that their working hours fit well with their private lives, compared with 80% in companies without one.

This comparison does not establish a causal effect of the policy. Organizational culture and the nature of work may also matter. It does show why the volume of contact and the burden employees experience should be examined together. The quality of implementation depends less on having created a rule than on the conditions under which contact occurs and whether employees can actually decline it.

Providing counseling matters. It gives employees a route to seek help rather than handling difficulties alone. But support can have limited effect if employees return to the same workload, conflicting instructions, and impossible deadlines. Measures that help individuals must connect with measures that change their work.

The UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) identifies six areas for managing work-related stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change. The framework considers not only how much work people have, but also their say in how they work, managerial support, conflict, clarity of responsibilities, and the way organizational change is communicated.

Applied to daily work, this framework makes the questions following "I'm finding things very difficult lately" more specific. Is there too much work? Is it unclear what comes first? Are two managers making conflicting demands? Is information or authority missing? Similar expressions of fatigue can require different adjustments. Understanding the situation precisely matters more than offering vague encouragement.

Suppose sales and planning each ask one employee for materials by the following morning. Both departments consider their own request modest. The employee, however, faces competing deadlines that are difficult to meet together. Before advising better time management, someone needs to decide which task comes first and which can wait.

Such conflicts can be reduced by deciding what existing work will change whenever new work is added. If every request is accepted and every previous deadline retained, the missing time is supplied through overtime, canceled leave, or reduced quality. When those costs remain hidden, the organization can mistakenly conclude that current staffing is sufficient. What an employee manages to endure becomes the benchmark for the next workload.

Managers are the key point at which these adjustments occur. Listening to difficulties and directing employees toward professional support matter, but so does the ability to remove some of the burden. When managers are responsible for health without the authority to change schedules or scope, they too are caught between performance demands and obligations to support staff.

In the CIPD survey, 29% of organizations provide mental health support training for line managers. Alongside expanding training, organizations need to examine whether managers have the resources and authority to implement adjustments. If there is no route to seek decisions on staffing and deadlines from higher up, the options available at the frontline are quickly exhausted.

Trust also depends on what happens after a conversation about health. Removing important responsibilities without consulting an employee who discloses difficulties can make support feel like a career penalty. Adjustments should be discussed with the person concerned, and health information should not be shared unnecessarily. For employees to speak early, what happens after they speak must feel safe.

Business leaders do not need to personally reconcile every request. They do need to establish who decides when priorities clash, how much frontline managers can change, and the criteria for allocating additional resources. Choices on the ground change when health policies are connected to the authority to alter work in practice.

The technology that enables connection can lighten work or make it more densely packed. Finding information quickly and organizing documents efficiently saves time. At the same time, detailed measurement of online status, response speed, and output can make employees as conscious of how they appear in the records as of the substance of their work.

An analysis introduced by the ILO in April 2026 notes that AI-based management can improve efficiency and productivity while creating psychosocial risks through surveillance, work intensification, reduced autonomy, and concerns about personal data. This does not mean every tool produces the same outcome. It raises the issue of how working conditions can change depending on what is measured and which decisions use those measurements.

Imagine a workplace that judges employees as committed when their green messaging status stays on for longer. Even while thinking deeply or reading documents, an employee may worry about appearing absent. If rapid replies receive praise, notifications may take priority over focused work. This is an illustration of how measurement criteria can shape behavior, not an empirical finding about a particular company.

Data used for health management also need a clear purpose. Identifying departments with frequent night-time activity can be a starting point for examining workload. But judging an individual's health or work ethic from connection times alone loses context. Work may have piled up; the person may be following a chosen schedule or collaborating with colleagues in another time zone.

The priority for using data should therefore be working conditions the organization can change. Are delays occurring at a particular approval stage? Is customer service concentrated on a few people? Do revision requests repeatedly arrive immediately before deadlines? Records should help start the inquiry, with conversations involving the people concerned used to establish the causes.

A decline in contact through official channels also needs checking. If work shifts to personal messaging after email is restricted, employees may face the same burden. As more activity moves into unrecorded channels, the organization may find it harder to understand actual additional work. Improvements in the system should be compared with employees' lived experience.

Allocating the time saved by technology is another important choice. Completing a task that once took an hour more quickly does not create more breathing room if the entire difference is filled with new work. Output may rise while employees continue at maximum pace. Organizations can instead allocate part of the productivity gain to quality checks, learning, and capacity to handle unexpected work.

Whether employees gain usable time becomes another criterion for assessing technology's effectiveness. If faster work simply raises expectations of quicker replies and later availability, the boundary around connection shifts again. Decisions about work tools must therefore be examined alongside decisions about the amount of work.

Applying the right-to-disconnect perspective in Korean companies also begins with the distinct structure of each organization. Overseas sales, customer support, development, and administration face different response requirements. Before establishing one company-wide cutoff, employers need to understand whose work extends beyond working hours, and which tasks are involved. Understanding why makes the scope for change visible.

Requests from external clients and business partners also matter. Boundaries remain weak if employees continue handling client contact individually even as internal messages decline. External parties need information about request channels, turnaround times, and emergency criteria. A mismatch between service promises and employees' working arrangements is difficult to sustain through individual dedication indefinitely.

Complete coverage is challenging in small organizations. Even so, it is possible to distinguish tasks that can pause during an absence from tasks that must continue. Employers can begin by sharing the location of key materials, establishing alternative approval routes, and notifying customers of an absence. The aim is to reduce points at which one person's absence can halt the entire operation.

Through this process, the right to disconnect becomes an opportunity to identify organizational vulnerabilities as well as a benefit for employees. It exposes work that nobody can decide on without one particular person, procedures repeatedly resolved just before deadlines, and promises to accept every client request immediately. Conditions that make rest difficult can overlap with conditions that weaken operational reliability.

The evidence and examples discussed here suggest five directions in which workplace mental health policies may become more concrete.

First, alongside the number of wellbeing programs, the results of actual workload adjustments may become more important. Counseling participation indicates accessibility but does not show whether excessive deadlines or repeated night-time responses have decreased. Evaluation needs to connect employee support with improvements to work itself.

Second, response deadlines and availability may become standard team agreements. Sharing when to make contact and when to expect a reply can reduce implicit expectations when new employees join or departments collaborate. Distinct channels for different levels of urgency may also become clearer through this process.

Third, managerial competence may increasingly include sustainable work allocation. Alongside delivering short-term results, this means preparing for staffing gaps, enabling leave, and preventing burdens from becoming concentrated on particular employees. Organizations will need managers who build continuity rather than take everything on themselves.

Fourth, consultation with employees may become more important when introducing work-management technology. Organizations must decide what information to collect, where to use it, and how to correct mistaken judgments. They also need clear boundaries to prevent information gathered for health support from becoming a disadvantage in employee evaluation.

Fifth, service promises may more clearly reflect actual response arrangements. Providing continuous service requires suitable staffing, shifts, and compensation. Expecting every employee to remain contactable at all times without providing the necessary resources transfers operating costs into personal time.

These changes involve choices and costs. Reducing workloads may require renegotiating schedules or service scope, and providing coverage takes resources. What matters is bringing those costs into organizational decision-making. Extra work and postponed rest already carry costs. When they remain unrecorded, leaders have fewer opportunities to make choices and adjustments.

Clear boundaries help employees as well. Knowing what is urgent, when a response is due, and who takes over during an absence reduces the need to keep guessing a manager's intentions. For leaders, it creates an opportunity to identify the people, time, and authority actually needed to maintain operations. Rules that enable rest also make work clearer.

An organization that protects workplace mental health does more than invite employees to speak up and then wait. It prepares work adjustments, scheduling options, and support routes for when someone describes a difficulty. Alongside declaring that after-hours contact should decrease, it examines why that contact becomes necessary.

The time people finish work can be recorded. Time free from work must be secured through changes to operations. An evening when necessary work continues after a phone is put down, a manageable workload awaits the following day, and declining to reply does not create anxiety about evaluation: the right to disconnect makes that time a matter of responsible organizational design.

CIPD, September 2025, Annette Sinclair and Rachel Suff, Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025

WHO and ILO, September 2022, WHO and ILO Call for New Measures to Tackle Mental Health Issues at Work

Daimler AG, 2015, Sustainability Report 2014

Eurofound, 2021, Tina Weber and Oscar Vargas Llave, Right to Disconnect: Exploring Company Practices

Eurofound, November 2023, Tina Weber and Drago? Ad?sc?li?ei, Right to Disconnect: Implementation and Impact at Company Level

Fair Work Ombudsman, Right to Disconnect

Health and Safety Executive, What Are the Management Standards?

ILO, April 2026, AI-Driven Intrusive Surveillance and Loss of Autonomy at Work Linked to Psychosocial Risks for Employees