What Is the Right to Disconnect?

Calls during vacation, emails sent at midnight, texts on weekends… With the rise of remote work and hybrid work, the line between personal and professional life is increasingly blurred. According to a study by Eléas, more than two-thirds of French managers use their professional digital tools in the evening and on weekends. To curb this always-on culture, one thing is essential: enforcing the right to disconnect.

What exactly is it? And what does the law provide to ensure this right is respected in the workplace? That is the focus of this article.

Definition

The right to disconnect can be defined as the right of employees to disconnect from their professional digital tools and not to be contacted by their employer outside of normal working hours, including when working remotely.

These digital tools can include:

• physical devices: computers, tablets, mobile phones…;
• online tools: team messaging, office suites, intranets, collaborative software…

What the law says

The right to disconnect is a concept of French origin that entered the Labour Code in 2016. Since then, other European countries have followed suit. Spain, Italy and Belgium have introduced it into their national legislation, and the European Parliament adopted a resolution on 21 January 2021.

Effective 1 January 2017, the Labour Law (also known as the El Khomri law) requires all companies with more than 50 employees to negotiate disconnection rules during the mandatory annual negotiations (NAO) on professional equality and quality of life at work.

If no collective agreement is reached, the company must draw up a right-to-disconnect charter, after consultation with the social and economic committee (CSE) or employee representatives.

Employers who fail to comply with this negotiation obligation face up to one year in prison and a €3,750 fine.

The goal?  Prevent employees from being contacted outside of working hours — late at night, during rest days or vacation, or while on sick leave.

The right to disconnect therefore makes it possible to:

• enforce working hours;
• guarantee the minimum 11-hour daily rest period;
• regulate workload;
• prevent psychosocial risks;
• restore a boundary between professional and personal life.

If an employee must remain permanently reachable, the employer is obliged to provide financial compensation or additional leave to offset the on-call period.

The limits of the Labour Law

Although it was pioneering on the right to disconnect, the El Khomri law has several limitations.

While it requires companies to negotiate on the right to disconnect, it provides no sanctions for employers who fail to enforce it, who lack a collective agreement or a right-to-disconnect charter. Likewise, no concrete measures are in place to ensure the effectiveness of any policy adopted.

The Labour Code also fails to address what happens when an employee is working remotely. It therefore falls to the company to establish its own right-to-disconnect rules for remote workers. In practice, however, few companies take that step: according to a 2020 Ugict-CGT survey, nearly 80 % of remote workers have no right to disconnect.

Due to the absence of sanctions, the right to disconnect is rarely enforced, even in large companies. As Brigitte Vaudolon, clinical psychologist and workplace well-being coach, puts it: “It is not unusual to see people connected very late at night, or even on weekends.”

Read also: The stakes of the right to disconnect

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Access the White Paper

This article is an extract from the White Paper “Right to Disconnect: A Survival Guide for Remote Work“. You will find: the key issues around the right to disconnect, best practices for implementing it, and concrete examples of initiatives put in place by companies.

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