The Right to Disconnect: Why Policy Isn’t Enough to Stop Burnout
Written By Jasmine
It has been roughly 18 months since the “right to disconnect” officially entered the Fair Work conversation here in Australia. When the legislation landed in August 2024, there was a collective sigh of relief across corporate Australia. Finally, a clear boundary. Finally, the legal “permission” to turn off the laptop, silence the pings, and actually be present at the dinner table.
But as I look around our workplaces today, I have to ask a difficult, honest question: Has anything actually changed? Or are we just performing the “out of office” while the underlying burnout continues to simmer?
In a recent episode of our Change Doesn’t Have to Suck podcast, Alistair and I pivoted from our usual change management focus to tackle this massive cultural friction point. What we found is that there is a vast, messy gap between writing a policy and actually living a people-first culture.
The Illusion of the "Out of Office"
It has been roughly 18 months since the “right to disconnect” officially entered the Fair Work conversation here in Australia. When the legislation landed in August 2024, there was a collective sigh of relief across corporate Australia. Finally, a clear boundary. Finally, the legal “permission” to turn off the laptop, silence the pings, and actually be present at the dinner table.
But as I look around our workplaces today, I have to ask a difficult, honest question: Has anything actually changed? Or are we just performing the “out of office” while the underlying burnout continues to simmer?
In a recent episode of our Change Doesn’t Have to Suck podcast, Alistair and I pivoted from our usual change management focus to tackle this massive cultural friction point. What we found is that there is a vast, messy gap between writing a policy and actually living a people-first culture.
The Illusion of Policy vs. Real-World Workplace Burnout
The data right now is telling a conflicting story about our relationship with work. On one hand, 56% of Australian employers report fielding formal requests from staff wanting to exercise their right to disconnect. People are clearly exhausted; they are reaching for the legislative liferaft because they are drowning.
Yet, on the other hand, 62% of employees admit they still reply to messages out of hours simply to “look committed” and avoid judgement. Only 3 in 10 people feel genuinely comfortable ignoring after-hours contact.
At The Outlier Group, we talk a lot about how human experience drives organisational success. But right now, the experience for many is one of “social survival.” We have created environments where the policy says “log off,” but the unspoken culture screams “stay on.” When humans are forced to choose between a written rule and their standing within a team, they will always choose the team. They send that email at 9:00 PM because they fear the professional shadow cast by silence.
Leadership Confessions: My Messy Reality with the Right to Disconnect
I’ll be the first to admit: I am not the poster child for disconnecting. If you look at my schedule, I usually work two or three nights a week. I love the flexibility it affords me. I can leave the office at 4:00 PM, do the school pickup, and be fully present for the chaos of a six-year-old’s birthday party. Then, when the house is quiet and the world has slowed down, I find my “flow state” for deep, focused thinking.
But here is the “Outlier” perspective: My personal flexibility must not become my team’s cage. There is a dangerous line between “flexible work” and being “always on.” As a leader, I’ve had to learn that if I am working at 10:00 PM, I have a responsibility to ensure my team doesn’t feel the weight of my choice. If I don’t manage my own “always-on” tendencies, I am inadvertently designing a culture of burnout for everyone else.
In my experience, if a leader doesn’t model the right to disconnect, the policy is dead on arrival. We have to move from “do as I say” to “watch what I do”.
Why Burnout is an Infrastructure Problem, Not a Boundary Problem
We often tell burnt-out employees that they just need to “set better boundaries.” We tell them to put their phones in a drawer or take a yoga class. But as Alistair rightly pointed out on the podcast, if an employee is consistently working late just to keep a project afloat, we are looking at the wrong problem.
That is not a boundary issue. That is a resourcing and capability issue.
If your people cannot safely exercise their right to disconnect without a project dropping the ball, your ratio of capability and capacity is not meeting the demands of the organisation. To enable your workforce to truly disconnect, you have to right-size the team to the work. Yes, that might mean the short-term pain of resourcing up or reassessing a broken process. But making it structurally safe to log off is the only way to build sustainable high performance.
Protecting High-Achievers from Chronic Burnout
The undercurrent of the burnout conversation is often the high performer. People with a high achievement orientation want to deliver impact. They want to go the extra mile for the client. Often, they will stop at nothing to get the job done.
You cannot simply tell a high performer to “take it easy.” Their internal drive won’t allow it. As leaders, we have to protect them from themselves. At The Outlier Group, I’ve always believed that I would rather forego short-term revenue to keep brilliant people healthy than burn them out for a temporary win.
I’ve had moments where I’ve had to physically tell a team member to step away because I could see the “invisible toil” taking its toll. A tired, cranky team is bad for culture, bad for productivity, and ultimately, bad for the customer. Burnout is a thief of creativity; protecting recovery is a strategic necessity.
Practical Guardrails to Enable the Right to Disconnect
We cannot put the digital genie back in the bottle, but we can design better experiences. Here is how we navigate the right to disconnect at The Outlier Group:
Radical Transparency: My team knows my “non-negotiables”. They know I am in at 8:00 AM and out by 4:00 PM. Transparency removes the anxiety of unmet expectations.
The Power of ‘Schedule Send’: This is my favourite tool. If nighttime is your best time for deep work, use the delay function. Ensure your team receives their tasks when they hit their desks at 8:30 AM, not while they are trying to wind down for sleep.
Silence the Noise: I do not have work notifications on my personal phone. If an email comes in, it stays in the digital “holding pen” until I am back in front of my laptop. We have to reclaim our cognitive space.
Applying the P4E Model to Recovery: We apply our P4E Change Model even to our internal habits.
How We Use P4E to Prevent Burnout
Position: Be clear about why recovery is a strategic priority.
Engage: Talk to the team about what “disconnecting” actually looks like for them.
Enable: Give them the tools (like Schedule Send or resourcing support) to make it possible.
Embed: Make “no-contact” times a respected ritual.
Evolve: Check in. Are we slipping back into old habits? How can we improve?
The Outlier Experience: Real-World Solutions for Burnout
We recently managed a major transformation for a client where burnout was already at a breaking point. The leadership wanted to implement the right to disconnect policy as a “fix.”
We pushed back. A policy on a page wouldn’t fix the fact that their managers were rewarded for “hustle culture.” We spent three months focusing on capability uplift, teaching managers how to plan work better so that “emergencies” didn’t happen at 6:00 PM.
The result? Productivity didn’t drop; it increased. When people knew they had a guaranteed “safe space” to recover, they brought 100% of themselves to the hours they were working. That is the power of experiential change. We don’t just lecture on balance; we build the infrastructure that allows it to happen.
Final Thought: Recovery is a Strategic Asset
A high-five at the end of a massive sprint is nice, but it isn’t enough to sustain a human being. If we want to build teams capable of solving complex, real-world problems, we have to build cultures that prioritise their recovery just as much as their output.
Change doesn’t have to suck, and neither does the modern work week. Let’s stop just talking about the right to disconnect as a legal obligation, and start building the organisational infrastructure that makes it a human reality.
Want to hear the full conversation?
Alistair and I dig deep into the messy realities of culture, burnout, and leadership on the latest episode of the Change Doesn’t Have to Suck podcast. [Listen to the full episode here].
If your organisation is struggling to bridge the gap between policy and true employee engagement, let’s have a chat. At The Outlier Group, we help leaders navigate the human side of change.
The Outlier Group
A specialist Change Management agency who design and deploys change campaigns that are memorable and move the needle.
Recent Posts