Right to disconnect: how to remain compliant

transcript

hadleigh

Hi everybody, I’m Hadley Milligan from businessDEPOT Digital. Today, I’m joined by Nick, Head of Hospitality and Partnerships at Tanda, to discuss the right to disconnect bill passed by Parliament in mid-February. If you’ve not heard about this bill, in short, it gives employees the right to refuse to monitor, read, and respond to contact from their employer outside of business hours. Unless such refusal is deemed unreasonable.

Nick, while this bill certainly benefits employees, what do you anticipate as the key challenges for employers?

nick

Yeah, the right to disconnect bill is going to be tricky for people in service industries like retail, hospitality and fast food to fill shifts that they need to fill at a short notice if someone calls in sick or refuses a shift. So, that’s the challenge ahead.

hadleigh

So off the back of those challenges, what can employers do to get ready for when the right to disconnect bill passes?

nick

Yeah. Step one, policies around how you’re gonna handle that type of communication with the team, present to your current staff, and make sure your new staff you’re hiring are aware of.

With the policy comes the need to make sure management are well trained in how to manage that policy and do the right thing by employees and business. And then finally, what are the tools that you’re going to use to make these contacts with the team and how you’re gonna do that.

hadleigh

The right to disconnect bill gives little detail about deciding whether the refusal to accept communication is unreasonable and whether the method of contact causes disruption to the employee outside of working hours.

So, what are some of the options for employers when it comes to communicating with staff outside of hours to ensure that they, again, remain compliant?

nick

Yeah, there’s lots of tools in the market for employee management and workforce management like Tanda. And most of them have light touch methods of communicating things. Such as, when a rostered shift is available, when it’s been published and when people want to swap shifts. And that’s generally just a push notification or something.

So that should be pretty acceptable to people.

hadleigh

Sure. Whilst there’s still a lot of the bill to flesh out, using technology like Tanda to communicate with your staff outside of hours where necessary will definitely help your business be on the front foot when this law comes into effect later on in the year.

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Right to disconnect: how to remain compliant

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