The right to disconnect lets employees refuse to monitor, read or respond to work contact outside their working hours unless that refusal is unreasonable. It is Fair Work law, not an IT rule. But the email, Teams and mobile settings your MSP controls are what turn a policy on paper into something that actually holds.
What the right to disconnect actually says
The right to disconnect was added to the Fair Work Act and took effect on 26 August 2024 for medium and larger employers. For small business employers (fewer than 15 employees), it commenced a year later, on 26 August 2025. So as of now, it applies across the board.
The substance is narrow but important. An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact (or attempted contact) from their employer outside their working hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. The same applies to contact from a third party — a client, a supplier — if it relates to their work. Whether a refusal is unreasonable depends on factors the legislation spells out: the reason for the contact, how it is made and how disruptive it is, whether the employee is compensated for being available, the employee’s role and level of responsibility, and their personal circumstances including family or caring responsibilities.
Note what it does not say. It is not a ban on after-hours contact. An employer can still send a message at 9pm. What changes is that the employee is generally entitled not to engage with it until they are back on the clock, and they cannot be punished for that. Disputes are meant to be worked out at the workplace first, and if that fails, the Fair Work Commission can deal with them.
This is workplace-relations law, and the genuinely hard questions — what counts as “working hours” for a salaried manager, how an on-call allowance is structured, what your enterprise agreement or award says — are HR and legal questions. Get advice on those. What we deal with as a Melbourne MSP is the layer underneath: the systems that decide whether a notification lands on someone’s phone at all, and whether your roster and monitoring arrangements line up with what you have told staff.
The IT controls that make a policy real
A right to disconnect policy that says “please don’t email after hours” and changes nothing in Microsoft 365 is theatre. Staff still hear the buzz, still feel the pull, and the more conscientious ones still answer. The controls below are the ones that actually shift behaviour, and most of them are already sitting in your tenant waiting to be turned on.
Quiet hours and scheduled send in Outlook and Teams
Microsoft Teams has a built-in quiet hours and quiet days feature in the mobile app, so notifications are silenced outside the hours a user sets. The catch is that it is per-user and opt-in by default — most people never find it. The fix is to make it part of standard onboarding and to actually show people where the setting lives, rather than burying it in a policy PDF.
On the sending side, Outlook’s scheduled send (Delay Delivery) lets a manager who genuinely does their thinking at 10pm queue the email to land at 8am. That one habit removes most of the after-hours pressure without anyone having to ignore anything. We usually pair it with a short signature line on out-of-hours senders — something like “I work flexible hours; I don’t expect a reply outside yours” — which the Fair Work Ombudsman’s own guidance points to as good practice.
If you want notifications properly switched off rather than left to each person, that is configurable through Microsoft 365 administration and device policy. This is part of the day-to-day work in any managed Microsoft 365 environment, and it is the kind of thing worth getting right once across the whole organisation rather than user by user.
Mobile device management and conditional access
The real after-hours leak is the phone. Work email and Teams on a personal mobile means contact follows people into the lounge room. Mobile device management (through Microsoft Intune) and conditional access policies give you proper levers here.
You can enforce app protection so work data stays inside managed apps, and you can use conditional access to shape when and how people connect. For specific roles — not everyone — you can even restrict access to corporate apps to particular hours or locations, so that someone who is genuinely off the roster is not technically able to be pulled back in. Used carefully, this turns a written rule into an enforced boundary. Used clumsily, it locks out the on-call engineer at 2am, so it has to be designed around your actual roster rather than applied with a blunt instrument.
A professional services firm in Hawthorn we work with had the opposite problem to most: their junior staff were answering partner emails at all hours because the Teams app pinged their personal phones and nobody had told them they didn’t have to. The remedy was not a stern memo. It was switching most of the team to managed app access with notifications off outside business hours, leaving a small after-hours group properly resourced, and writing the policy to match what the systems now did.
On-call rosters and the compensation question
The right to disconnect bites hardest where there is no clear on-call arrangement. If you expect certain people to be reachable after hours, that should be a defined roster with an allowance or overtime attached — not a vague cultural expectation that everyone is always on. The legislation explicitly weighs whether the employee is compensated for being available when judging if a refusal is unreasonable.
From the IT side, that means your access controls and notification rules should mirror the roster. The on-call person this week gets the alerts and the access; everyone else doesn’t. We run our own 24/7 NOC out of Tecoma on exactly this model, with a defined roster and the tooling configured so the engineers who are off are genuinely off. The technology and the employment arrangement have to agree with each other, or one of them is lying.
Monitoring, alerts and overtime creep
System monitoring is where this gets subtle. Automated alerts from a server, a backup job or a security tool are not “the employer contacting you” in the Fair Work sense — they are machines. But if a human is expected to act on those alerts after hours, that expectation is exactly what the right to disconnect is about, and it should be rostered and paid like any other on-call duty.
The practical move is to route after-hours monitoring to whoever is actually on call, not to a whole team’s inboxes. Alert fatigue and silent unpaid overtime usually come from the same root cause: everyone gets every alert, so everyone feels vaguely responsible at all hours. Tightening alert routing is both better security operations and a cleaner employment boundary. This is core to how a managed security operations capability should be run regardless of the legislation.
Writing a policy your systems can back up
The order of operations matters. Plenty of businesses write the policy first, then discover their systems don’t support it. Do it the other way around: decide what the systems will enforce, then write a policy that describes that reality.
A workable right to disconnect policy generally covers:
- Working hours by role — what they are, and who, if anyone, is on a defined after-hours roster.
- Contact expectations — that staff are not expected to respond outside their hours, and won’t be penalised for not doing so.
- The genuine exceptions — emergencies, the on-call roster, and how those people are compensated.
- The tools — quiet hours, scheduled send, managed notifications — and that the business has configured them, not just recommended them.
- How to raise a concern — the internal process before anything goes near the Fair Work Commission.
The wording and the workplace-relations judgement calls belong with your HR adviser or employment lawyer. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes plain-English guidance on the right to disconnect that is a sensible starting point for that conversation. Our job is the other half: making sure the tenant settings, device policies and alerting genuinely do what the document claims. When we take on a new client we treat this as part of the broader managed IT baseline, alongside the security and identity controls that touch the same systems.
Frequently asked questions
Does the right to disconnect ban after-hours emails?
No. Employers can still send messages outside working hours. What the law changes is that employees are generally entitled not to monitor or respond to them until they are back at work, and they can’t be disadvantaged for that — unless their refusal is unreasonable in the circumstances. Scheduled send is the easy way to avoid the issue entirely.
Does it apply to my small business?
Yes. The right to disconnect commenced on 26 August 2024 for employers with 15 or more employees and on 26 August 2025 for small business employers under 15 staff. Both dates have now passed, so it applies regardless of size.
Can IT settings actually enforce this?
To a large degree, yes. Quiet hours in Teams, managed-app notifications through Intune, and conditional access policies can stop most after-hours pings reaching staff who aren’t on call. They can’t make legal judgements about what’s reasonable, but they remove the temptation and the pressure that cause the problem in the first place.
What about our on-call engineers and after-hours support?
Genuine on-call work is fine — it just needs to be a defined roster with proper compensation, and your access and alert routing should match it so only the on-call person is pinged. The law specifically considers whether someone is paid for being available when deciding if declining contact is reasonable.
Is this a security or a compliance issue?
It is primarily a workplace-relations issue, so the policy and any disputes are HR and legal territory. But the controls that make it work — identity, device management, conditional access, alert routing — are the same ones that underpin your security posture, which is why it tends to land on the IT plate.
Where TechAssist fits
We’re a Melbourne MSP, founded in 2014, with 13 Australian-employed engineers — no offshore call centre — and we run this kind of configuration work across professional services, construction, manufacturing and healthcare clients every week. The right to disconnect is one of those rules where the legal text is short but the implementation lives entirely in settings most businesses have never opened.
If you want your Microsoft 365 tenant, mobile device policies and after-hours alerting set up so they actually back the policy you’re putting in writing, get in touch. We’ll handle the IT half; pair it with your HR adviser for the rest.