Belgians who won the right to disconnect from work

Although she once dreamed of being a chef, Delphine ended up becoming a civil servant. But she still makes a point of taking time to cook. “It’s one of my passions.”

The 36-year-old Belgian is preparing a dinner for her friends Catherine and Roch. The dish is Hachis Parmentier, a recipe based on ground beef and mashed potatoes. While frying onions, Delphine tells me that she celebrated the fact that many public servants in Belgium were being granted the “right to disconnect.”

“Especially for young people, it’s not clear when they should or shouldn’t be available,” he said.

“Because when you start a new job, you want to be perfect and you think, ‘If I don’t respond to that email at 10 pm, maybe my boss won’t like it.’ So now I think there’s going to be a cultural shift,” he says.

Since February 1st, 65,000 civil servants cannot be contacted outside office hours. There are some exceptions — by arrangement or if it’s something so urgent that it can’t wait. And that doesn’t mean there won’t be employees on duty.

stress and burnout

A second principle established by the new rules is that employees cannot be harmed for not answering the phone or responding to emails outside of working hours.

Minister of Public Administration Petra De Sutter believes the changes will increase efficiency. She says the line between work and personal life has become increasingly gray with the pandemic, with so many people working from home.

Without the right to disconnect, she says, “the result would be stress and burnout, and that’s a real disease these days.” This rule change is relatively easy to implement because it only applies to federal government employees.

A project to extend the practice to the private sector may encounter greater resistance. “The right to disconnect should not apply to the private sector,” says Eric Laureys of Voka, a Belgian network of companies. He says this change could “undo” the progress seen during the pandemic in making work routines more flexible.

“It would be a big sign of distrust in employers’ ability to organize work.”

Len Shackleton, a researcher at the Think Tank Institute of Economic Affairs and a professor of economics at the University of Buckingham, agrees that the “right to disconnect” would undermine flexibility.

“Restrictions on contacting workers outside of office hours would just be an added dose of regulation.” Petra De Sutter insists the measure will not be an obstacle to work flexibility, when that is what the employee wants.

“On the other hand, we have to protect workers’ basic rights,” she says.

Delphine, on the other hand, laughs when asked if the “right to disconnect” cannot feed the idea that public servants work little or that they are always keeping an eye on the end of work hours.

She says this is an old cliché and assures her that the workload has increased in recent years. “I think we do more with fewer people, usually. I don’t think we work too little.”

Other countries have already approved similar changes, such as France. In Belgium, the next stage of the debate is whether a larger group of workers should also earn the right to disconnect.