A few weeks ago I was working with a client in Spain, drafting employment contracts and HR policies to fit local labour law. It is the kind of work I enjoy, because stepping into a different legal system makes you look hard at the things we usually take for granted in employment relationships.
One of those things stood out immediately.
Sitting right there in Spanish employment law is something called “the right to digital disconnection.” On first read it sounds like a legal technicality – another clause to check off. But the more I worked with it, the more I realised it was pointing at something much bigger: a formal recognition of what most businesses still treat as a cultural inconvenience rather than a real problem.
And given how hard it has become for most people to separate work time from personal time, that matters more than many leaders realise.
Technology has moved faster than our ability to manage its impact on working life. Spain decided to stop waiting for culture to catch up, and made it law instead.
What Spain Actually Did – and Why It Matters
Spain’s right to digital disconnection is not a policy recommendation or an HR best practice. It is law. It lives in two places:
- Article 88 of the LOPDGDD — Spain’s Data Protection and Digital Rights Act (Ley Orgánica 3/2018), one of the first laws in Europe to formally protect employees’ digital rights.
- Article 18 of the Remote Work Law (Law 10/2021), which extended these protections to cover remote and hybrid workers specifically.
The principle is straightforward: employees have the right to ignore work-related emails, messages, and calls outside of their working hours. Not as a courtesy, as a legal right. And employers do not just have to accept this; they have to actively make it work. That means putting a formal policy in place, talking to employee representatives, and making sure their systems and working culture do not quietly pressure people into staying connected anyway.
That last part is the most important. Because in most organisations, nobody actually tells people they must respond to messages at 10pm. The pressure is subtler than that. It comes from watching what leaders do, from unspoken expectations, from not wanting to look like the one who switched off. Spain’s law says that is the employer’s problem to fix, not just something to mention in a policy document.
Spain was not the first in Europe to go down this road, France introduced a similar right in 2017, but it has gone further than most in making it part of the employment contract itself. Italy, Ireland, Belgium (which passed its own legislation in 2022), and Portugal have all followed in different ways. The pattern across Europe is hard to ignore.
The “Always On” Problem Is Not a Spanish Problem
What this really comes down to is not a legal issue. It is a human one. And it is happening everywhere.
Across South Africa, the UK, and Europe, the same shift has taken place. The tools that were meant to make us more flexible – WhatsApp groups, Teams, email on every device – have gradually changed what “available” means. It used to mean available during working hours. Now, for many people, it just means available. That shift was not a decision anyone made. It crept in through habit, leadership behaviour, and the absence of any clear boundary.
It gets worse when teams span time zones. If your business has people in Boston, London, Cape Town, and Hong Kong, and there is no clear handover process, someone is always going to be picking up messages in their own time. Not because the business decided that was okay, but because nobody decided it was not.
The impact is real and well-researched. Burnout, poor concentration, reduced quality of thinking, personal time that never quite feels personal. And here is the irony: the same evidence that supports flexible working also shows that being constantly available actually makes people less effective. Good thinking, the kind that solves real problems, needs uninterrupted time. You cannot do your best work if your mind is never really off the clock.
If work can now happen anytime, anywhere – the question is not whether it can, the question is: who decides when it should stop?
Policy vs. Practice: Where Most Organisations Get Stuck
Most businesses I work with already have some kind of expectation around switching off. The issue is not that there is no policy, it is that the policy and the reality are two different things.
Here is a scenario I have seen more times than I can count. A senior leader sends emails late at night. They genuinely do not expect anyone to reply until the next morning. But the team does not know that. So someone responds, just to be safe. Someone else lies awake wondering if they should. The leader never meant to set that tone, but they did. And whatever the HR policy says about work-life balance is completely beside the point.
The same thing happens with global teams. Without a proper handover structure, there is always someone holding the thread – and the thread never gets put down. That is not a technology problem. It is a design problem.
In South Africa, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act sets clear limits on working hours, rest time, and leave. What it does not cover (yet), is the expectation that employees stay digitally reachable outside those hours. As remote and hybrid working becomes more common, that gap is going to become harder to ignore. The law was written for a world where leaving the office meant leaving work behind. That world is gone.
From Compliance to Conscious Design
After more than two decades working with organisations across different industries and countries, here is what I have come to believe: the businesses that get this right are not the ones with the best-written policies. They are the ones where leaders have made deliberate choices about how work runs – and then actually stuck to them.
Digital disconnection is not a compliance issue. It is a design issue. And a few things consistently make the difference:
- Be clear, do not assume. Decide when people are expected to be available and when they are not – and say it out loud. Most organisations have never had that conversation directly. Having it changes more than you would expect.
- Leaders set the tone, not the policy. People watch what leaders do, not what the handbook says. A director who sends messages at midnight is sending a message, whether they mean to or not. This takes real self-awareness from people at the top – and sometimes an honest conversation about the unintended signals they are sending.
- Measure output, not availability. Being quick to respond is not the same as doing good work. Many organisations have moved towards measuring outcomes rather than hours – but have not yet made the same shift when it comes to availability. The two need to go together.
- Design for global work properly. If your teams work across time zones, build a real handover process. Make it clear who is responsible at what point. Do not just rely on everyone being vaguely reachable all the time.
- Guard the time for deep thinking. The most valuable work in any business – strategy, problem-solving, the decisions that actually move things forward – needs space and focus. Constant interruptions eat away at that. It does not protect itself.
Could AI Actually Give Us Permission to Switch Off?
Here is where the conversation gets interesting, and where I think there is a genuine opportunity that most businesses have not fully considered yet.
AI agents – tools that can act autonomously on your behalf, not just answer questions but actually do things – are becoming capable enough to handle a meaningful slice of the routine work that currently keeps people tethered to their devices after hours. Triaging incoming emails. Responding to standard client queries. Flagging what genuinely needs a human decision versus what can wait. Following up on tasks. Logging, summarising, preparing.
For the first time, there is a credible technological argument that a person could genuinely switch off at 6pm, not because nothing is happening, but because something capable is holding the fort. That is a fundamentally different proposition to anything we have had before. Previous waves of technology promised efficiency but quietly added to the always-on load. AI agents, used well, could do the opposite.
But, and this is the part that tends to get skipped over in the excitement, the technology only works if the foundation is already solid. An AI agent operating in a business with no clear boundaries, no defined handover process, and a culture where responsiveness is treated as a performance signal will not create disconnection. It will just automate the always-on problem. The inbox gets managed at 11pm by a machine instead of a person, but the underlying expectation, that work never really stops, remains completely intact.
So AI agents are not the solution to digital disconnection. But for businesses that have already done the harder work of setting boundaries and designing how work flows – they could be a genuinely powerful enabler. The humans step back. The agent holds the watch. And for the first time, switching off does not have to mean dropping the ball.
AI will not fix an always-on culture. It will just automate it. But for businesses that have already set real boundaries, it might be the tool that finally makes switching off feel safe.
What This Tells Us About Where Work Is Heading
I think digital disconnection is a signal, not just a legal trend. What it is pointing at is a slow but real shift in how we think about work: the recognition that being flexible and being always-on are not the same thing, and that confusing the two is costing businesses and people more than they realise.
The organisations that handle this well will be the ones that can hold both sides of the equation: the real benefits of digital working and flexibility, alongside the equally real need for people to rest, recover, and set limits. These things are not in conflict. But they do not sort themselves out either.
As AI and automation push the pace of work even faster – making it possible to do more, across more time zones, at any hour – the question of who sets the boundaries becomes more pressing, not less. Technology will not answer it. That is a leadership call.
The future of work is not just about how connected we can be. It is about how deliberately we choose to disconnect.
A Question Worth Sitting With
If a senior leader in your business sends a message at 9pm, what does your team actually hear? And does that match what you intend?
Digital disconnection is already law in parts of Europe. Whether or not it reaches your market in statute form, the problem it is trying to solve is already sitting inside your organisation. The real question is whether you are dealing with it on purpose, or just letting it happen.
Interested in delving deeper? Connect with Terrex today!
Looking forward to our next conversation
Keith Magill
Empowering your business through innovative human capital strategies
