Companies with at least 20 employees must have agreements in place on their staff's "right to disconnect" from 1 April, meaning the deal must be laid down in a company collective agreement or in the labour regulations at the start of next month at the latest.
The right to disconnect is the legal right to be offline or unreachable outside working hours, so people can literally disconnect from their job and/or employer, explains HR service provider Liantis on its website.
"Your employer is therefore no longer allowed to contact you unless there are unforeseen or specific circumstances that cannot wait. Those circumstances and practical conditions must be laid down by the employer in a collective agreement or made part of the current employment regulations," the company states.
These guidelines should objectively state when the employer does or does not have the right to disturb an employee after working hours, Liantis added.
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This right is part of the labour deal reached by the Federal Government last year, which contains a raft of measures to ensure better work-life balance, such as the four-day working week, extra training for employees, better protection for platform workers and more flexible evening work for e-commerce.
This regulation has already been in force for federal civil servants since 1 February 2022, as Minister of Civil Service Petra De Sutter sent a circular making it clear that they no longer had to answer phone calls or emails after normal working hours.
A similar arrangement was in the pipeline for the private sector, a spokesperson for Federal Labour Minister Pierre-Yves Dermagne told The Brussels Times at the time. The initial deadline was 1 January 2023, but because the law was published late, the deadline was pushed back by three months.
