Does the Right to Disconnect Stop You Sending Automated After-Hours Messages to Your Staff?

Detailed Explanation

The right to disconnect commenced for larger employers in August 2024 and extended to small business employees (businesses with fewer than 15 employees) from 26 August 2025. It gives an employee the right to refuse to monitor, read, or respond to contact — or attempted contact — from their employer (or a third party, where it relates to work) outside their working hours, unless that refusal would be unreasonable in the circumstances.

The part that catches automation-minded businesses off guard is that the right isn't limited to a manager personally calling or texting. Fair Work Ombudsman guidance treats "contact" broadly enough to cover automated systems: a scheduled roster-reminder email, an app push notification asking someone to cover a shift, or an SMS auto-sent when a shift goes unfilled all count in the same way a personal phone call would. An automation that fires off after-hours notifications by design — because that's simply when the underlying event (a no-show, a last-minute cancellation, a roster gap) happened — doesn't get a free pass just because no human decided in the moment to send it.

Importantly, the law doesn't stop a business from sending the message. It protects the employee's right not to engage with it until their next working period, and it stops the employer from treating that non-response as a disciplinary issue.

What Counts as "Contact" From an Automated System

Roster and shift-fill notifications. An automated text or app alert asking staff to pick up an open shift, sent the moment a gap appears — commonly overnight or early morning when rosters are finalised — is exactly the kind of message this right addresses. Staff aren't obliged to respond, or even look at it, until they're next working.

Alert escalations. Monitoring or alerting systems (a site-security alert, an equipment-fault notification, or an urgent job dispatched to a field technician outside their rostered hours) that page an employee outside their hours are contact in the same sense — the automation doesn't change who's on the receiving end or when.

Scheduled reports and reminders. A recurring automated email — a weekly rostering summary, an end-of-day sales report cc'd to a manager — sent outside business hours is lower-stakes in practice (nobody expects an immediate response to a report), but the same principle applies: it's contact the recipient isn't obliged to engage with until their working hours resume.

Is Refusing to Respond "Unreasonable"?

The right isn't absolute — an employee's refusal to monitor or respond can be unreasonable depending on the circumstances, and the Fair Work Act sets out several (non-exhaustive) factors relevant to that assessment:

• The reason for the contact — a genuine emergency or urgent operational need weighs differently than a routine, non-urgent request.
• How the contact is made and how disruptive it is — a single automated text is less disruptive than repeated calls, and the method matters.
• The employee's role and level of responsibility — a manager or someone in an on-call role reasonably has different after-hours expectations than a junior staff member with no such arrangement.
• Whether the employee is compensated for availability — an on-call allowance or similar payment for staying reachable outside rostered hours is a relevant factor in weighing whether a refusal is reasonable.
• The employee's personal circumstances — caring responsibilities and similar factors can weigh toward a refusal being reasonable.
• Whether contact is required by law — if a law genuinely requires the contact, refusal is not considered unreasonable to make in the first place from the employer's side.

None of these factors is decisive alone, and the Fair Work Commission assesses reasonableness case by case where a dispute actually reaches that stage — most situations are meant to be resolved directly between employer and employee, with the Commission as a last resort.

Adjusting Automated Systems

Batch and delay non-urgent notifications. The most direct fix is scheduling: hold automated messages generated outside business hours and release them as a single digest at the start of the next working period, rather than pushing them in real time. Most rostering and workflow-automation tools support scheduled or delayed sending, so this is usually a configuration change rather than a rebuild.

Reserve real-time delivery for genuine urgency. Not every after-hours automated message needs to wait — a message that's genuinely time-critical (an emergency callout, a safety issue) is a different category, and the "reason for contact" factor above is exactly what would make responding to that message reasonable to expect. The mistake is applying real-time urgency to routine notifications that don't need it.

Make on-call arrangements explicit, not assumed. If a role genuinely requires being reachable after hours — an on-call technician, a manager handling escalations — document that expectation clearly as part of how the role is onboarded, including any allowance paid for it, rather than relying on an automated system's behaviour to imply the expectation.

Review notification settings across every tool that can message staff, not just the rostering system. A workflow platform, a helpdesk tool, or a security monitoring system may all have separate after-hours alerting configured independently — auditing them together avoids fixing the obvious rostering case while leaving another system firing off contact at 2am unnoticed.

Things to Consider

• This is an employee right, not a blanket rule against after-hours automation. A business can still run automations that generate messages outside business hours — the practical adjustment is usually about delivery timing and expectation-setting, not disabling the automation itself.
• Talk to staff about expectations rather than guessing. The Fair Work Ombudsman's own guidance frames this as something employers and employees should discuss directly — what's reasonable for one role or workplace may not be for another, and a documented conversation avoids disputes later, the same practical habit that helps any process change land — see how do you get employees to actually use a new automated process.
• This sits alongside, not instead of, ordinary award and overtime obligations. If out-of-hours contact does turn into paid work, the usual modern award interpretation rules around overtime and allowances still apply independently of the right to disconnect.
• The commencement date coincided with, but is unrelated to, casual conversion changes. Both took effect for small business on 26 August 2025 under the same reform package, but they're separate entitlements — don't conflate the two when communicating changes to staff.

Common Mistakes

• Assuming the right to disconnect only applies to phone calls. Automated texts, app notifications, and emails are treated the same as a personal call under the Fair Work Ombudsman's guidance — a business that only adjusts its call policy while leaving automated after-hours texting untouched hasn't actually addressed the risk.
• Treating every after-hours automated message as equally urgent. Bundling a genuinely time-critical alert with routine roster reminders in the same real-time notification stream makes it harder to argue any specific message was reasonable to expect a response to.
• Disciplining or informally pressuring a staff member who didn't respond overnight. Even an informal comment framed as a performance concern can expose the business to a general protections risk if it's connected to the employee exercising this right — address rostering or coverage problems through the roster itself, not by pressuring after-hours responsiveness.
• Never revisiting notification settings after the initial fix. A new tool, integration, or workflow added later can quietly reintroduce real-time after-hours messaging that the original review missed — treat this as part of a periodic settings check, not a one-off task.