Off the Clock, Still On Call: The Right to Disconnect, the Always-On Workday, and How Leaders Can Make Recovery Part of the Work System

Abstract: After-hours availability has become one of the least examined features of modern work. Telemetry from Microsoft 365 shows email checking before 6 a.m., inbox activity late into the evening, and meetings creeping past 8 p.m., while survey data from Europe indicate that most teleworkable employees receive work contact outside contracted hours in a typical week. Regulators have responded. Australia, Ontario, and at least nine European countries now regulate disconnection in some form, Luxembourg began enforcing penalties in July 2026, Mexico's lower house approved a disconnection bill in March 2026, and the European Commission has folded the issue into a proposed Quality Jobs Act. This article synthesizes research on availability expectations, psychological detachment, leader signaling, and the email urgency bias, and examines what disconnection policies do and do not achieve. It argues that compliance-oriented policies alone rarely change behavior, and proposes five evidence-based responses: explicit response norms, leader modeling backed by formal rules, predictable team time off, technical guardrails, and the redesign and fair compensation of genuine after-hours demand.