Many Ontario employers should have a disconnection policy earlier this month, but experts say strike legislation may not stop emails and out-of-hours calls as easily as some employees might expect. .
The plan was conceived in the depths of the pandemic when many people in Ontario began working remotely. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
Labor lawyers and HR professionals say it’s a positive first step and can contribute to changes in some work cultures, but many say it depends too much on a good employer to do it right.
“The legislation is pretty toothless,” said Matthew Fisher, a partner in Lecker & Associates Law specializing in labor law. “What it really does is get employers of a certain size in certain circumstances to make a policy,” he added.
“The problem is that they trust the good faith of employers … There is nothing in the legislation that requires the policy to be reasonable.”
Employers in Ontario with more than 25 employees should have written policies in place on June 2 to detail how employees can disconnect from work-related communications. (Shutterstock / Prostock study)
June 2, 2022 was the deadline for Ontario employers with more than 25 employees to have written policies. They are supposed to detail how employees can disassociate themselves from work-related communications, including emails, audio and video calls, and sending or receiving messages when they need to be fired. of the clock. The policy may or may not include details related to the time of day, the types of communication that are acceptable, and who may contact an employee outside of business hours.
Fisher hypothetically says that a cynical employer could make a policy that says employees “have the right to disconnect between 4 and 4:15 a.m. Tuesday.”
A victory for good entrepreneurs?
Erin Bury is the CEO of Willful, an Ontario startup that helps people with wealth planning online.
Bury says he proactively created a right-to-disconnect policy just before legislation passed in Ontario. Your company is just below the 25-employee cut, but it is growing, which means it may be necessary to have one soon.
“Before the pandemic, we had an office in downtown Toronto, and we were very much a culture in the office … It was pretty easy to disconnect, because it would only physically come out of the office,” he said.
But the company now operates remotely with some employees from other time zones, meaning someone in British Columbia could send an email to someone in Toronto after normal business hours, he says.
The company’s disconnect policy encourages employees to schedule emails, turn off chat notifications on their phones after hours, and consider sending a video message instead of a late meeting. he says.
The policy also states that while there may be times when tasks are needed outside of hours, if you become a boss, there is a resource for the employee, either the direction addressing the cause. or offer replacement time.
Bury says Willful’s policy has been well received. He would have liked to have seen government policy as mandatory for smaller businesses, noting that home culture can lead to overworked employees.
Steph Little, a senior human resources consultant for Bright + Early, says that everything that is said about the legislation has led to better policies, even if the legislation itself is weak. (Submitted by: Steph Little)
Confusion over the legislation has led to positive action by good actors, says Steph Little, chief human resources consultant for Bright + Early, a Toronto-based human resources consulting firm.
Good employers, including some who have fewer than 25 employees and do not legally need a policy, were encouraged by discussions on the issue, he says. Entrepreneurs wanted to “be more proactive, get ahead of politics and get things up and running to make sure people can disconnect.”
Its customers have reported better productivity and organization from both managers and employees when people have realized that they have to do everything within business hours.
Explaining work standards that are solid and desirable is “really appealing to candidates and also appreciated with existing employees,” he said.
Too much at the discretion of the employer
The problem is that not all companies will be willing to go beyond what the law requires, which is not much, says Daniel Lublin, a labor lawyer and founding partner of Whitten & Lublin, based in downtown Toronto.
“Few companies will be chained to the inability to call employees for urgent out-of-hours situations,” he said.
“It’s wrong to call it the right to disconnect,” he said, because much depends on the employer’s discretion on whether they want it to be so.
“It’s really about whether an employer has made the decision to really create a substantive right or not,” he said.
But for companies that incorporate the right to really disconnect from their policy, it means that employees could go to the Ministry of Labor if they were warned, suspended or fired for not responding to something outside. of the time period specified in the policy.
Nita Chhinzer, a professor of human resources and business consulting at the University of Guelph, says that unfortunately, bad entrepreneurs are likely to continue to be a problem despite the new policy. (Submitted by: Nita Chhinzer)
Nita Chhinzer, a professor of HR and business consulting at the University of Guelph, says companies that traditionally violate labor law “will not suddenly start complying with this law when they have not been complying with others.”
Predatory entrepreneurs will continue to do what they love and “lead by a culture of fear,” Chhinzer says.
However, “it will positively offer employees a path to correction,” and the intention to reduce the exhaustion that comes from prolonged stress is very good, he says.