A Queensland teacher is currently suing her former school in the Federal Court, alleging her termination was partly related to refusing after-hours work contact during school holidays — and she's seeking around $800,000 in compensation. It's the first real test case of Australia's right to disconnect law, and it landed just as the rule extended to small businesses with fewer than 15 employees on 26 August 2025. If you run a small business, this isn't a theoretical compliance box to tick anymore — it's an active legal risk with real dollar figures attached, and the good news is that a handful of automation habits can put you on the right side of it.
Key Takeaways
- The right to disconnect has applied to small businesses (fewer than 15 employees) since 26 August 2025, covering 5.4 million Australian workers (The Conversation, 2025).
- AHRI's June 2025 Quarterly Australian Work Outlook found 58% of employers reported the law increased employee engagement and productivity, against just 4% who saw a decline.
- Four factors decide whether after-hours contact is "unreasonable": the reason for contact, whether the employee is paid to be available, their role, and their personal circumstances.
- Scheduled-send, quiet-hours settings, and AI message triage let you keep working after hours without pressuring staff to respond — no policy rewrite required to start.
- No written policy is the single biggest compliance gap small businesses have right now — it's also the fastest one to fix.
What is the right to disconnect, and does it apply to my small business?
The right to disconnect lets employees refuse to monitor, read, or respond to work-related contact outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. It's now a formal part of the Fair Work Act 2009 (section 333M), and it applies to your business if you employ fewer than 15 people, effective 26 August 2025.
The threshold is calculated across your permanent, part-time, and casual staff, not just full-timers. If your headcount sits near that 15-employee line, check where you land — the transition period is over, and there's no small-business carve-out left to rely on.
"Contact" covers more than phone calls. Emails, texts, and work-related messages on any platform all count. An employee isn't required to ignore their job, but they now have legal backing to say no to after-hours demands that aren't justified by their role or the situation.
For trades, retail, and professional services businesses used to the odd after-hours text — a site check, a roster question, a client email — the practical shift is smaller than it sounds. It's less about "never contacting staff after 5pm" and more about being able to justify why the contact happened.
What counts as "unreasonable" contact?
The Fair Work Commission weighs four factors: why you're making contact, whether the employee is paid to be available, their role and seniority, and their personal circumstances. No single factor decides a case — the Commission looks at the combination.
"It will be unreasonable for an employee to refuse to read, monitor or respond if the contact or attempted contact is required by law." — Fair Work Commission guidance
Reason for contact matters most. A burst pipe at a client's property on a Saturday night justifies calling the on-call plumber. A text asking when someone's arriving for Monday's scheduled job doesn't.
Paid availability changes the calculus. If an employee's contract includes an on-call allowance, responding is more likely reasonable. If nobody's compensating them for being reachable, it's harder to justify expecting a reply.
Role and seniority raise the bar for some staff. An operations manager handling a system outage has a higher reasonable-response expectation than a junior admin assistant fielding a non-urgent email.
Personal circumstances — caring responsibilities, health issues — can tip a borderline case toward "unreasonable," even where the other three factors are mixed.
Pro tip
Pro tip: Document your reason for any after-hours contact that isn't routine, even briefly. If a dispute ever reaches the Fair Work Commission, a contemporaneous note showing which of the four factors applied is far more useful than reconstructing your reasoning after the fact.
What's actually happened in the first year?
The first 12 months of small-business coverage produced real data, not just legal theory. AHRI's Quarterly Australian Work Outlook (June 2025) found 29% of employers had already made policy or practice changes, and 27% reported positive organisational impacts from doing so.
The productivity numbers cut against the fear that "disconnecting" hurts output. AHRI found 58% of employers reported the law significantly or somewhat increased employee engagement and productivity, against only 4% who reported a decline. Separately, 37% reported reduced employee stress and 39% reported improved work-life balance.
Then there's the Federal Court case mentioned above — mediation was scheduled for 11 August 2025, and it's the clearest signal yet that employees are willing to formally challenge after-hours contact they consider unreasonable. Win or lose, a dispute like that costs a small employer time, legal fees, and reputation.
Read together, the data says something small business owners often don't expect: respecting the boundary tends to help productivity, not hurt it, while ignoring it now carries a documented legal cost. It's one of several 2026 compliance shifts landing on small business at once — we covered a similar pattern in AI tools for workplace safety compliance, and the broader Australian regulatory picture is moving the same direction on data and privacy compliance too.
How can AI and automation tools help you comply?
Automation gives you a structural way to stop unreasonable contact from happening in the first place, instead of relying on managers to remember not to send that 9pm text. Four tool categories do most of the work.
Scheduled send. Most email clients and team chat apps let you write a message at 9pm and schedule it to land at 8am the next working day. You get to think through the issue when it's fresh in your mind; your staff don't get an unread-message ping outside their hours.
Quiet hours and do-not-disturb scheduling. Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams let employees silence notifications outside contracted hours automatically, and let managers' scheduled messages hold until the recipient is back online. The boundary becomes a setting, not a habit you have to enforce person by person.
AI message triage. Some communication tools now flag genuinely urgent contact — an emergency callout, a system outage — and route routine requests into a next-business-day batch. This takes the "just in case" instinct out of the manager's hands and reduces the temptation to ping staff when nothing is actually urgent.
Automated rostering. Tools that publish shifts, leave, and availability well in advance cut down on the last-minute changes that usually trigger after-hours calls in the first place. Fewer roster surprises means fewer reasons to contact anyone outside working hours.
None of this replaces a written policy or manager training — see the next section — but it does most of the day-to-day enforcement work automatically, which matters when you don't have an HR team checking every message.
| Automation approach | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled send / delayed delivery | Holds outgoing messages until the recipient's next working day | Owners and managers who work irregular hours |
| Quiet hours / do-not-disturb | Silences notifications automatically outside contracted hours | Team chat platforms (Slack, Teams) |
| AI message triage | Flags genuinely urgent contact, batches routine requests | Businesses with real after-hours emergencies (trades, healthcare) |
| Automated rostering | Publishes shifts and availability in advance | Retail, hospitality, and shift-based teams |
None of these tools require a big IT project to switch on — most are settings already sitting inside the workflow automation platforms your team likely already uses. If you haven't automated much yet, our piece on AI workflow automation quick wins is a good place to start before tackling right-to-disconnect specifically, and our AI workflow automation service covers the same ground in more depth.
What should your right to disconnect policy actually include?
A workable policy defines reasonable and unreasonable contact for your business specifically, names who can be contacted for genuine emergencies, and sets out manager training and a dispute resolution step. It doesn't need to be long — it needs to be specific enough that staff and managers both know where the line sits.
Cover the essentials:
- A working definition of what counts as an emergency for your business, so "urgent" doesn't become whatever a manager feels like at the time.
- Named on-call arrangements — who's contactable, when, and how they're compensated for availability.
- Manager training on the four reasonableness factors and the automation tools available, so managers default to scheduled send rather than an immediate message.
- A dispute pathway — who an employee raises a concern with, and how it gets resolved before it escalates.
- A review date — the policy should be revisited as your team grows past (or approaches) the 15-employee threshold.
Getting managers to actually follow a new policy is as much a culture problem as a legal one — our guide to building an AI-first culture covers the change-management side, and AI governance frameworks are worth a look if you want a more formal structure around how automation and policy interact.
Pro tip
Common mistake: Treating the right to disconnect as something you'll "deal with if it comes up." Businesses with no written policy have nothing to point to if a dispute reaches the Fair Work Commission — and per AHRI's data, 71% of employers still hadn't made any policy or practice changes as of June 2025.
Common mistakes small businesses make
Most compliance problems come down to five recurring gaps, and all of them are cheap to fix once you know to look for them.
- Assuming you're exempt. The small-business carve-out ended 26 August 2025. If you employ fewer than 15 people, the law already applies to you.
- No written policy. Verbal expectations don't hold up in a dispute. A one-page document naming your emergency contacts and reasonable-hours expectations is enough to start.
- Managers still expecting "just a quick reply." Old habits are the most common source of unreasonable contact — a manager who's always texted staff after hours won't stop just because the law changed, unless the tools make it automatic.
- No plan for genuine emergencies. Ironically, businesses that over-correct and ban all after-hours contact struggle when a real emergency hits, because nobody knows who's actually meant to be reachable.
- Treating this as a one-off task. Team size, rosters, and client expectations change. A policy set once in 2025 and never revisited will drift out of date.
Right to Disconnect Compliance at a Glance
| Requirement | Status | What to do this week |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage threshold | Applies now to businesses with fewer than 15 employees (since 26 Aug 2025) | Confirm your current headcount |
| Written policy | Most common gap (71% of employers hadn't updated practices as of Jun 2025) | Draft a one-page policy covering emergencies and on-call pay |
| Automation | Optional but effective | Turn on scheduled send and quiet hours this week |
| Manager training | Often skipped | Brief managers on the four reasonableness factors |
| Dispute pathway | Legally required in substance, not just form | Name who handles a right-to-disconnect complaint |
For a broader look at rolling out automation across your operations rather than one compliance issue at a time, our AI Productivity Stack guide walks through the tools and sequencing that tend to work for Australian SMBs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The right to disconnect extended to small business employers (fewer than 15 employees) on 26 August 2025, under Fair Work Act 2009 section 333M. There's no ongoing small-business exemption.
The Fair Work Commission weighs four factors: the reason for contact, whether the employee is paid to be available, their role and seniority, and their personal circumstances. Genuine emergencies are almost always reasonable; routine requests outside paid on-call arrangements usually aren't.
Yes — the law doesn't stop you from sending contact, it stops you from expecting or requiring a response outside working hours unless that expectation is reasonable. Scheduled-send tools let you write messages when convenient without creating that expectation.
If the refusal is reasonable under the four-factor test, the employee is protected and can't be penalised for it. If a dispute arises, either party can ask the Fair Work Commission to resolve it, and the Commission can make orders affecting either side.
It's not strictly mandated as a standalone document, but a written policy is the clearest way to demonstrate compliance if a dispute occurs. AHRI data shows most employers who've addressed the law formally have done so through a written policy and manager training.
Scheduled send, quiet-hours settings, AI message triage, and automated rostering reduce how often after-hours contact happens at all, and make the reasonable/unreasonable line a system setting rather than something every manager has to remember.
As of publication, the case — a Queensland teacher seeking around $800,000 after alleging her termination was linked to refusing after-hours contact — was in mediation, scheduled for 11 August 2025. It's the first case of its kind and will likely shape how "unreasonable" is interpreted going forward.
Sources & References
- Fair Work Ombudsman — "Right to disconnect for small business employees starts 26 August" (2025)
- The Conversation — "5 million small business employees now have a right to disconnect from work" (2025)
- HWL Ebsworth — "The Right to Disconnect — 12 Months On", citing AHRI's Quarterly Australian Work Outlook and the Federal Court test case (2025)
- Fair Work Commission — guidance on right to disconnect disputes and the reasonableness factors under s.333M
We help Australian small businesses work out which automation actually fits their operations — not just for compliance issues like this one, but across the workflows that eat the most admin time. If getting your right to disconnect policy and tooling sorted feels like one more thing on an already long list, that's exactly the kind of setup work we do at GrowthGear.
