Brussels (Brussels Morning) – Approximately 12% of Belgian employees face pressure to be available outside work hours, a study reveals. The disconnection law, effective since April 2023, aims to alleviate this, showing initial success with a decrease from 14% in 2020.
Twelve per cent of employees experience pressure to be available to their employer outside working hours or during holiday periods. This was evident from a study by IDEWE, an external service for prevention and protection at work, among approximately 127,000 employees in Belgium.
How has Belgium’s disconnection law impacted employee availability?
In April 2023, the disconnection law came into effect: employers with more than 20 employees may no longer expect them to be ‘online’ outside working hours and may in principle no longer disturb them. IDEWE wanted to investigate whether the law was being complied with a year later.
The researchers surveyed 126,956 employees between 2020 and 2023 about the pressure they feel to be available outside working hours. The ‘availability pressure’ was defined in the study as “my direct manager expects me to answer work-related messages in my spare time”. The results showed that 12.3 per cent of employees experienced accessibility pressure in 2023, compared to around 14 per cent in 2020. “The legislation therefore seems to have had an initial effect,” says Rosanne Volckaert, prevention advisor for psychosocial aspects at IDEWE. “The first figures for 2024 continue this trend, but these are still provisional data.”
What are the effects of accessibility pressure on job satisfaction?
Employees who have difficulty disconnecting due to accessibility pressure are less satisfied at work, the study shows: that 73 percent of employees with accessibility pressure are satisfied, compared to 82 percent in the group that does not experience accessibility pressure.
How has employee satisfaction changed under the disconnection law?
Employees with accessibility pressure also have less intention to stay at their job (63 per cent versus 70 per cent) and experience more stress (40 per cent versus 26 per cent) and exhaustion (44 per cent versus 30 per cent). They, therefore, run a higher risk of burnout (26 per cent versus 15 per cent) and drop out for work-related, psychosocial reasons (19 per cent versus 10 per cent).
The study also looked at whether certain functions within a company feel more or less obliged to remain available. Managers in particular experience accessibility pressure, the analysis shows. About 14 per cent of non-executives feel pressure, compared to 15 per cent of executive executives and 22.9 per cent of executive executives.
“If we can conclude one thing, it is that as an employer you have nothing to gain from high accessibility pressure among your employees,” says Lode Godderis, CEO at IDEWE and professor of occupational medicine at KU Leuven. “Regardless of what the law requires, it is important for employers to work on a policy with clear rules for employees and managers, both in the evenings after work and during holidays. This benefits everyone.”
