The right to disconnect resolution in the European Union.
Tags: Work Life Balance, European Union, Remote Working, Technology, Europe

The right to disconnect is a good step towards better work-life balance

The advancements of modern tools and technologies have made it possible for Information Technology professionals to remotely work anywhere, anytime without losing much productivity of their work. This has proved to be a lifesaver for many companies during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Eurofound, over a Third of EU employees are working from home since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, this brings us to the ever-increasing challenge of blurring boundaries between work & personal life. With no physical distinction between work & home office, many people are now habitually working extended hours.

IT professionals are accustomed to an always-on, on-call culture where they need to respond to incident tickets and provide support when systems are malfunctioning.

But this widespread & growing expectation that employees should be reachable at any time can negatively affect work-life balance, physical and mental health, and well-being in general.

This has been brought to the spotlight at the European Parliament. The “right to disconnect” resolution was brought last week by the Members of the European Parliament to ensure that employees within EU countries are able to exercise their right to stay out from work during non-work hours.

What is the “right to disconnect”? The right to disconnect refers to an employees right to be able to disengage from work and refrain from engaging in work-related electronic communications, such as emails or other messages, during non-work hours.

This non-legislative resolution is expected to be voted on in January 2021, and if endorsed, it would be part of future regulatory implementation across the EU. In June 2013, France already made a landmark decision on a similar act allowing French employees to have better work-life balance.

So how would this affect your IT operations?

Managing SLAs (Service Level Agreements) on IT ticket resolution & system uptime. Incident response to IT emergencies such as hardware & platform failures. Handling emergency application support requests.

Of course, shifting from on-call model to a roster based operation would be one of the choices. But would the additional cost of HR and other expenses feasible for some of the SMEs? Would this make your best employees leave the organization?

Offpeak coverage is important for global organizations

This is an area where some of our clients are far ahead compared to their competition by having extended teams established through Bluecorp. While the concept of distributed/remote workforce is quite old, it has been recently accelerated and accepted because of the pandemic.

Bluecorp provides extended teams in software engineering and IT operations through our own ISO-27001 certified office in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka (UTC +5:30) is conveniently half a day ahead of Europe, thus making it possible to have a good overlap for meetings while they cover off-hours. Additionally, we have years of experience managing 24x7 operations allowing our clients to cover off-peak hours in Europe, US & APAC.

Bluecorp provides extended IT teams from Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has been our exclusive offshore choice for over two decades because of the high quality of talent, reliability & the less crowded market. Working directly with a European company based in Brussels avoids common pitfalls & drawbacks of directly contracting with local offshore companies.

Let’s discuss how we could help you to affordably allow employees to exercise their right to disconnect.