Letters | Use your brain: why no law can protect us from bringing work home

Readers discuss a proposed law in Australia that will empower workers to ignore calls from their bosses outside work hours without penalty, and how Hong Kong can deal with its ageing society

Reading Time:2 minutes

Disconnecting from the office after work hours would allow employees to focus on family and their personal interests. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:30am, 10 Mar 2024

Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at letters@scmp.com or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words, and must include your full name and address, plus a phone number for verification.

I refer to “Australia to allow workers to ignore after-hours calls from bosses: ‘that time is yours’” (February 7). While industrial relations reforms are up in the air, people can take matters into their own hands and control the workplace’s access to them by temporarily turning off notifications from work or opting out of work chats on their days off so that they can immerse themselves completely in their personal and family pursuits. Urgent matters can be addressed through phone calls, which are, alas, not yet avoidable.

Being a deliberate non-participant in work discourse online when you are on unpaid time will also reduce screen addiction.

On the other hand, the boundaries between work and personal life have blurred significantly, so much so that the legally prescribed effort to promote disconnection from work might be impossible to implement successfully. Gen Z and their forebears will find that the end of after-hours work communication cannot insulate them from the tendency to brood on work issues in their private time.

The converse also applies. Our minds can be distracted by family troubles or wanderlust for sought-after holidays during paid hours at the office. Human nature finds it difficult to compartmentalise completely between work and home.

The sweetener is the quid-pro-quo juggling act between daydreaming at work and bringing work home to the sanctity of our bedrooms. Hopefully one balances out the other.

“Work to live, rather than live to work” is what many aspire to. However, tilting the scales of work-life balance cannot arrest the cross-permeation through the work-life divide in employees’ minds. People cannot tune in and out just because a ban on workplace communication is legislated.