When I was researching the article on the “right to disconnect” that I recently wrote for The Conversation, one of the studies that I referenced was one exploring over-connectivity and gender equity in the legal profession. The Australian researchers interviewed 63 lawyers about the effects of newer digital technology tools (e.g. email, Zoom, Teams, texting, mobile phones) on their work. The legal profession is a good place to study these effects, because lawyers do complex work in time-sensitive situations that can unexpectedly change. They also simultaneously manage multiple clients, cases, and commitments.

The interviewees appreciated the work flexibility that digital technology gave them – particularly women with family or household commitments outside of work. But they reported that they were experiencing more challenges around setting boundaries between work and non-work times, due to their increased availability. Many also said that easier communication had intensified clients’ expectations for fast turnarounds and responses.

The interviewees discussed individual and firm-level strategies they used to deal with “digital overload”. These included clearly defined work hours, limiting the methods by which clients could contact them, and organizational policies with guidelines such as expected response times to messages from client. However, this part of the discussion really stood out to me.

Some participants expressed a need for regulatory interventions to set new normative expectations around worker availability and accessibility. Right to disconnect laws were specifically evoked in two focus groups as one means of challenging existing norms around long hours as a proxy commitment and dedication. The establishment and enforcement of maximum working hours—or laws ‘to limit the amount of hours you can do’ (Drew, mid‐career, private sector) implemented industry‐wide or ‘across the board’ (Brendan, early‐career, private sector)—was seen as the most practical and effective means of pushing back against digital work intensification. (p. 13)

There’s only so much that individuals can do on their own to counteract digital overload. Too often in workplaces, individuals’ inability, perceived or actual, to manage their workload is seen as the individual’s problem. In that sense, it’s somewhat similar to the problem of workplace stress, which employers often address by offering “wellness programs” and the like to individual workers – what one of my friends describes as the “yoga and scented candles” strategy.

Blaming individual workers’ problems on the workers overlooks or deflects from another source of those problems: the workplace conditions that cause them. If a worker is struggling with digital overload, it doesn’t always mean that they’re disorganized or lazy. It may mean that the employer has unrealistic expectations of how available employees should be, or that the worker has too many tasks to complete or manage. Employers may also assume, incorrectly, that more technology should result in better productivity.

Framing these issues as organizational or systemic rather than individual, as the study participants point out, shows how legislation can make a very big difference. Individual workers may be able to negotiate workplace arrangements that solve their own problem, but that doesn’t help their co-workers, or workers in other organizations, who may be struggling with the same issues or who may not have sufficient leverage to push for change in their workplace. Not all managers or employers may be sympathetic or well informed about these problems or their potential causes. They may ignore their own responsibility and simply write off the complaints as something the worker should solve for themselves.

There’s a lot of noise right now about government interference in the free market, and with companies’ and businesses’ “freedom” to operate without excessive “red tape” (their terms, not mine). Yes, there are employers who treat their employees fairly, listen to their concerns, and take substantive action to address those concerns. But for the employers who don’t do those things, laws that establish workplace norms or minimum standards are one of the few tools that can actually help workers get the workplace changes that they need to be healthy and productive. Yoga and scented candles aren’t enough.