Bosses will benefit if they leave ‘work-shy’ Gen Z alone

With Labour set to enshrine in law an employee’s ‘right to switch off’ from their office inbox, Matt Potter says the impact will be felt most by the young demographic that has never known a world without smartphones – or what proper work/life boundaries look like

New laws to ensure our homes don’t become a 24/7 office aren’t the atom bomb businesses suggest (Getty)

Like flexible working, TikTok and the Gen Z slang “FRFR”, the right to switch off – an idea proposed by Labour before the election as part of its reform of workers rights, and now set to become law – is a Rorschach test.

Your instinctive position on Labour’s new employment law promising workers the right to disconnect probably says more about who you are, attitudinally, socially and generationally, than about anything in the legislation itself.

At present, employees have no official right to disconnect from work. If a boss wants to bother you outside of your mandated hours with a phone call or an email, they can. They can also agitate that you reply, too – and even demand you do extra work. But a new law ensuring that our homes don’t become 24/7 offices is hardly the atom bomb for business that has been suggested.

Not only is similar legislation already in operation in Ireland, Belgium and Australia, among others, it is simply the rolling back of a land grab – unplanned, and even unintended – of your free time.

If you were already in work in the mid-2000s, when smartphones and unlimited home broadband packages arrived, the law simply resets your expectations to what they reasonably would have been. Hi, are you still at work? No, you’ve left for the day and are at home, at the gym, in the pub. Let’s pick this up tomorrow.

To the workforce of 2024, those sound like halcyon days. Now, it’s standard to be asked to “just quickly ping me” – or to be at home on Sunday and see a single word pop up on your phone: “For tomorrow. Thoughts?”

The big difference is that in the intervening years, Generation Z has arrived. Already the most populous generation on Earth, those aged between their mid-teens and late twenties will soon become the biggest voting bloc in history.

In my day-to-day job, I mentor Gen Z colleagues, peers and clients. And a big part of what I do is validation, helping a cohort whose place in the workforce is defined by being at the beck and call of others. Half of all employees are now freelance or self-employed. More crucially, they have no memory of working life pre-smartphone, no memory of being – practically and genuinely – unavailable. Of course, social media and 24/7 connectivity is amazing. But it does mean it’s a generation who are faced with negotiating boundaries that seem natural, or at least normative, to the rest of the working population.

For all the huffing and hand-wringing about how “nobody wants to work any more” from older, more reactionary bosses, about the “entitlement” of young workers today, and their fondness for “quiet quitting”, Gen Z employees have also been told there are no jobs for life any more, so rise and grind, embrace the gig, “be a portfolio”.

And all the while, they are doing something no previous age group has had to do: feel their own way through the thickets of employers’ finagling, coercion, guilt tripping and boundary ignoring, on their own, and without anything as physically, immovably protective as “Sorry you’ve missed me, please call again tomorrow” to shield them.

Add to that Covid-19, when successive lockdowns turned remote working and Zoom meetings into the default working pattern. It also made everyone’s living room or flatshare bedroom into an office, into which their laptops and phones decanted the uncannily large, two-dimensional disembodied faces of bosses, clients and colleagues at no more notice than a bleep-bloop alert or “Can you just hop on a call?”.

Yes, it’s great that they don’t have to spend two hours of every day schlepping to and from a city centre office in rush hour. But it does leave them somewhat at the beck and call of older bosses.

You think Gen Z protest too much? That’s because you won’t leave them alone.

Any organisation that can only measure employee contribution by bum-on-swivel-chair hours has a larger problem on its hands. You’re threatened that you can’t get hold of someone while they’re on holiday, or at weekends? You’re running a pretty chaotic business.

With the right to switch off, we have the first piece of workplace protection tailor-made for Generation Z. You might say it’s a canny piece of politics, just like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s 1997 pledge to introduce the minimum wage. Three decades ago, industrialists warned the measure would ruin the economy, that guaranteeing £3.60 an hour would only put businesses out of business and consign entire workforces to the scrapheap.

Then as now, the naysayers and scaremongers will be proven wrong. At the last election, even the Conservatives supported the national living wage.

Labour’s workplace reforms will help Gen Z re-establish the boundaries that every generation before them took for granted. We should get off their case and let them enjoy their holiday.

Matt Potter is author of ‘The Last Goodbye: The History of the World in Resignation Letters’