Study: 72% of Senior Leaders Support French-Style “Right to Disconnect”

As employee wellbeing continues to rise up the agenda for US employers, Tech.co’s new report found that 72% of senior leads currently support the ‘right to disconnect’ labor law which would give workers the right to ignore communications when they’re off the clock.

The policy is gaining momentum globally and has already been embraced by a slew of European countries including France, Portugal, and Belgium, with Australia joining the cohort last summer.

With the pendulum appearing to swing in the favor of employees, there’s growing hope that the European-style policy will help to combat the “always-on” culture that’s prevalent in the US. Yet, with Americans being notoriously bad for taking paid time off (PTO), despite escalating cases of worker burnout, we discuss if the policy is actually ready to be embraced on home soil.

The Right to Disconnect Is Growing Momentum Globally

As the growing prevalence of work-from-home technologies continues to blur professional and personal boundaries, the right to disconnect aims to make it easier for employees to unplug from work, with some countries adopting this stance as law.

The law seeks to curb escalating cases of worker burnout, by allowing them to disengage from emails, calls, and Slack messages, outside of contracted work hours.

As legislators continue to take note, Australia has become the latest country to impliment the right-to-disconnect law, with the nation adopting it under its Fair Work Act in August of last year.

This brings the total global tally up to over a dozen, with a variety of European and South American countries like France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina already passing the policy in the last few years, and even more nations, including the Netherlands, proposing the bill in government.

77% of US Senior Leaders Are On Board With the Law

The US has been accused of lagging behind when it comes to championing employee rights. However, the results of our 2025 Impact of Tech on the Workplace report revealed the right-to-disconnect policy has a surprising amount of backing among company executives.

After surveying 1,036 US-based senior executives, we found that 72% of respondents currently support the policy, compared to only 14% that rejected it outright, and 14% that didn’t take a clear stance. With clearer workplace boundaries being shown to result in a more productive workforce by reducing levels of burnout and stress, it’s in the best interests of employers to consider the bill – and unsurprisingly, workers agree.

A 2024 survey from Email Tool Tester showed that 9 out of 10 US employees are in favor of the policy, and would like to see the European law become a staple in their own workforce. The survey also revealed that 74% of workers communicate less with loved ones because they feel burned out by communicating with clients and colleagues at work – a sobering demonstration of how today’s working culture can disrupt personal lives.

Is the Right to Disconnect at Odds With the US’s Hustle Culture?

Yet, despite near-unanimous support for the policy among senior leaders and workers, the results of our report hint that the US’s current working culture may prevent the nation from following in the footsteps of their European and South American counterparts anytime soon.

Managers clearly aren’t ready to pull the plug on ‘out of office’ communications yet, with a large segment (39%) of respondents admitting that they would reach out to staff in the case of an emergency, even if they were on vacation. Surprisingly, the younger generation is actually leading the pack on the matter, with 37% of Gen Z managers saying that they would contact workers out-of-hours for a critical business issue, compared to just 28% of managers aged 45-54.

Most workers feel obliged to respond too, with 83% of employees still feeling somewhat obligated to respond to work messages while on vacation, in contrast to just 17% who were happily able to disconnect.

US legislators aren’t jumping on the policy, either. While California and New Jersey have recently considered rolling out right-to-disconnect laws, no states have officially rolled out the policy. But for many of us, this news won’t be surprising. The US is one of the only nations to mandate no official PTO policy and place no limits on how many hours a person can work. As a result, the harsh reality is that it’ll be much harder to implement a right-to-disconnect law on home soil, compared with countries with stricter employee protections like France and Spain.

This doesn’t mean you should lose hope though. The fact that the policy is backed by so many senior leaders suggests that executives are finally starting to take employee wellbeing more seriously. What’s more, while a federal right to disconnect law may not be on the cards any time soon, it’s still possible to land a job with an employer that respects your boundaries, as well as your right to snooze work notifications when on your well-deserved vacation.