Government employees in this country no longer have to answer emails after work hours

Belgium has joined the growing list of European countries taking steps toward greater work-life balance. (Representative image)

Belgian civil servants will no longer need to answer emails or phone calls out of hours after the country became the latest in Europe to offer workers the right to disconnect. The move is aimed towards greater work-life balance.

The law means 65,000 federal officials are able to make themselves unavailable at the end of the normal working day unless there are “exceptional” reasons for not doing so, reported The Guardian.

The Belgium government also plans to extend the right to private-sector employees despite the opposition of some business groups.

Petra De Sutter, the Belgian minister for public administration, said the law was necessary to combat a culture of people feeling they should always be available.

He said in a letter that the right to disconnect will be codified into law as a means to combat "excessive work stress and burn-out" among federal civil servants, according to The Brussels Times.

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The federal government is also examining a proposal to move to a four-day week of 38 to 40 hours for full-time staff, meaning longer working days but a three-day weekend.

Belgium has followed a trend set in Europe by Volkswagen in Germany, which decided in 2012 to ban certain employees from accessing emails after hours in order to avoid burnout.

Last November, the European parliament backed a resolution calling on the European Commission to draft an EU-wide law that would protect workers who wished to “disconnect”.

Alex Agius Saliba, a Maltese MEP, who drove the vote, said: “We cannot abandon millions of European workers who are exhausted by the pressure to be always ‘on’ and overly long working hours.

“Now is the moment to stand by their side and give them what they deserve: the right to disconnect. This is vital for our mental and physical health. It is time to update worker’s rights so that they correspond to the new realities of the digital age.”
In France, the sense that a different work-life balance needed to be struck was turned into action in 2017, when organisations with more than 50 workers were required to start negotiations to define the rights of employees to ignore their company smartphones and laptops.

According to The Guardian report, Portugal went further last year by approving legislation under which employers with more than 10 staff can be liable to fines if they text message, phone or email workers who are off the clock. Companies must help pay for expenses incurred by remote working.

But, the Portuguese parliament rejected a proposal to include a legal right to switch off work-related messages and devices outside office hours.