Right to switch off: The person who really needs to grant the permission is ourselves

Yes it's up to our managers, but the real power comes when we say 'no'

The moment is still so clear. Mid 2000s. About 7pm, a while after I’d left work for the day, I was hanging out with some friends. My (not smart, but mobile) phone rang. It was my features editor, my job at the time was on the features team of a weekly women’s magazine. One of many ‘dream jobs’ I was working my way through as a writer in the search for job perfection.

She spoke with urgency. Had I secured the story? Had the woman answered, had I sorted it, was the story ours now?

I felt mild panic but also confusion. Wasn’t this a tomorrow thing? I wasn’t at work any more.

The woman my manager was talking about had been in the newspaper that day, telling her story, a biggie.

The magazine where I was working wanted the story. But someone else had already signed her. This means she had already agreed to speak to another magazine, exclusively, and she had signed a contract to that effect. The story was theirs.

But my editor wasn’t happy. She wanted me to ‘gazump’. To ‘steal’ the story, to get it secured for us. I was to phone the woman and get her to agree to that.

Only I hadn’t phoned the woman from the papers.

I had wondered, perhaps naively, why I should. In my mind, I would pick up the task in the morning and go from there. There had been no clear discussion of the expectations of me that evening before I left, but during that call from my manager, the full expectancy that I would do her bidding was clear. Well, as far as she was concerned, anyway! I had to keep going until the job was done. For me, it was done that evening. We’d lost out and that was that.

I know now that I must have been a very frustrating employee! But my (and our) relationships with managers is another Substack for another time.

I know I was never a ‘hack’. I hated bothering people to ask if they’d speak to a magazine, and hated cold calling to see if they’d be interested in signing with us. I loathed that part of the job. For me, the good part was the interview and the finished story, the writing of it, the byline glory. I hated the ‘chase’. There were many others in my peer group who were much more with the programme. People who would have called that woman until she changed her mind. Devil wears Prada style. In one office I worked in, we called the features editor ‘Devil Wears Primark’.

That day, taking that call outside of hours was perhaps me being an early adopter of the ‘right to switch off’.

The world I worked in was one of demands and orders. Story chasing back then was brutal, because there was hardly any social media. There were no DMs into which to slide with your request for an interview. We often got sent to knock on doors to see if people would talk to us. We were sent to interview people in remote parts of the country, with no chaperone. You found people for stories by picking up the phone - and seeing if they would sign a contract with you. Often we’d fax or courier the contracts, for ‘speed’ (these days of course you’d email them.

In a way, we could disconnect because there wasn’t the tech to stay in touch. Fast forward to 2024 and the world of tech and social media, and switching off is a holy grail.

The ‘Right to switch off’, also known as the ‘right to disconnect’ is a new pledge from the Labour government (here in the UK for those outside the UK!) called Plan to Make Work Pay and is essentially about workers being able to disconnect from their work. That might mean not answering emails or not answering calls. It might mean refusing a meeting request ahead of our 9am start. It might mean not being available to see an email about shifts when you’re not on shift.

It’s about tackling work intensity - giving workers the space to have downtime. But in practice, the onus seems to be on the worker not to answer.

First of all, it shouldn’t have to be this way at all. There should be clear boundaries between managers and their teams about this. There should be clear direction from above that (of course) outside of working hours, our time is our own. We shouldn’t need to tell people that their staff have the right to switch off.

The pressure on the employee to switch off should be a given - surely it should be about the manager, boss or company implementing the rule of ‘switch off’ and not contacting them.

To return to my original story, should my manager have ever called me out of hours in the first place?

There is a correlation here with smartphones and being contactable - that the world we live in now means we aren’t able to just switch off, or be anywhere without being call-able. We’re all conditioned to check and to answer, to respond if we are contacted. that classic ‘could you just’…

Back when I began my career as a local newspaper journalist the only way we could be contacted out of hours was on the landline at home. I read recently that a quarter of people aged 18-34 never answer the phone. I’m part of the ‘let it ring’ brigade these days but back in office journalism newspaper days, and magazines, not answering the phone was a no-no! But that was a landline, the office phone. We didn’t have smartphones that flashed up with calls all evening long.

I think I had a Nokia at some point, and that could then receive calls and texts but it was more about emergencies. Like the time we got a call to say the local school was on fire (!) and my housemate, a photographer, and I raced down there to cover it.

We had a time off in lieu book, in which we’d write when we had done overtime in some way - an evening council meeting for example - and in return for hours worked out of the usual working hours we could claim back days off in lieu.

It was the opposite of the right to switch off. It was flexible working of a sort. For me, the trust it offered made me work harder.

The right to switch off seems to be between employers and employees. About boundaries between work and home, the work day and ‘off duty’.

But there is no point in our boss, manager or company giving us that right if we don’t give it to ourselves too.

In freelance times, I found it impossible to switch off. Clients and boundaries are not a strong match - they each think your time belongs to them and when they need something, when it’s urgent to them, they push that onto you.

The right to switch off and have a day off eludes most freelancers, even on a day off I would be checking emails or socials to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

Rather than giving myself the right to switch off, I was enabling myself to stay switched on.

And in non-freelance times, there is a tendency for many people to stay switched on because work is their big priority. Because their own boundaries are out of whack.

We don’t allow ourselves to switch off out of FOMO, for sure (for example, checking traffic stats on a website after everyone has logged off, or emails on the train to work), but we also don’t allow it because we like to be ‘on’ all the time. And that’s a worry.

If we can’t give ourselves permission to switch off, how will we ever allow anyone else to give us that right?