The short version
- Right-to-disconnect rules assume one time zone. A company in four cannot apply a single evening window to anyone.
- Rebuild the policy on declared personal hours rather than company hours. Everything else follows from that.
- Five components: declared hours, response times in the recipient's zone, a narrow exception route, meeting rules, and a stated consequence.
- The component that makes it operational rather than aspirational is answering the question of who answers when you are off.
Right-to-disconnect legislation and the internal policies written to satisfy it share a design assumption: that there is an evening, shared by everyone, after which work stops. For a company operating in four countries that assumption does not survive contact with a calendar.
"The policy assumes one time zone. We have four."
The one-time-zone assumption
A policy stating that employees are not expected to respond between 19:00 and 08:00 is clear in one country and meaningless in four. 19:00 in Amsterdam is 02:00 in Tokyo and 10:00 in San Francisco. Applied literally, it either protects nobody or forbids all cross-zone communication.
The usual compromise is to apply it in local time, which is correct and incomplete: it tells people when they may not be contacted and says nothing about what happens to the work that needed them. That gap is where compliance turns into quiet non-compliance.
The five components
| Component | What it says |
|---|---|
| Declared hours | Each person publishes their own, in local time, visible to everyone |
| Response times | Per channel, in working hours, in the recipient's zone |
| Exception route | Two qualifying situations, one channel, one named person |
| Meeting rules | No recurring meeting inside anyone's declared off-hours |
| Consequence | Out-of-hours messages wait, and nobody apologises for that |
Note what is not in the table: a company-wide evening. Everything is anchored to the individual's declared hours, which is the only frame that works in four countries and has the useful side effect of accommodating people who genuinely prefer different hours.
Meeting rules, which do most of the work
Of the five components, meeting rules deliver the most and get the least attention. A message can be ignored until morning; a recurring meeting at 21:00 cannot, and nobody can decline it individually without cost.
Three rules. No recurring meeting inside anyone's declared off-hours, without exception. Where a shared slot is genuinely impossible, rotate it, publish the rota a quarter ahead, and cap how often any zone takes the unpleasant slot. And re-anchor recurring meetings twice a year when clocks change on different dates, because otherwise your compliant 17:00 becomes a non-compliant 18:00 without anyone touching it.
The fuller treatment of rotation and its costs is in rotating meetings across time zones.
Who answers when you are off
Here is the component that separates an operational policy from a statement of values. Every rule above tells people when not to contact someone. None of them says what happens to the question.
Left unanswered, the question waits for the person, and the person knows it, so they check. That is why policies are complied with in letter and broken in practice: the cost of the boundary is paid by whoever needed the answer, and eventually by the person who feels responsible for them.
With StandIn, the answer does not wait. Each person confirms a ninety-second brief at the end of their day, mostly pre-drafted from the work they already did: current state, open questions, blockers, next actions, decisions and why. Whenever they are off, their StandIn answers questions from that brief in their words, with a source under every answer, clearly labelled as their StandIn. It never guesses: when the answer is not in what they wrote, it says so and names who to ask.
So the colleague in another zone gets what they needed during their own working day, and the person's declared hours hold because nobody loses anything by respecting them. See working across time zones.
How to tell whether it is working
Compliance is not measurable by counting policy violations, because the behaviour goes quiet rather than stopping. Three better signals.
Ask in one-to-ones when someone last worked outside their hours and what they were doing. Look at your own sent messages and count how many left outside the recipient's day. And watch whether junior people are replying at night, since they are the group with the least standing to decline and therefore the best indicator of the real norm.
If all three improve, the policy is operational. If the first two improve and the third does not, you have a document rather than a change.
Common Questions
How does right to disconnect work across time zones?
Anchor everything to each person's declared working hours in local time rather than to a company-wide evening. Response times, meeting rules, and exceptions all reference the individual's hours, which is the only frame that is meaningful in several countries.
What should a right-to-disconnect policy contain?
Declared hours per person, response times per channel in the recipient's zone, a narrow exception route, a rule against recurring meetings in anyone's off-hours, and a stated consequence: out-of-hours messages wait, and nobody apologises.
Why do these policies usually fail?
Because they say when not to contact someone without saying what happens to the work. The person knows the question is waiting for them, so they check, and the policy is observed in letter only.
Is on-call compatible with right to disconnect?
Yes, if it is a small named rota with compensation and a clear definition of what pages someone. What is not compatible is a general expectation of availability that is never named, never rostered, and never paid.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.