Does the right to disconnect make after-hours messages illegal?

No. The Fair Work Ombudsman says the rules don't make out-of-hours contact unlawful. They give employees a right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to it unless refusing would be unreasonable. The practical risk is the dispute, and a message that serves no purpose at that hour is hard to defend.

Does it apply to a business with fewer than 15 employees?

Yes. It has applied to employees of small business employers since 26 August 2025, and to employees of larger employers since 26 August 2024. Awards and enterprise agreements can add their own right to disconnect terms, so check yours as well.

What about staff who are on call or paid to be available?

Pay and availability are among the factors in deciding whether a refusal is unreasonable, and employees can be required to respond while on call or working overtime. The sensible setup is that urgent alerts go only to the person who is rostered and paid for that, and everyone else gets the message in the morning.

Your automation is messaging staff at 9pm

What does the right to disconnect actually say?

Under the Fair Work Act, an employee can refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact outside their working hours unless doing so is unreasonable. The Fair Work Ombudsman is explicit that this includes contact from an employer or a third party, over calls, emails, texts, social media and messaging services.

It has applied to employees of small business employers (fewer than 15 employees) since 26 August 2025, and to everyone else since 26 August 2024. So a ten-person firm is covered.

Whether a refusal is unreasonable depends on factors the Ombudsman lists:

the reason for the contact
how the contact is made and how disruptive it is
how much the employee is paid, or paid extra, to be available or to work additional hours
their role and level of responsibility
their personal circumstances, including family or caring responsibilities

It's also a protected workplace right. An employer must not stop an employee from using it, and disputes can end up with the Fair Work Commission, which can make orders. Awards and agreements can add their own provisions on top, and the Ombudsman notes all awards include a right to disconnect clause. Read yours.

Why does automation make this worse?

Because nobody decides to send the message. A manager thinks twice before texting someone at 9pm. A workflow doesn't think at all. It fires when its trigger fires, to whoever is on the list, at whatever hour that happens to be.

The usual culprits are mundane:

Roster and shift notifications that go out when the roster is published, which is often when the manager is finishing up at night.
Task and job reminders set to fire at a fixed time, or a fixed number of hours after something happened.
Overdue and escalation alerts that copy the whole team rather than the owner of the task.
Lead and enquiry alerts sent to everyone, including people who can't act on them until morning.
Daily summaries scheduled in a timezone the setup tool defaulted to, not yours.

Each one made sense on its own. Together they train staff to treat the phone as a work device at all hours, and they leave you in the position of explaining why a message with no urgency had to arrive at that time.

The automation also has no idea who is rostered on, on leave, or on a day off. A person would know.

Which messages are worth sending after hours?

Apply the Ombudsman's first factor to your own list: what is the reason for the contact? A short sort works.

Genuinely urgent and acted on tonight. A fire alarm, a site security alert, a customer emergency on a service you provide out of hours. Send these, to the person who is rostered and paid for being available.
Useful but not urgent. The new roster, tomorrow's job list, a reminder that a document is due. Hold these until the start of the person's working day.
Nobody needs this. Digests, status pings and reminders sent because the tool can send them. Switch them off.

Most of what an automation sends after hours lands in the second and third groups. That's good news, because holding a message costs you nothing.

What rules should you set?

Five settings cover most of it. Most workflow and messaging tools can do all of them, though you should check what yours supports rather than assume.

A send window. Messages to staff go out only inside a window that matches their working hours. Anything triggered outside it is queued and released when the window opens.
Routing by role. Urgent alerts go to a named on-call person or a role, not to a whole-team list.
A roster check before sending. Where your roster lives in a system the workflow can read, send only to people who are working or on call. Leave and days off are the obvious misses.
Quiet hours for non-urgent categories. Set per category, not per tool, so a security alert can go through while a reminder waits.
A review of the defaults. Check the timezone and the recipient lists on every scheduled workflow. Defaults are where the 9pm message comes from.

It's the same discipline as any rostering setup across several sites: the system needs to know who is working when, or it will guess.

How do you find what's already going out?

You probably have more of these than you think, because they were switched on one at a time.

List every workflow, scheduled report, calendar rule and app notification that can contact an employee. Include the ones inside your payroll, rostering, CRM and job management tools, not only the automations you built.
For each, write down who receives it, what triggers it and what time it can fire.
Ask two or three staff what their phone does after hours. They'll tell you in a minute what a settings screen won't.
Sort each one into the three groups above, then change the schedule, recipients or category as needed.

If you can't say who owns a workflow, that's a separate problem, and who owns your automations is the place to start.

Does this change what you tell staff?

A little. The Ombudsman encourages employers and employees to discuss out-of-hours contact and agree what suits the role. Put the result in writing in a sentence or two: which messages can reach you after hours, who they come from, and who is expected to respond. Anyone on call should know that and what they're paid for it.

AI makes the drafting side of this easier, but not the judgement. A tool can write a polite after-hours message in a second. Deciding whether the message should exist is yours, which is the theme of what AI won't do for your business.

What to do next

List every automation, report and app that can message an employee, and note the hour each can fire.
Sort them: urgent and acted on tonight, useful but can wait, or not needed.
Add a send window to everything in the middle group, and route urgent alerts to a named on-call person.
Check the timezone and recipient list on each scheduled workflow.
Check your award or agreement for its right to disconnect terms, and confirm your own obligations if you're unsure how they apply.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on what your tools send and when, the free fit chat is the place to start.