Section 333M of the Fair Work Act came into force on 26 August 2024 for large employers. Most HR teams did what you'd expect. Update the handbook. Circulate a new policy. Get everyone to sign an acknowledgment.
That was the easy part.
A right-to-disconnect complaint doesn't test whether you have a policy. It tests whether you can reconstruct a timeline, and the timeline the FWC wants to see pulls from six different places: the communication that triggered the complaint with a timestamp, the rostered hours from your WFM system, the actual hours worked from time and attendance, the employee's contract terms including any section 62 reasonable additional hours clause, the applicable award provisions, and your company policy with signed acknowledgment receipt.
Six systems. Most of them don't share an employee identifier.
You have 7 days to respond under FWC procedural rules. Seven days. I've watched organisations spend most of that just locating the data. Not analysing it. Not building a response. Just getting the right exports from the right systems into the same room so someone can start piecing together what happened at 9:14pm on a Tuesday.
Here's the part nobody talks about. For salaried employees on annualised arrangements, "outside working hours" isn't a simple question because you have to reconcile the contract terms against actual hours worked, factor in the salary absorption offset, and determine whether the contact occurred during what could reasonably be considered working time given the pattern of hours the employee actually performs, not just the hours on paper. That's not a policy question. That's an evidence question. And it needs data from at least three systems to answer.
The employers who will handle these complaints well aren't the ones with the best-written policy. They're the ones who can correlate communications, rosters, timesheets, contracts, and award terms into a single timeline within 48 hours and produce it as a coherent package. Here's when the message was sent. Here's when the employee was rostered. Here's when they actually worked. Here's what their contract says. Here's what the award says. Connected.
The employers who will struggle? Beautiful 12-page policy, no way to produce the evidence trail behind it. The FWC's first move is a Stop Order under section 333P. Breach that order and the civil penalties under section 333Q run up to $19,800 per contravention for an individual. But the real cost isn't the penalty. It's the operational scramble of trying to reconstruct something that should have been queryable from the start.
Everyone treated right to disconnect as a policy problem. It's an evidence problem. The policy was the 2% solution. The other 98% is whether your systems can answer one question: was this employee working or not, at this specific time, according to every system that has an opinion?
If it takes you five of your seven days just to find the data, your policy doesn't matter.