Portugal has recently enacted legislation to regulate working from home in a bold attempt to protect workers' work/life balance. Although the benefits of working from home are overwhelmingly positive for most workers, one of the downsides is the reported increase in working hours and the greater difficulty that some workers have in switching off from work at the end of the day.
In response, Portugal has implemented new laws which prohibit employers from contacting their staff outside their contracted working hours, except in emergencies. It will be interesting to see how these laws play out in practice. For example, will copying a colleague into an email for information purposes be caught by the prohibition, or only emails that require immediate action? In an increasingly global economy, bosses are frequently located in different time zones to team members, which may now make managing staff in Portugal more challenging. I imagine there is no restriction on clients or third parties contacting staff out of hours, so that pressure to respond will remain. And are there any restrictions on junior members of staff contacting their supervisors out of hours, whose work/life balance surely merits equal protection? How will an "emergency" be defined? And will employees have the right to opt out of these protections?
Although any attempt to promote work/life balance is laudable in my opinion, I question whether legislation is the best way of achieving this. Of far greater importance is the employer's culture, with leadership needing to act by example: setting clear boundaries to their working time and actively encouraging their staff to do the same.