What Changed on 26 August 2025
If you run a small business, a workplace rule that used to apply only to larger employers now applies to you too. From 26 August 2025, the right to disconnect extended to small business employers, those with fewer than 15 employees. Larger businesses were already covered from the year before; this is the date the rule reached the smallest employers, and it brought roughly 5.4 million small-business employees under its protection.
The right sits within the Fair Work Act, and the Fair Work Ombudsman publishes guidance on how it works in practice. For most owners of small teams it is not a dramatic change to daily operations, but it is a genuine shift in what an employee is entitled to do once their working hours are over. The sensible response is not to panic, it is to make sure your after-hours contact does not depend on ringing a staff member's personal phone and hoping they pick up.
26 Aug 2025
date the rule reached small business employers
<15
employees, the definition of a covered small business
5.4m
small-business employees now covered
Not a ban
after-hours contact is still allowed when reasonable
What the Right to Disconnect Actually Means (Plain English)
Stripped of the jargon, the right to disconnect gives an employee the ability to refuse to monitor, read or respond to work contact outside their working hours, unless that refusal is unreasonable. Work contact means the calls, texts and emails that reach an employee after they have finished for the day, whether they come from you as the employer or from a third party such as a customer or supplier.
The key phrase is "unless the refusal is unreasonable". The law does not say an employee can never be contacted after hours. It says they are entitled to not engage with after-hours contact, and that ignoring a message once they have clocked off is generally their right, provided saying no is not unreasonable in the circumstances. In practice that means the burden shifts: rather than assuming staff will always answer, a well-run business plans for the times they will not.
Whether a refusal is reasonable or unreasonable depends on the situation. The factors that matter include the employee's role and level of responsibility, the reason for the contact, how the contact is made and how disruptive it is, and the level of compensation the employee receives, including any allowance for being available outside hours. A quick call to a senior manager who is paid an on-call allowance sits very differently from a late-night call to a junior casual who has no such arrangement.
The Plain-English Version
An employee can choose not to answer work calls, texts or emails after hours, and that choice is protected unless it is unreasonable. It is not a ban on contacting your team, and it does not stop you being reachable to your customers. It simply means you should not rely on a staff member's personal phone as your after-hours answering service. Build the after-hours plan into your phone system instead, and the question of whether any individual should have answered largely disappears. This is general information, not legal advice.
What It Is Not: Emergencies and Reasonableness
It is worth being clear about what the right to disconnect does not do, because the headlines can make it sound more absolute than it is.
- It is not a ban on after-hours contact. You can still call, text or email a staff member outside their hours. What changes is that they may be entitled to not respond, unless that refusal is unreasonable.
- Emergencies are excluded. Genuine emergencies and genuinely reasonable contact are not what the rule is aimed at. If something urgent and legitimate arises, reaching out is a different matter from routine after-hours pestering.
- Reasonableness is a two-way test. Just as an employee's refusal can be unreasonable, contact itself can be reasonable or unreasonable depending on role, reason, method and compensation. The law asks everyone to be sensible rather than setting a rigid clock.
The reason this matters for a phone system is simple. The grey area, the argument about whether a particular call should or should not have been answered, only exists when a human is expected to field after-hours calls in the first place. Take the routine after-hours calls off people's personal phones and route them somewhere designed to handle them, and you remove most of the friction before it starts.
The Real Problem: Your Business Number on Personal Mobiles
For a lot of small businesses, the after-hours setup grew by accident. The business number, or a call divert from it, ends up pointing at the owner's mobile or a couple of senior staff members' personal phones. It worked when the team was small and everyone was happy to pick up. Under the right to disconnect, that arrangement is exactly the thing to move away from.
The problems with leaning on personal mobiles are practical as much as legal:
- It puts individuals in the firing line. Every after-hours call becomes a personal decision to answer or not, which is the situation the right to disconnect is designed to protect people from.
- The business number lives on a personal device. When staff change, leave, or simply want their own number back, untangling the business line from a personal phone is messy, and customer calls can go to the wrong place.
- Nothing is logged consistently. Calls handled on personal mobiles are invisible to the business. You cannot see who was contacted, when, or whether anything was missed, which is the opposite of what you want if a question about after-hours contact ever comes up.
- Missed calls become lost business. If nobody answers a personal phone after hours, the caller often just hangs up and rings a competitor. You get neither compliance comfort nor the customer.
The good news is that a modern cloud phone system makes the fix straightforward. Instead of a call divert to a personal handset, you set up rules that decide what happens to every call based on the time of day, and you keep the business number where it belongs, in the system, not on someone's SIM.
The Fix: Let Your Phone System Handle After Hours
The safest way to comply with the right to disconnect, and to stay reachable to customers at the same time, is to stop routing after-hours calls to staff personal mobiles and let the phone system take over. A cloud platform gives you a few building blocks that, combined, cover almost every after-hours scenario without putting an individual on the spot.
Business-Hours Call Flows
Define your working hours once. During the day, calls ring your team as normal; the moment you close, the system switches to your after-hours plan automatically, so nobody has to remember to divert anything.
After-Hours AI Call Agent
Instead of a phone ringing on a personal mobile, an AI call agent answers in an authentic Australian voice, handles common questions, takes details, and books or triages the caller, 24/7, without a single staff member being disturbed.
Voicemail-to-Email
Anything the AI does not resolve becomes a professional voicemail delivered to a shared inbox as audio and text, ready to action first thing, rather than a missed call sitting on someone's personal phone overnight.
Managed On-Call Roster
When a role genuinely needs after-hours cover, route urgent calls to the rostered on-call person only, using their business identity in the app, not to everyone's personal number all the time.
Number Off Personal Devices
The business number lives in the platform and rings through a business app on any device. Staff are never the number, so when someone finishes for the day, or leaves, the line is unaffected.
Log Everything
Every call, divert, voicemail and after-hours interaction is recorded in the system, so you have a clear, consistent record of what happened and when, instead of activity scattered across personal phones.
Used together, these turn "who has to answer their mobile tonight?" into a settled, documented process. Your customers still reach a helpful, professional response after hours, often a better one than a rushed personal call, and your team gets to actually finish work when they finish work. For a deeper look at how AI answers the after-hours calls that would otherwise ring out, see our guides to AI business phone systems and AI versus human receptionists.
Setting Up a Compliance-Friendly Call Flow, Step by Step
Moving your after-hours calls off personal phones and into a proper call flow is a short project, not a big one. Here is a practical order to work through it.
- Map your real working hours. Write down when each team or number is genuinely staffed, including any lunch closures, and decide what "after hours" means for your business. This becomes the schedule the system follows.
- Decide what happens after hours. Choose your default: an AI call agent that answers and triages, voicemail-to-email, or a message directing callers to online booking. For most businesses the AI agent plus voicemail-to-email combination covers the lot.
- Define what counts as urgent, and who is on call. If certain calls genuinely can't wait, set the rule for what makes a call urgent and build an on-call roster so only the rostered person, using their business app identity, is reached, and only for those calls.
- Take the business number off personal mobiles. Remove any divert that points the business line at a personal SIM. The number stays in the platform and rings through the business app instead, so staff can switch it off cleanly when they finish.
- Set expectations in writing. Update your team on the new after-hours process so everyone knows they are not expected to monitor personal phones out of hours, and that the system handles it. Clarity here is what makes the right to disconnect a non-issue day to day.
- Turn on logging and review it. Make sure calls, voicemails and after-hours diverts are recorded, then review the log periodically so you can see what is actually coming in after hours and adjust the flow.
Because everything is now handled by the system rather than by individuals, you also get a consistent record of after-hours activity. If a question about after-hours contact ever arises, you can point to a documented process instead of a memory of who answered what. Call logging and recording have their own considerations, our guide to call recording in Australia covers the rules and setup.
How Uniden Voice Helps
All of the building blocks above are standard on Uniden Voice Over Cloud, and importantly, the AI is included rather than gated behind an expensive tier or charged as an add-on. That matters when the whole point is to give even the smallest team a professional after-hours setup without a big bill.
With Uniden Voice Over Cloud you get business-hours call flows, an after-hours AI call agent speaking in authentic Australian voices, voicemail-to-email, and on-call routing, all managed from one platform and all hosted on 100% Australian servers, keeping your call data and recordings onshore under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. The business number lives in the system, not on anyone's personal device, and every interaction is logged. You also get a dedicated account manager and 24-hour local support to help set the flows up correctly the first time, so you are not left configuring compliance-sensitive call routing on your own.
For a small team weighing up the options, this is the difference between a phone setup that quietly puts individuals in an awkward spot after hours and one that handles the whole thing for you. If you are choosing a system from scratch, our guide to the best phone system for small business walks through what to prioritise, and if missed after-hours calls are a sore point, the after-hours fix for missed calls shows the revenue side of getting this right.
"Uniden Voice Over Cloud perfectly complements our billing software. The ease of integration with our billing software and great local support improved our own customer interactions and now many of our customers have made the switch." Chris, Operations Manager, PracBill
Frequently Asked Questions
What to Read Next: Getting After-Hours Right
Handling after-hours calls well is part compliance and part good business. These related guides go deeper on the phone-system side of the equation.
