It’s evening on a weekday. A line manager at a logistics firm sends a WhatsApp message to three team members asking for tomorrow’s dispatch numbers “before you sleep.” None of them are on call. None of them get paid for the twenty minutes it takes to pull the report. All three reply within the hour, because in most workplaces, not replying feels riskier than the interruption itself.
Multiply that message by every manager, every evening, across a company of 200 people, and you don’t have a communication habit. You have an un-budgeted, unmeasured second shift.
This is exactly the kind of workplace culture that the “right to disconnect” seeks to address.
The Cost of Ignoring the Right to Disconnect
For years, “always available” was treated as a sign of commitment in Kenyan corporate culture. The data suggests it’s closer to a slow leak. A 2023 survey by Corporate Staffing Services, cited by Capital Business found that 68% of professionals in Kenya reported experiencing burnout symptoms, with the pattern most pronounced among middle and senior management. A separate workplace mental health report, also cited by Capital Business, found that 75% of employees reported moderate stress linked to factors like long hours, with 48% experiencing burnout and 53% showing depressive symptoms, all of it feeding back into performance.
This isn’t just a wellbeing story. It’s a balance-sheet one. The estimated economic burden of mental health conditions on the Kenyan economy in 2021 was KES 62.2 billion, roughly 0.6% of GDP, with the largest share (KES 56.6 billion) coming from lost productivity through absenteeism, presenteeism, and premature mortality. Employees who never fully log off don’t necessarily work more effectively. They work longer, get less done per hour, and leave sooner.
Respecting employees’ right to disconnect isn’t simply about protecting wellbeing—it also improves productivity, retention, and long-term business performance.
The Law Is Coming, Slowly, but It Keeps Coming Back
The Employment (Amendment) Bill, first tabled in 2021 and reintroduced as the 2022 Bill, would insert a new section into the Employment Act giving employees the right to ignore work contact outside agreed hours, with compensation owed if they choose to respond. The proposed legislation would formally establish employees’ right to disconnect</span>, limiting expectations around after-hours work communication. It passed the Senate in August 2023, was rejected by the National Assembly at second reading in 2024 and sent to a mediation committee, and has since been reintroduced to Parliament again, a sign that the political appetite for it hasn’t gone away.
As originally drafted, the bill would require employers with more than ten staff to consult employees or unions when setting out-of-work-hours policy, with proposed fines of around $4,000 for breaches. Whether or not this exact version becomes law, employers are already exposed under the Employment Act, 2007, which caps ordinary working hours and mandates overtime compensation. Unpaid, informal after-hours work is a compliance risk today, bill or no bill.
Even before the law is enacted, implementing a clear right to disconnect policy can help organisations reduce legal risk and improve employee experience.
What “Structural Right to Disconnect” Looks Like in Practice
Most companies already have an expenses policy or a leave policy documented somewhere. Very few have an equivalent for after-hours contact, and fewer still enforce one. A policy that lives in the staff handbook but not in the systems people actually use rarely survives a busy month.
Successfully implementing the right to disconnect requires more than policy documents—it demands systems that reinforce healthy working hours.
This is where overtime and communication boundaries need to move from a memo to a workflow:
- Define working hours per role, not per department. A retail branch team and a finance team don’t share the same “off” hours, so the system managing schedules should reflect that.
- Make overtime visible and approved, not assumed. If a manager needs someone after hours, that should route through a logged, approved overtime request, not a WhatsApp message that never shows up in payroll.
- Give leadership the data, not just the intention. If a specific team is consistently logging unrecorded after-hours activity, that’s a burnout signal CHROs should be able to see before it becomes a resignation.
This is exactly the gap Factorial’s Shift Management and Time Tracking tools are built to close. Shift Management lets you set clear, role-specific schedules and flag conflicts before they happen, instead of relying on informal expectations of who’s “reachable.” Time Tracking captures clock-ins, clock-outs, and overtime automatically, so hours worked outside the agreed schedule are recorded and compensated, rather than absorbed silently by the employee. Together, they turn “please respect people’s time” from an aspiration into an auditable workflow.
Takeaway for leadership
The underlying pressure —burnt-out professionals, rising turnover, and a workforce that increasingly ranks boundaries above bonuses—is already here. Employers who start implementing the right to disconnect today will be better prepared for future legislation while building healthier, more productive workplaces. Rather than waiting for compliance requirements, forward-thinking organisations can make the right to disconnect part of their people strategy today.
