Globally, fifteen countries offer employees the “right to disconnect” after hours. From Australia to Ireland; Kenya to Slovakia, workers can legally mute their Slacks and focus on their lives outside of the office. As one Australian minister put it after his country passed its version of the law in 2024: “It’s really about trying to bring back some work-life balance and make sure that people aren’t racking up hours of unpaid overtime for checking emails and responding to things at a time when they’re not being paid.”

Here in the U.S., efforts to pass similar legislation have ended up dead in the water. California, New Jersey, New York City and Washington have all launched legislation protecting workers who log off; none have successfully become law.

But the issue these laws are trying to solve is as acute here as anywhere. Employee burnout is estimated to cost companies millions each year, and as much as $21,000 per employee in the U.S., according to one study from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. That’s an expensive problem, considering more than half of U.S. workers report feeling burned out.

Luckily, leaders don’t need to wait for the slow-turning wheels of justice to enact the “right to disconnect” mentality in their workplaces. Here’s how to do it in a way that feels meaningful.

It’s one thing to say you want your teams to disconnect after hours. It’s another to actually model the behavior yourself.

Plenty of leaders claim to value the importance of unplugged downtime. But when it comes to unplugging themselves, they fail to walk the walk. Sending late-night emails despite encouraging employees to protect their evenings undermines the messaging, reinforcing that “work-life balance and detachment aren’t genuine organizational priorities,” the Wall Street Journal reports .

There’s also the insidious practice of praising employees who work long hours and sacrifice their personal lives to meet deadlines, which of course only reinforces the idea that a good employee is one who never pushes back or needs time to recharge.

As the CEO of Jotform, I understand the pressure to remain connected at all times. I also know that I have to resist that urge, both for the sake of my own sanity, and everyone else who works for me. My employees know I take time off each year to fully unplug on my family’s olive farm in Turkey. They saw me take a full three months of leave after the birth of my second child, and it’s rare that anyone will receive an email from me on weekends.

My company is important to me, of course. But taking a step back and giving myself space is exactly what allows me to do my job well. Why would the same not be true for my employees?

Demonstrating that it’s safe to log off is an essential step in encouraging a healthy work-life balance. But it’s also not the only step.

France was the first country in the world to enact its right to disconnect laws in 2017, but there’s a reason it felt the need to codify what was already an essential way of life. The country recognized that technology was creating an “always on” lifestyle that interfered with employee wellbeing—and that good intentions alone weren’t powerful enough to fix it.

The passage of the law obligated businesses to define normal working hours, and protected employees’ rights to be unreachable once the workday ended. One employee at a Paris-based fintech company told the Guardian that even though avoiding after-hours responses is encouraged, the law backs it up, allowing her to feel “100% in my right to disconnect every weekend, in the evenings, when I’m sick, on vacation,” she said. “I feel no pressure to answer my emails or other work communications.”

There may be no such law in the U.S., but there’s nothing to say that leaders can’t write the rules at their own companies. Putting such a policy into place demands answers to certain tough questions: What counts as a genuine emergency? Who can contact whom after hours, and why? What happens when someone repeatedly ignores the boundary?

Getting those answers into writing eliminates a lot of confusion and ambiguity. Employees no longer have to stress about whether they’re being derelict in their duties by not leaving a family dinner or soccer game to respond to an email—the answer will simply be “no.”

The case for disconnecting is simple. Highly engaged teams see less absenteeism, lower turnover and higher productivity. Burned-out ones do the opposite.

These days especially, employees are stressed about their jobs, and feel pressure to perform even when what they really need is rest. By writing a right to disconnect into your company’s playbook, you’re telling your team that their time outside of work belongs to them. And in doing that, you’re creating an environment where people will genuinely thrive.