The right to disconnect and your roster: what hospitality managers can still send after hours

It's 10:15pm on a Thursday. Your Saturday closer has just called in sick, and you need somebody to cover. You open the staff group chat and start typing "Anyone free Saturday night?" to twenty casuals, most of whom finished their last shift hours ago.

Since 26 August 2025 that message sits under the right to disconnect, even if your venue has fewer than 15 staff. Bigger businesses have been covered since August 2024. Sending the message is still legal. What changed is that every person who gets it is entitled to ignore it, unless ignoring it would be unreasonable. In hospitality most after-hours contact is about the roster, so this is where it matters most.

This is how I'd think about it as a venue manager, and how we're building rostering around it.

What the law actually says

The right to disconnect gives employees the right to refuse to monitor, read or reply to contact from their employer outside their working hours, unless the refusal is unreasonable. It also covers contact from third parties about work, like a supplier or a customer.

Some things it doesn't do:

• It doesn't make after-hours contact illegal. You can still send the message.
• It doesn't ban rostering out of hours. Plenty of managers do the roster at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, and that's fine.
• It doesn't mean staff can ignore everything. Whether a refusal is unreasonable depends on the situation.

The Fair Work Act lists what counts when deciding whether a refusal is unreasonable:

• the reason for the contact
• how it's made, and how much it disrupts the person
• whether they're paid to be available out of hours
• the nature of their role and how senior they are
• their personal circumstances, including family and caring responsibilities

If a dispute can't be sorted out at work, the Fair Work Commission can deal with it, including with an order to stop. You can't punish someone for using the right either, so a casual who doesn't reply at 10pm can't quietly lose their next week of shifts over it.

Why rosters are the pressure point

Rosters move all the time in hospitality. Someone's sick, a function books in, it rains and the beer garden empties. Most of your team are casuals who aren't paid to be on call. So the reason for the contact and the pay for being available both point the same way for a casual who's off for the night: they don't have to answer.

How you send the message matters too. A message to the whole group chat buzzes twenty phones to fill one shift. That counts as disruption under the factors above, and it's also how good casuals end up muting the venue chat altogether.

Messages that are usually fine, and ones to hold until morning

Nothing here is a hard rule, because the law sets out factors, not a list. But this is the line I'd draw, and I think it follows from those factors.

Usually reasonable to send after hours

• A change to a shift they already have, starting soon. If you've moved someone's 7am start to 9am, they need to know tonight. Not telling them is worse.
• Safety or an emergency. The venue's closed because of a burst pipe, so don't come in.
• A message they can read when they choose. A roster published to an app or a pinned post is there when they next look. Nobody has to answer it.

Better held until their next working time

• "Can anyone pick up Saturday?" This is the classic one. It asks them to do something, it's not about a shift they already have, and a casual isn't paid to be available.
• Availability requests for next fortnight. They can wait until morning.
• General announcements. The new menu briefing, the uniform reminder, the staff party.

One more thing for permanent staff. The Hospitality Award already says that once a full-time or part-time employee has a roster, you change it by agreement or with 7 days' notice. A message at 10pm doesn't count as their agreement just because they didn't say no.

Set it up so you're not deciding at 10pm

Most of the risk comes from managers deciding message by message, late at night, when they're tired. A few changes take the decision away from that moment.

1. Publish the roster at a set time. Pick a day and an hour in trading time, for example Wednesday at 2pm for the following week, and stick to it. Staff learn when to look, and nobody is waiting up for it.
2. Keep a cover list of people who've said yes. Ask your team, during work hours, who wants to be asked about extra shifts and until what time. Some casuals want every shift going and will say so. Put that in writing, and call them first.
3. Send cover requests to one person at a time. Message the next person on the cover list, not the whole group. It fills the shift just as fast, and it's one phone buzzing, not twenty.
4. Write the policy down. One paragraph is enough: when the roster comes out, which messages get sent after hours, and that nobody is penalised for not replying to the rest. Put it in your staff induction.
5. Keep a record. If a dispute ever reaches Fair Work, "we have a system" is a far stronger answer than "I don't usually message late". The record is what shows what was sent, when, and why.

What rostering software should do about it

Most rostering apps send a push notification the moment a manager clicks anything. Publish at 11pm and every phone in the team buzzes at 11pm. The software sends the message for you and keeps no record of why.

We think the app should know the difference between a change to tomorrow's 7am shift and an open-shift offer for next Saturday, and treat them differently. That's what we're building into Kaslu Work's staff notifications. Each message gets a level. Urgent ones and changes to a shift starting soon go out straight away. Offers and announcements wait until the person's next working window. A manager can still send one of those as urgent, but they have to give a reason, and the reason is kept against their name. Staff can see their own contactable hours, and the venue gets a log of what was sent, what was held, and when it arrived.

It's still in development, and it won't make a policy decision for you. What it does is make the reasonable option the default, so 10pm messages are the exception, not the habit.

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. If you're working out a policy, the Fair Work Ombudsman's right to disconnect page is the place to start. If you're putting a weekly roster together now, our free roster template is a good way to get the publish-day habit going. And if you run a hospitality group and want rostering that works this way, early access is opening a few groups at a time. The waitlist is on the home page.