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A general manager of a retail chain sent emails at 11pm on Sunday nights. He didn’t require responses until Monday morning — that was always clear. But within six months, his entire management team was also sending Sunday night emails.

Within a year, his retail supervisors were apologising for not responding to messages while they were on leave. Nobody had asked for any of this. It had simply trickled down.

Workplace boundaries — the limits people set around their time, energy, and availability — are powerfully shaped by what leaders model. Not what they say, but what they actually do. A leader who says “your time outside work is your own” and then messages people on weekends sends a mixed message that most employees will resolve in favour of the observable behaviour.

This matters more now than it did five years ago. The line between work and not-work has blurred significantly for many Australians. The changes to working from home practices accelerated this. And the Fair Work Act’s provisions on the right to disengage — introduced as part of the Closing Loopholes reforms — have created new legal context around what employers can reasonably expect outside of ordinary working hours.

 

 

Why leaders struggle to model boundaries

Most leaders who struggle with this don’t lack self-awareness. They know they work long hours. The challenge is usually a genuine belief, conscious or not, that working intensely is what commitment looks like — and a worry that stepping back will be read as disengagement or signal that the work isn’t important.

The research goes the other way. Leaders who model sustainable working practices tend to run teams with lower burnout rates, lower turnover, and better sustained performance over time. Teams whose leaders consistently work at unsustainable intensity show short-term productivity spikes and longer-term deterioration.

The other challenge is that the urgency is often real. Small business owners in particular are managing genuine complexity and genuine time pressure. The question isn’t whether that pressure exists but whether normalising it as a standard is good for the business long-term.

 

What modelling looks like in practice 

It’s less about proclamations than habits. Turning off notifications after a certain hour. Not responding to non-urgent messages outside working hours, even if you’ve sent them. Taking leave without checking in constantly. Being explicit when you send a late-night email: “No need to respond until tomorrow” — and meaning it.

It also means being honest in conversations about workload. When someone on your team says they’re struggling to manage their hours, the response that matters is the real one, not the performative one. “What’s creating the time pressure and what can we change?” is more useful than “make sure you’re taking care of yourself.”

The right to disconnect legislation creates a floor, not a ceiling. Your obligation as a leader is to know what it requires — and to recognise that a workplace culture where people feel unable to switch off represents both a legal risk and a significant business cost.

 

Ready to build a better workplace? Book your free 30-minute consultation at  Blue Kite HR Consulting