Ontario's Disconnecting from Work Policy

It means not engaging in work-related communications, including emails, telephone calls, video calls or sending or reviewing other messages, to be free from performing work.

Your Disconnecting from Work policy must cover all of your business’s employees in Ontario as of January 1, such as full-time, part-time and casual, as well as management, executives and shareholders if they are employees under the Employment Standards Act.

Employers with multiple locations must count all employees at each Ontario location and add them together to determine if the 25-employee threshold has been met.

Example: Joe owns 3 bakeries in Ontario, one of which has 7 employees, and two have 12 employees each, for a total of 31 employees. Because the business has 25 or more employees, they must put in place a Disconnecting from Work policy for all employees.

If on January 1 you have fewer than 25 employees, you are not required to put a policy in place. Even if your number of employees increases to 25 or more over the course of the same year, you are not required to put the policy in place. 

Every year on January 1, you should re-count your employees to determine if you are required to put a Disconnecting from Work policy in place. 

All employees must be provided with a copy of the policy within 30 days of it being created, 30 days of it being changed (if an existing policy is updated), or 30 days of being hired in the case of new employees. The policy may be provided as a printed copy, as an attachment to an e-mail if the employee can print it, or as a link to an online document providing the employee has reasonable access to the document and is able to print it.

Your business is not required to amend the policy annually. If you decide on your own to make changes to it, each of the changes must be dated. You don’t have to provide a copy of the written policy to your employees annually if the policy hasn’t changed from the previous year.

The policy applies to all employees and employers covered by the Employment Standards Act with exceptions for government, including government agencies, or authorities, boards, commissions or corporations whose members are all appointed by government.

As of January 1, 2023, business consultants and information technology consultants will no longer be covered by the Employment Standards Act and will no longer be subject to electronic monitoring policy requirements.

Your business could be subject to administrative penalties or fines.

Your business may have multiple policies (i.e., a single policy that applies to all employees, or different policies for different groups of employees).

You must keep a copy of every Disconnecting from Work policy that was required by the Employment Standards Act for three years after the policy is no longer in effect.