The Right to Disconnect in the Industry That Never Does.
There is a moment every hospitality professional in the Middle East or Asia will recognise.
You receive an email from a colleague in another office, another country, another time zone:
"I will be out of the office from the 17th to the 7th. I will have no access to email or phone during this period. Please be mindful of time zone differences when scheduling meetings. For urgent matters - and please consider carefully whether your matter is truly urgent - contact my colleague Karen."
You read it. You respect it. You close the email.
And then your phone buzzes.
The world has discovered the right to disconnect.
France legislated it in 2017. Portugal made it illegal for employers to contact workers outside working hours at all. Belgium followed. Germany didn't wait for a law - Volkswagen stopped its email servers from sending to employee phones between 6pm and 7am. Daimler introduced software called "Mail on Holiday" that automatically deletes incoming emails while staff are on vacation and informs the sender that the email is gone and will not be read. Gone. Deleted.
France, Ireland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece and Australia now have formal right to disconnect legislation or enterprise agreements. The conversation is active in India, the Philippines and the UK. What began as a French labour policy in 2017 is becoming a global standard.
And the research supports it. The German and French worker, despite - or perhaps because of - their firmly bounded working hours, is among the most productive in the developed world per hour worked. Rest works. Disconnection works.
The right to disconnect is real, legitimate and increasingly global.
And yet.
Hospitality is not a bank.
I have worked in this industry for two decades. I have never once looked at my phone at 11pm and thought: this is wrong. I have never received a message at an hour that most people would consider antisocial and felt violated. I have never set an out of office and fully meant it.
Not because the industry demands it of me. Because the industry attracted me precisely because it doesn't work like a bank.
A hotel does not close at six. A guest does not have a crisis at convenient hours. A rate decision does not wait for Monday morning. The nature of hospitality - genuinely, structurally, irreducibly - is that it operates continuously. The front desk does not disconnect. The night manager does not disconnect. The GM does not disconnect. And the commercial, operational and leadership layers that support all of them are most effective when they share that orientation.
This is not a complaint. It is a description of the job. There are excellent careers in industries that end at 18:00. Hospitality, at its best, is simply not one of them.
The chicken and the egg.
In the Middle East and across much of Asia, the always-on culture is not just internal. It is the market. Clients send WhatsApp messages at 10pm on a Friday expecting a response. Not hoping for one - expecting one. And if one doesn't arrive, the Monday morning conversation sometimes includes a complaint that you were unreachable. Meanwhile, the competitor replied at 10:15pm.
Is it always-on culture? Or always-on markets that create always-on professionals? Probably both. Which is exactly what makes it impossible to resolve with a piece of legislation.
In Europe it is understood - culturally and increasingly legally - that contacting someone outside working hours will not get you a response. More importantly, it will get you a reputation. For being inconsiderate. For not knowing how things work. The social contract around professional contact is so established that violating it reflects badly on the sender, not the recipient.
In Dubai, Mumbai or Tokyo, the same message sent at the same hour carries no such stigma. It is simply how business is done.
The man who built the Burj Khalifa has an out of office policy too. It's just not the one you'd expect.
Mohamed Alabbar - founder of Emaar, the man who built the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall - said it publicly and without apology:
"Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard, and this is why I like to hire Indians - because they answer the phone even at one o'clock in the morning."
Anyone who has ever worked within his orbit knows this is not a soundbite. It is an operating principle. There is no out of office email policy within Alabbar's companies. There is no "please be mindful of time zone differences." There is simply an expectation that if you are part of building something extraordinary, you show up for it - at whatever hour that requires.
Two worldviews. One industry.
The German colleague who auto-deletes vacation emails is not lazy. They are operating within a cultural and legal framework that values recovery and believes a rested professional is a better professional. They are probably right, within their context.
The Abu Dhabi, New Delhi or Osaka colleague who answers the WhatsApp at 11pm is not a victim of exploitation. They are operating within a framework that finds meaning in the work itself - that does not experience the boundary between professional and personal time as a loss, but as a feature of a career they chose deliberately.
Both are hoteliers. Both are right. And they work in the same global industry, for the same global brands, against the same global benchmarks.
xoxo, Bored Hotelier 😉