Digitally connected work systems can extend coordination, flexibility, and access, yet they can also make work temporally porous, cognitively persistent, and difficult to leave. Recovery is commonly framed as an individual responsibility to detach, rest, or self-regulate after demands have already been generated. This Original Governance Framework Article argues that such a framing is incomplete because workload, availability expectations, escalation practices, and digital communication defaults are organizationally designed. The article proposes a Recovery-by-Design Governance Framework that treats recovery opportunity as a work-system property rather than an employee benefit or private coping task. The framework integrates four domains: workload boundaries and demand accumulation; managerial availability and escalation rules; digital disconnection and temporal protection; and organizational roles, decision rights, enforcement, and feedback. It proposes that recovery-relevant outcomes may arise through detachment, rumination, resource preservation, autonomy, urgency interpretation, and next-day appraisal, while remaining conditional on role criticality, schedule predictability, worker preferences, household circumstances, and implementation climate. The contribution is a non-empirical governance synthesis, not a validated causal model or universal prescription. Its decision principles require organizations to distinguish genuine urgency from habitual availability, formal permission from usable protection, and employee autonomy from responsibility transfer. Empirical assessment would require longitudinal, multilevel, experimental, and qualitative designs capable of testing mechanisms, enactment, distributional effects, and unintended consequences. The framework therefore offers an analytically bounded basis for organizational inquiry and design without claiming implementation readiness.
