With persistent burnout, employers are encouraging people to take vacation time—and revel in it.
When Jennifer Kraszewski went on vacation, she shared with her team how she and her husband boated, water skied, floated in the lake and slept late. She even touted photos of her trip.
Call it “loud vacationing.” The chief human resources officer at HR software firm Paycom believes that leaders must start reveling in their vacation plans, telling their teams when they’ll go on vacation and talk about it when they return — with the hope that it fosters a culture of taking paid time off and turning work off. “That positive paid time off culture is so important,” she says.
Kraszewski coined the term “loud vacation” in response to the trend of people in overworked work environments taking “quiet vacations” or “hushcations,” or secret vacations without using paid time off. That could involve posting up at the beach with your laptop, jumping on a Zoom call with your camera off and seldom working the rest of the day.
As many as 78% of American workers do not use their maximum amount of PTO/vacation days allowed by their employer, according to a May Harris poll. Those respondents said they felt pressure to be available, had too much work to do and felt guilt asking others to cover their workload. Nearly half of those interviewed said they get nervous when asking for time off.
Vacation time, Kraszewski says, is an expensive benefit that employers offer. If employees don’t take that time, they’re far more likely to flame out, be less productive, less happy and probably leave their jobs. “It’s the leaders’ responsibility to encourage PTO.”
Overworking is not necessarily new. Even a decade ago, companies struggled to get people to take PTO, whether it was forcing employees to take vacation before they even started the job, paying people to go on vacation if they unplugged, posting “no workaholics” policies that required people to leave work at 5 p.m. and do no more than 40 hours a week, or doing company-wide “shut downs,” or time periods when everyone at the company logs off of and takes time off.
Yet today, the majority of workers (76%) interviewed by Harris say they wished their workplace culture placed a stronger emphasis on taking breaks and utilizing paid time off.
Quiet Vacations Persist
Because of the workload and anxiety about leaving entirely, people are still sneaking vacations and working remotely without their managers knowing. At least half of those surveyed by Monster in August said they have taken a quiet vacation or considered taking one.
At least 14% lied to their managers about their whereabouts during that time. A quarter of those worked remotely and figured it didn’t matter much where they were located. Another 20% said they were overwhelmed and needed a break and 15% didn’t want to lose out on pay by officially taking paid time off.
“I never tell anyone I’m leaving,” says Darcy Gabrielle, a sales director at a Portland events company. She often takes a few weeks in the spring to go to Europe and work remotely without anyone knowing.
She sleeps from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m., and during the day will visit museums, hike and read and then work at night from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. “If I could build my dream life, it would be to play all day and work in the evenings,” she says.
But a quiet vacation isn’t really a vacation because it’s secret and people cannot truly unplug. And very few people actually leave work behind entirely when they take actual PTO. At least 86% of people still check emails and half take work-related calls when they’re on PTO, according to Harris.
At least 5% of employees don’t take any vacation time at all.
Count Unique Michael as one of them. He didn’t take a vacation for 18 months at his last job, primarily because his boss never took time off either.
Yet in a surprising twist, the 32-year-old copywriter says it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“I found a leader who actually put in way more time than she needed to to help everyone around her, and it inspired me,” says Michael. He wanted to work, and did so without time off.
Michael says he never got burned out because he felt valued, and work was fun and energizing. He embraced what he calls “work-life harmony,” in which he’d take mini breaks without logging off completely. That could be a few hours to himself during the day, or beginning work later in the day if he just worked a particularly long stretch.
“I didn’t feel like I was in a rat race. I felt like I was in the Olympics,” he says.
Not everyone else has that experience. Some people who feel like they’re overworked save their vacation time to the end, preserving it as a savings account that they can get paid out if they’re terminated.
Showing Employees the ‘Real’ Rules
Sometimes even if a company has explicit rules that discourage overtime work or encourage vacation time, a company’s culture says otherwise. Case in point: Bank of America’s rules said “no long hours,” but the company ignored those rules with dangerous results. An analyst in the company’s New York office collapsed last year after working long hours, and another vice president checked into the hospital after working around the clock, sick, in bed.
“Employees are always trying to figure out what the ‘real’ rules are, and they look to see what their leaders are doing for guidance,” says Peter Capelli, a professor of management and Wharton’s director of the center for human resources at the University of Pennsylvania.
If a company is serious about helping employees avoid burnout, Capelli says, it is very useful if they can see that their leaders are actually doing what the rules say they should.
To ensure people take those necessary breaks and rejuvenite, leaders should also assess whether the work burden is reasonable, whether people feel empowered to speak up when they’re burned out, and whether people will return to a more stressful workload than before they left.
“Are leaders trying to impose an artificial ‘take time off’ behavior where all other norms go against it?” says Gena Cox, an organizational psychologist and author of the book, “Leading Inclusion: Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel.”
Leaders also must acknowledge that they may have more financial wherewithal to be able to take fun vacations, and likewise should be careful when sharing those experiences with the team to ensure they don’t breed resentment among those who cannot afford the same luxuries, says Cox.
Building an Environment for Healthy Breaks
Mikaela Kiner, CEO of HR consulting firm Reverb, has carefully considered what she models to her 20-person team.
Kiner’s Seattle company has an unlimited time off policy, flex Fridays and summer Fridays, and internally, everyone shares stories and photos of vacations and hikes on the company’s Slack channel. They celebrate funny out-of-office messages.
Reverb’s employees are cross-trained to cover for each other and everyone works 40 hours a week, not 60 or 70— so it’s not overwhelming for someone to cover for an out-of-office colleague. And they encourage people to fully unplug when they’re out, including evenings and weekends.
“I don’t think our team in particular has difficulty vacationing, because we really try to embrace balance and well being and flexibility,” says Kiner.
Kiner herself spends several weeks working remotely each year in Costa Rica and takes vacations with family, and at one point she worried she was taking too much personal time. “I don’t want to set a bad example,” she says.
But her staff has told her otherwise. “I’ve heard from people who said, ‘Oh, if we see you taking time off, we know we have permission.’ They’ve told me that the modeling helps them.” Plus, that leadership move gets her a sandy beach, some sunshine and a break at the same time, too.
