News
A holiday is as good as a change !!
There are a range of reasons why staff may not take holidays, both good and bad. Knowing the underlying signs may help you encourage them to take a break, or to see if you’re the reason why they aren’t. By Leanne Faraday-Brash
We’re the ‘lucky country’,the ‘leisure country’ and the home of ‘Thank God it’s Friday’. So why might employees be reluctant to take holidays? This matters if we consider the impost on the balance sheet when staff stockpile annual and long service leave, and the toll that work with no downtime may take on worker stress and productivity.
Australians have traditionally retired quite young relative to other OECD countries. Sweden has three days of sunshine a year so we can’t blame them for feeling flat and getting out earlier, but why are we prepared to call it quits so young, and not take entitled breaks while we’re still working?
There are lots of plausible explanations for the reluctance to fully utilise our entitlements. These range from factors that will warm your heart to those that can make your blood run cold.
1. Commitment/conscientiousness.
Staff may love their jobs due to the inherent meaning in the work (eg Make a Wish Foundation), or the company they work for (eg Apple) or rousing team spirit (a close-knit footy team) so they enjoy being at work. Assuming they are well trained and not chronically overworked they may be able to sustain energy for long periods. If the same staff are great at self-care and enjoy supportive leadership, what’s not to like about coming to work?
2. Conscience.
In cohesive, well-led teams with high accountability, staff may be reluctant to take leave because of the impact of their absence (particularly a long one) on colleagues. Paradoxically, staff can be working in virtual sweat factories under terrible conditions but still worry about the impact of their absence on their partners in misery, so they don’t take leave. The motto is all for one and one for all, and if the ship goes down, we go together.
3. Control.
We probably all know the colleague with their way of doing things; certain others will only mess things up. Sometimes this fear is real but some suffer from ‘delusional indispensability’.Staff with perfectionist tendencies can be anxious or contemptuous of others’efforts to deputise for them. They don’t want to return from holidays to ‘undo all the damage’. Of course, this can make them quite insufferable to work with, and their maladaptive rigidity can erode team experimentation and initiative.
4. Culture.
A compelling body of research has measured the impact of the GFC on people’s security at work. Regrettably, some managers make sure they share their “You’re lucky to have a job” mentality with staff. A new study of 1700 workers in the UK has shown that with the increased cost of living and the bleak economic outlook, only 53 per cent of employees took their full leave entitlement last year, preferring to stockpile their leave.
5. Corruption.
It is well known in internal audit circles that staff engaging in unethical or potentially unlawful practice may feel too exposed taking leave, for fear of what may be found on their system, at their desk, in the phone calls taken by others, and in the payments and paperwork that come in. You should worry if staff seem to almost pathologically resist the idea of time off. Some businesses stipulate staff must take leave in minimum two-week blocks. This is usually a specific anti-fraud strategy, not an enforced work-life balance initiative.
6. Conflict.
Sadly, home is not always where the heart is nor a refuge from the stresses and responsibilities of work. Some staff engage in avoidance when living in dissatisfying or conflict-laden relationships. Genuinely demanding jobs can provide the pretext for long working days and short or no holidays. While meaningful and challenging work can meet the needs of the adrenalin junkie, connectedness at work can compensate for loneliness or malnourishment in people’s private lives.
Strategies to engage
Strategies to encourage good take up of holiday leave and reduction in work stress include the following:
- Senior managers model work/life balance. Make it okay to have a life outside work, and express concern for staff welfare. Smash a culture of guilt and sacrifice. What’s the good of being 43, a senior partner and on your third marriage?
- Provide cover for leave so staff don’t dread taking, and returning from, leave. Make it compulsory for staff to do professional handovers before and after.
- Enshrine leave breaks in policy. Set a ‘leave’ ceiling or threshold that automatically triggers the requirement to take holidays.
- Hot desk, move staff around, and insist on breaks of two weeks or more so others can fill in as an anti-fraud strategy.
- Create a healthy culture in which knowledge sharing and mentorship are natural. Incentivise a knowledge management strategy to get it out of people’s heads so others learn and staff don’t have to feel indispensable.
- Educate staff about the pitfalls and poor health outcomes of addictive behaviours. Let them take complete breaks. Don’t arm them with smartphones, remote access and laptops and wonder why they don’t return rested.
- Putting the risk of fraud aside, respect the wishes of staff who say they get more benefit from a few well-spaced long weekends than one long holiday and 11 manic months. They may be right! But be attentive to signs of staleness, irritability, explosiveness or exhaustion.