Who Needs a Vacation?

There has been a lot of articles on working from home, the burnout and workaholism in the US, and now vacation or lack thereof in the US – basically stuff that kind of addresses employee mental health in a way. So, a couple of months ago, New York Times’ DealBook had an article about vacation or “The Limits of Vacation”. This article actually came through in an email. If you have access to New York Times, the article can be found here or try to Google “Will More Vacation Solve Burnout?”.

In America, employees often do not take all of their vacation time, probably for fear of not appearing dedicated enough to their job or their fear of tremendous workload after getting back. I have to admit that I was one of those who did not take the full vacation but that was because I learned that every time I planned something, some supposed “crisis” from corporate (“need a forecast by tomorrow”, “need some kind of analysis…” or whatever the problem du jour would be) would appear and I would have to scramble to try to get the materials done so I could leave for vacation. Oftentimes, I would have to cancel planned night out due to these last minutes emergencies. I kind of learned to not plan anything.

Now companies are trying to instill a culture of taking your full vacation or force their employees to take vacation, knowing that doing so could boost productivity and lessen the chances of burnout. But the author of the article said that maybe executives should look to the source of burnout: their culture of workaholism. Getting employees to take vacation only for them to come back to the hamster wheel atmosphere doesn’t do anything for the chronic stress.

If the company takes pride on the workaholism, the long hours, the hustle culture, then taking vacations will not alleviate the burnout. You have to address the culture.

I’m glad we’re starting this conversation because America is known for having the least amount of vacation time. The rest of the world, except for maybe China, Japan and certain Oriental countries, understand the value of getting away from work to recover.