What do you do in the days before and after taking time off work for vacation?
If your answer is “work harder,” I’m not surprised at all. That was my answer for all but two years during my 15-year career in corporate America. As for the other two years? I lived in another country.
Where did Corporate America’s respect for vacation time go!?
Other countries respect vacation, why don’t Americans?
Before we married, Mr. RFL and I had the opportunity to live and work in London for a couple years. It was an awesome experience, filled with travel, meeting new friends and hard work. Really hard work. The group we joined included mostly U.S. Expats, which made sense, because our specialty was U.S. market transactions.
But no matter how many hours we worked during the week, we were rarely expected to bring the work home over the weekend. Even in London, we found a massive difference in the respect shown for people’s personal time. There were times that an urgent transaction demanded weekend work. However, those occasions were few and far between. It was quite different from our job back home, which required us to go into work every Saturday (and/or Sunday) during several months of the year. The British locals, outside of our American bubble, worked even less overtime.
And, as for vacations? Vacation time was sacred! People knew not to email or call you on your vacation unless the building was literally burning down. Back home we rarely enjoyed an uninterrupted vacation. You couldn’t truly unplug, since it was taboo to leave your work laptop at home… just in case you were needed (and it seems like we always were).
Taking your vacation time could save your life
Yep, that’s right. In the over-stressed and over-scheduled world we live in, NOT taking your vacation could actually kill you.
In my previous post about the link between health and wealth, I mentioned a recent study published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO), which estimated that 745,000 people died in 2016 from stroke and heart disease due to long work hours.
Vacations are crucial to providing our bodies and minds with a break from the long hours and preventing burnout! They’ve been proven time and time again to reduce stress, and improve our mental and physical health. If you aren’t able to take your vacation time, and truly unplug from work during it, it will eventually take a toll on your health.
Never mind the fact that your employer doesn’t own you. Most of them don’t pay enough these days to claim such a large portion of your personal time.
When “time off” really means shifting work to a different time
The other thing I noticed working all those years in the corporate accounting world: You never actually got time off.
Vacation was more a deferral of work or shift in timing. My work never went away; rather, I had to put in extra hours before and after my vacation to stay on top of it.
This effect wasn’t as pronounced in the UK. We could tag in a teammate, who would help to pick up the slack in our absence. They would take care of some of our work so that the burden wasn’t as difficult to overcome upon our return. And we, of course, gladly did the same for our peers when they were taking some much-needed time off.
I’m going to show vacation the respect it deserves!
As we were planning our most recent vacation, I was reminded of this problem with the American work culture.
I don’t actually “work” anymore, at least, not in the traditional sense. However, I found myself feeling overwhelmed thinking about how I would stay on top of my weekly blog posts during our vacation. Should I work harder to knock out more posts ahead of time, or play catch-up when I return? Thinking about it actually stressed me out, which is silly!
And so, instead, I’m keeping this week’s post short and sweet. I don’t care about how it ranks for SEO, or how much traffic it brings in. I’m enjoying my vacation and not adding any extra work to my “to do” list.
This post is an ode to the cultures who still value vacation and the personal time of their workers.
If you’re an American reading this, I hope that you are able to truly disconnect when you need time off. And if you’re an American boss… please let your employees do the same!
End rant.
Where will you go for your next vacation?
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Mr. Fate
Great post and totally agree at the dismal respect American employers generally pay to vacation time. As you say, it most often is nothing more than a deferral/shift of work. In my 25 years in the corporate world the longest consecutive number of days I was off was 13 – for my wedding/honeymoon.
As the head of HR for Fortune 500 companies, I worked tirelessly to get CEOs to adopt progressive PTO policies and was more often successful than not. My last employer finally adopted an “unlimited PTO policy” for management which I considered a massive win. The other issue, of course, is getting people comfortable to actually taking the time they have available.
Mrs. RichFrugalLife
Thank you for the kind comment, as well as the insight from a former head of HR! This truly is a systemic problem, that will take both a change in corporate policies and a change in the stigma associated with taking vacation in order to rectify.
Similar to your experience, the only vacation I was ever able to successfully take without bringing my laptop and at least checking emails was my honeymoon… and even then, I got shit for it. My company enacted a very generous maternity and paternity leave shortly before I left, which was great. I was able to enjoy some extended time off with our daughter because of it… however, it was very outwardly frowned upon for men to actually take their entitled leave.
The stock markets would not crash if people needed to wait a few days for a response from us, and we would have been less burnt-out and more efficient upon returning if we’d actually been able to enjoy regular time off.
Angie
Ha this is a really good post because I’m literally reading this at EWR, waiting for a flight to Italy for an overdue vacation!
And I feel like I read this just in time as a solid reminder to be present over the next few weeks to really focus on the enjoyment of vacation instead of being in the mental space of worrying about work.
Thanks for the reminder!
Mrs. RichFrugalLife
Thanks for the comment, Angie. I love Italy!!! And you’re going for multiple weeks? Super excited for you! I hope that you are able to disconnect and have an amazing time (and that you’ll share photos with the rest of us when you return).