There's been a solid uptick recently in the number of media outlets talking about the perils for wired, overworked employees. The best summary from those talking the talk appears at Business Week's "Do Us a Favor, Take a Vacation". From the article:
"A new survey by employment firm Hudson says more than half of American workers fail to
take all their vacation days. Thirty percent say they use less than half their allotted time. And 20% take only a few days instead of a week or two. Among so-called extreme jobholders—what author Sylvia Ann Hewlett calls the professional class panjandrums—42% claim they have to cancel vacation plans "regularly." Americans take even less vacation than the Japanese, the people who gave rise to karoshi—the phenomenon of being worked to death.
Former NASA scientists, working on behalf of Air New Zealand and using testing tools normally reserved for astronauts, recently found that vacationers experienced an 82% increase in job performance post-trip. The now-popular micro-vacations—taking two or three days off—do not deliver the same stress-reduction benefits as vacations that last one and two weeks, research shows. Moreover, experts agree that a key ingredient in peak performance is a drastic change of venue coupled with shutting down for extended periods of time. "Making yourself available 24/7 does not create peak performance," says psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, an instructor at Harvard Medical School. "Recreating the boundaries that technology has eroded does."
tSo how do our vacation policies play into this? Couple of things from my perspective that more than likely drive behavior and acceptance of the need to take vacations in your organizations:
1. The Stick - Use it or lose it Vacation Time on an annual basis (Policies that mandate usage for all or some of vacation time each calendar year, or you lose it).
2. The Delayed Stick - Aggressive Accural Caps to Vacation time if you don't have a "use it or lose it" policy (meaning once an employee reaches 80-120 hours, they stop accruing - which means they are in a "use it or lose it" situation at that point)
3. The Role Model - Leading By Example - Directors and department heads who take at least a week's worth of vacation at a time and connect back on a limited basis, signaling to all who work for them that's acceptable behavior.
4. The Best Buy Example - We don't care when you show up, as long as the work gets done (that's extreme, check out the breakdown of this program here...)
5. Crackberry Rehab - Turn in your Crackberry before you go on vacation, and we are disabling your VPN and WebMail account. Detox for the wired manager.
Of course, you can have all of this in place with the exception of #5 (which rarely exists), and the Crackberry and other digital tools can provide the path to check in repeatedly for the manager trying to take a vacation. Interestingly enough, the BW article also cites research citing the fact that typing out Crackberry replies fires up the dopamine-reward system to your brain, becoming clinically addictive for a small percentage of users. Nice....
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