You’ve been working hard and struggling to balance your workload and personal life. You want to take time off, but you feel like you can’t due to company culture. What do you do? Maybe you consider some quiet vacationing.
Quiet vacations have become a popular discussion topic recently. Instead of taking time off, some employees take their laptops and work while on vacation. Is this a business-ruining trend, or are people overreacting? What can be done to prevent it?
What is Quiet Vacationing?
First things first—what is quiet vacationing? Also known as a workation, a simple workation definition is “employees taking a vacation without telling their employer while making it seem like they’re still working.” According to The Harris Poll, nearly half of Americans have quiet vacationed around the Fourth of July. Though that’s only one example, it shows that quiet vacations are a widespread phenomenon.
How much they’re actually working while on vacation depends on the person. Some people are just logging in and sending the occasional email to keep up appearances, while others are actually submitting work, attending calls/meetings, and more. Either way though, the employee is on vacation without telling their employer and making it seem like they’re working like usual. While there are some pros associated with it, there are many more cons.
Why Employees Are Quiet Vacationing
Before looking at the pros and cons of the workation, it’s important to understand why employees are doing quiet vacations. Knowing why people do it will help you better curb the behavior.
A commonly cited reason for many quiet vacationing millennials in the workplace is the pressure to stay available. They feel obligated to be at work or at least available like they can’t fully check out. So, instead of taking a proper vacation, they take a quiet vacation.
Another motivation is micromanagement in the workplace. Micromanagement harms work-life balance, and it can make employees feel stressed while unable to take a break. That leads them to taking a workation.
Other causes include inadequate PTO, not wanting to have a bunch of work to return to, and blurred lines between work and personal life. At the end of the day, quiet vacations happen when employees need time off but can’t or feel like they can’t take time off.
Pros and Cons of Workations
Now that you understand what workations are and why people take them, let’s look at the pros and cons. Though working vacations are generally seen as a negative thing, it’s important to be fair and look at both sides of the argument.
That said, don’t mistake the pros for support for workations. While they aren’t necessarily a bad thing, they’re typically indicative of lapses in management and issues with company culture that need to be addressed.
Pros
Quiet vacationing isn’t all bad. Working on vacation can result in reduced post-vacation stress. We all know that feeling of coming back from a vacation only to see a mountain of work on our desks. A workation limits that. They also make the transition back into work easier. Since you never fully disconnected, you can more quickly and easily get back into the swing of things at work. And since you’ll have less work piled up, you can work at your normal pace.
Workations can also be a positive when urgent matters are involved. If something urgent comes up that requires your input or work, you can quickly deal with it right away instead of waiting till you come back.
Cons
Where there are pros, there are cons; workations are no different. While they help avoid work building up while you’re out, they also prevent you from truly relaxing and resting your mind since you’re still tapped into work. There’s also significant potential for burnout from always being “on.” When even your vacations require you to be checking emails and ready for calls, stress can build up and have numerous negative impacts on you and your work.
Working vacations can also strain your work-life balance, as well as personal relationships. We all need our own personal time for ourselves and personal relationships, but workations can get in the way of that.
On top of all that, workations also reduce your performance. Since you’re on vacation, you’re not going to be fully focused on your work (or your vacation). You’re essentially getting the worst of both worlds when you try to work and vacation at the same time.
How Employers Can Fade Out Quiet Vacationing
While quiet vacationing isn’t all bad, it’s also not something you want. As mentioned earlier, it’s usually caused by certain lapses in leadership and company culture, such as lack of PTO or poor work-life balance. Businesses should try to improve management to limit workations.
However, this is one of the issues where it can be difficult to even figure out where to start. To help, we’re going to provide some strategies employers can use to fade out quiet vacations while improving their company culture.
Lead by Example
When it comes to leadership, leading by example is always good advice. People follow their leaders; if managers don’t fully disconnect on vacations and insist on working at the beach, so will employees. Managers need to show employees it’s okay to take their PTO and that they should fully disconnect from work while doing so. That also requires managers to trust their employees and know that they’ll be okay without their direct oversight.
If managers take their time off and disconnect, employees will do the same. It’s amazing how much of an impact managers and leaders can have simply by leading by example and doing what they want their employees to do.
Offer Flexible and Substantial PTO
Another way to prevent workations is by providing employees with flexible and substantial PTO. If employees have enough PTO to actually take vacations and don’t feel guilty taking it, they’ll take those vacations. There are lots of ways to get creative with your workplace PTO policy too. It doesn’t have to be as simple and straightforward as giving them all a bunch more PTO. There are lots of ways you can offer more flexible PTO.
Tying into this, it’s all key to support work-life balance. Doing so shows employees that you want them to have a good balance and encourages them to take their PTO as needed, helping curb future quiet vacationing.
Foster a Culture of Transparency
A culture of transparency is also very important when it comes to reducing workations. It doesn’t matter how much PTO employees have if they don’t feel comfortable taking breaks. You need to build trust in the workplace between employees and management.
Management should regularly communicate the importance of work-life balance, emphasizing that productivity comes from rest and recovery. They should also make it clear that taking time off isn’t taboo but is actually encouraged. Both of those things ensure that employees know they won’t be punished for taking time off and are encouraged to take time off. If they feel like they can fully disconnect, they’ll take a proper vacation instead of a workation.
Invest in Wellness Programs
Wellness programs can also help curb working vacations. These programs can promote work-life balance and healthy boundaries, both of which encourage employees to take normal vacations instead of workations.
Our Team Wellbeing Program for example enhances wellness and fosters a culture of continuous learning through various wellbeing activities and events. Employees also build bonds at the same time, helping create a stronger and more connected community.
Review Policies Regularly
Another important practice that often gets overlooked is reviewing policies regularly. Strong leaders listen to their employees and adapt according to their needs. The workplace and your workers are always changing, and so should your policies.
Managers should go out of their way to get employee feedback. Talk to them directly and see how things are going. Do they need more PTO? Are hours getting out of hand? Do assignments need to be shifted around for more equal workloads? Whether you directly ask employees, use surveys, or some other method, managers should be in tune with how employees are feeling and what their needs are.
Build Employee Connections
Last but not least, building employee connections is a great way to reduce quiet vacationing. If employees connect more deeply on a personal level with their coworkers, they’ll be more likely to ask others to cover them while they take PTO and cover for others when necessary.
Team building is an incredibly effective way to build bonds between employees. Events such as the Mystery Bus and Virtual in-it-to-Win-it can strengthen bonds through playing fun and competitive games that require teamwork and communication. These events also serve as a good break from the day-to-day. Having a dedicated team building day is a great way to give employees some time off from work, let them have some fun, and build bonds while doing so.
Reduce Quiet Vacationing Through Team Building
When employees feel like they can’t take their PTO and fully disconnect from work, they may consider a quiet vacation. They don’t seem all that bad at first, but quiet vacations increase stress, worsen work-life balance, and decrease productivity.
Team building activities can be an incredibly effective way to curb quiet vacationing. They encourage communication, improve company culture, build trust between employees and leadership, and foster bonds between team members.
Take the first steps to reducing quiet vacations with TeamBonding. We have tons of team building activities that are perfectly suited for helping employees disconnect. So get in touch with us today.
