By Neil Pasricha & Shashank Nigam
Have you ever felt burned out at work after a vacation? I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Walt Disney World all week.
I’m talking about how you knew, the whole time walking around Epcot, that a world of work was waiting for you upon your return.
Our vacation systems are completely broken. So it’s no wonder that absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves and stress leaves.
Would it help if we got more paid vacation? Not necessarily. According to a study from the US Travel Association and GfK, a market-research firm, just over 40 percent of Americans plan not to use all of their paid time off.
What’s the solution? Recurring, scheduled, mandatory vacation.
We recently collaborated on an experiment at SimpliFlying—a global aviation-strategy firm of about 10 people where one of us serves as CEO—to see what would happen if we forced people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks.
Vacation was entirely mandatory. In fact, if employees contacted the office while they were on vacation—whether through e-mail, WhatsApp or anything else—they didn’t get paid for their vacation.
After the experiment was in place for 12 weeks, we had managers at the company-rate changes in their employees. It turned out that creativity went up 33 percent, happiness levels rose by 25 percent and productivity increased by 13 percent.
We haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: Could something this simple work in your workplace?
With constructive feedback from our experiment we realized that:
- Frequency was too high. Employees found that once every seven weeks was just too often. We redesigned the policy so that vacation was required once every eight weeks.
- Staggering was important. Work fell through the cracks if there were consecutive absences on a small project team. We revised the arrangement so that no one could take a week off right after someone else had just come back from vacation.
- Fix your vacation system. You’ll be doing better, more important work.
Neil Pasricha is the New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Equation. Shashank Nigam is the CEO of SimpliFlying.