Take a vacation! YOU DESERVE IT! If you don’t your company performance will suffer
Not taking vacation time is a bad idea, as it harms productivity and the economy. Those are the key findings of a study entitled “An Assessment of Paid Time Off in the U.S.” commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group, and completed by Oxford Economics in 2014.
The study suggests that most managers recognize the benefits that taking time off from work provides to employees. These include higher productivity, stronger workplace morale, greater employee retention, and significant health benefits. But nearly 34 percent of employees surveyed indicated that their employer neither encouraged nor discouraged leave, and 17 percent of managers considered employees who take all of their leave to be less dedicated, according to the survey’s findings. That is wrong!
First of all, everyone should be encouraged to take a vacation. An engineering friend of mine at Google is reminded nearly every two weeks that he should use up his vacation time. People need vacations to unwind, relax and come back even more energized and focused. Research shows that companies who enforce time off for vacations and relaxation perform better and produce more innovation and creativity.
"There is a lot of research that says we have a limited pool of cognitive resources," says Allison Gabriel, an assistant professor of management at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies job demands and employee motivation. "When you are constantly draining your resources, you are not being as productive as you can be. If you get depleted, we see performance decline. You're able to persist less and have trouble solving tasks."
Another management expert Dan Sullivan, co-founder of Toronto-based Strategic Coach and co-author of The Laws of Lifetime Growth, says it's this mentality that keeps entrepreneurs exhausted, stuck and reaping a fraction of potential profits. He strongly advises entrepreneurs to do the last thing in the world they would ever think to do: take time off. His anthem is that productivity and performance start with free time, which he argues is the fuel for the energy, creativity and focus that lead to success.
Other key findings from the study:
- Millions of Jobs: If workers used all of their available paid time off, the economy and companies would benefit from more than $160 billion in total business sales and $21 billion in tax revenues, spending that would support 1.2 million jobs in industries ranging from retail to manufacturing to transportation, as a result of increased productivity and creativity.
- Even Small Changes Lead to Big Gains: If employees would take just one additional day of earned leave each year, the result would mean $73 billion in output for the U.S. economy and positive impacts for both employees and businesses.
So as we enter this summer season, TAKE A VACATION! RELAX! TAKE SOME TIME OFF! Help the economy, save your relationships and help improve your life and the live of your organization. Have some fun. Use sun lotion and get yourself some good hiking boots.