Hey, boss person, when did you last take a vacation? Not a long weekend, or a few days tacked on to a business trip, but real vacation sans laptop and PDA.

Can’t remember? You’ve got a lot of company! According to an article in Business Week, “Americans take even less vacation than the Japanese, the people who gave rise to karoshi—the phenomenon of being worked to death.”

Did you know that “Former NASA scientist…recently found that vacationers experienced an 82% increase in job performance post-trip?” Or that “…a key ingredient in peak performance is a drastic change of venue coupled with shutting down for extended periods of time.”

According to psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, “Making yourself available 24/7 does not create peak performance, recreating the boundaries that technology has eroded does.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers and others use a kick-’em-out approach by insisting on vacations, while Netflix takes a more radical approach, elimination vacations and telling “…workers that so long as they get their jobs done, they can take as much time off as they like.”

Be really smart and follow the lead of “Kelly Services Inc. CEO Carl T. Camden [who] has started giving his wife gifts of time and attention as opposed to cars and baubles.” (Bet that marriage improved at least an order of magnitude!)

As for your people, don’t expect them to take off if those above them don’t—monkey see monkey do or, if you prefer a different image, lead by example.

So please, print out the following and hang it in your office. Give copies to your people. Add it to the company intranet and post it on the wiki.

Not taking a vacation is a great way to
ruin your health,
devalue your family,
undermine your team, and
show-off your insecurities.

None of which you want to do, so pick up the phone and book yourself a real vacation—sans laptop and PDA, with the cell phone for emergencies only.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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