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Karen Dillon
June 10, 2015
There are words that no manager wants to hear from his most valued employees:
I missed the deadline, I m being wooed by our top competitor, or I
m planning my vacation.
Few managers might admit that that last statement can cause the same temporary
panic as the first two, but all too often it s true. I will confess that as a
new manager, years ago, my heart always sank just a little bit when someone on
my team told me they were hoping to plan a long vacation. The ugly reality of
being one or gasp! two, key players down during any crucial time was
difficult for everyone. Few companies today are overstaffed or have budget
money allocated for temporary employees so that vacations don t take a toll on
the team. The work still needs to get done and that often involves everyone,
including the vacationing employee, who might be asked to check in or work
extra hard before taking off to make sure all their work is covered. The
employee handbook may encourage vacation, but managers send all kinds of subtle
signals to our teams that it would be easier if they didn t make that a
priority. How many people do you know who have a continual vacation carry over
balance because they never get around to taking what they re entitled to? A
Glassdoor survey found that only 26% of Americans take all their vacation time.
But with time and experience, I realized becoming a better vacation manager was
actually far more important than the challenges of enduring a temporary gap in
staffing. Not only are employees entitled to the time off, but research shows
that taking it is critical for both their engagement and to avoid long-term
burnout. It really does build resilience, observes Monique Valcour, a
professor of management at EDHEC Business School in France whose research,
teaching, and consulting focuses on helping companies and individuals craft
high-performance, meaningful jobs, careers, workplaces, and lives.
My own sense is that the older generations are far more reluctant to take all
of their entitled vacation days than Millennials, who seem to recognize that
vacations are a critical part of their desired work-life balance. But even
highly motivated, high potentials benefit from time away from the office, even
if they don t always realize they do. We need to restore and rejuvenate,
says Stew Friedman, the practice professor of management at Wharton Business
School and former head of Ford Motor s Leadership Development Center. It s
important.
You and Your Team
Vacation
Make the most of your time away.
As a manager, I also realized that figuring out how to cope with the ebb and
flow of vacations actually forced me to make sure my team was collaborating and
cross-training. In the long run, we were far stronger as a group if no one
person was so critical to the mission that we couldn t afford to lose them,
either temporarily for a vacation or permanently to another job. As Valcour
says, You don t want to have anybody with the illusion that they re the one
person who is irreplaceable or that they re incapable of delegating. If we
built in overlap and backup, we were far better positioned for future
curve-balls, I learned. And, as it turns out, sometimes giving an employee a
slightly different set of tasks provides a welcome change of pace or the taste
of areas they d like to grow.
But even if you want to be a pro vacation manager, it s still difficult to know
how to do that fairly for your entire team. What if one employee wants a
bucket-list vacation to Asia at the same time another is planning a dream
wedding? Employees with school-aged children start with limits that may make
those with more life flexibility feel that they always get the short straw. How
can you get the balance right and be fair to everyone? Friedman and Valcour
advise:
Plan vacations collectively. It doesn t make sense to have one person, a
supervisor, approving or disapproving alone in his or her office, Valcour
observes. Instead, engage your entire team in working through the problem
together. It s messier, but it brings the process out into the daylight. You
have to make sure the message is that you value vacations and you want
everybody to enjoy them, [e.g.] Let s figure out how we can support each other
s needs for renewal and wellness and avoid anybody feeling resentful. If
everyone feels that they re solving the problems jointly as a team and that
the team will help ensure they get their time off, too you ll usually find
people willing to step up to make things work.
Don t be judgmental about how people spend their time off. The employee who is
deeply involved in competitive dog shows will be just as recharged by spending
a week doing that than the employee who wants nothing more than to sit by a
pool at a pricey resort. As a manager, it s not your job to judge or prioritize
how people choose to spend their time off.
Consider a rota system. Use a list to determine who gets to choose their days
off first. Next year, the top couple of people go to the bottom of the list,
and so on, so that everyone tops the list over time.
Consider a full-scale shutdown. There s no picking favorites if everyone has
to take two weeks off at the end of July because the company shuts down a
tactic historically employed by manufacturing plants and European companies,
but increasingly American companies are experimenting with the technique as
well.
Consider other forms of repose and restoration. As a manager, you might be able
to deliver many of the same benefits over the course of the year by looking for
other ways for your employees to recharge. The key is to recognize that one
size, as usual, does not fit all. And it can change over the course of your
life, says Friedman. The important thing is to have conversations about what
individuals would benefit most from and then how well that fits with the
collective interests of your team. When Friedman was head of Ford s
leadership development center, he negotiated that he could spend one day a
month out of the office doing something other than his day job. I m going to
be of more value to you and this business if I m out in the world, exposed to
new ideas, new people, and continuing to grow. I ll have a richer perspective
and will enrich my sense of trust and commitment to my boss. He tried, in
turn, to ensure that the employees who reported to him had opportunities to do
the same thing. For some employees, it might be equally powerful to ensure that
they had the flexible time to train for a marathon or appear in a community
play. The key is figuring out what matters to them and supporting that, as a
team.
Take vacation yourself! Remember, as a manager, there are no small gestures.
Managers who think they convey the idea that vacations are important for staff,
while neglecting their own, actually have the opposite effect. It s very
important for managers to set the standard, Valcour says. I ve heard so
many managers say, I support a healthy lifestyle for my staff, it s just that
I, personally, am a workaholic. But doing that increases anxiety in your
staff. It suggests that people who put in longer hours are more committed than
those who don t. It s so insidious. Everyone, including you, will be better
off if your employees know that you care about their long-term well-being.
Karen Dillon is the former editor of Harvard Business Review and co-author with
Clayton Christensen and James Allworth of New York Times best-seller How Will
You Measure Your Life. She s also the author of the HBR Guide to Office
Politics. Follow her on Twitter @KarDillon.