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2014-09-05 11:01:10
By Nick Clayton
How would you feel if your employer made you take a vacation and handed you a
bundle of cash on top of your normal salary to pay for it? It seems like a good
deal right?
That s what Kipp Chambers thought at first, too.
In October he took his fiancee, now his wife, on a two-week trip to Greece. A
veteran of several startups, it was the first time he'd ever managed to get
away for more than an extended weekend. But, there was a catch built in to his
company s offer. The 34-year-old had been instructed to stay out of contact
with the office. No email, social media or phone for work.
It made me feel horribly nervous for the first few days, he said. I kept
feeling phantom cellphone rings in my pocket.
In the long run, though, it was worth it.
It was so different from when I used to take those short vacations, said
Chambers, who is marketing engineer for FullContact in Denver, Colorado, an
online address book startup where paid vacations are mandatory and accompanied
by an additional $7,500 payment. I came back so much more refreshed .I had
about 30 different ideas that could only have germinated while I was unplugged
from the office.
The health benefits of vacations are, perhaps, not unexpected. The Framingham
Heart Study, which has tracked the cardiovascular health of residents in
Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948, found men who didn't take vacations for
several years were 30% more likely to suffer heart attacks than those who took
off at least one week annually.
Vacations can help mental health as well. Terry Hartig. professor of
environmental psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden, a country where five
weeks paid time off is a legal requirement for every worker, examined the
effects of vacations on mental health.
He and his colleagues looked at national antidepressant use from 1993 to 2005
and found there was a significant reduction in prescriptions when people were
on vacation. The decrease was even greater when people were spending their time
away from work outdoors.
Good for companies, too
Mandatory vacation policies can also bring unexpected benefits to companies
even if the new policy has a rocky start.
When we introduced it, we thought this is going to be a great recruiting tool
for us, great for retention and the single best mental health facilitator you
could get, FullContact's content director Brad McCarty said. To begin with,
we screwed up. One of our guys took his paid vacation and extraordinarily
critical aspects of our company stopped working, so you had people in the
office who were scrambling to figure out how to fix it.
The answer was to draw up 'bus plans.' As in, What would happen if you were hit
by a bus tomorrow? No one person holds the answers to any issue now. The
company is much healthier for it, McCarty said.
We can identify possible weaknesses and make sure that even though one person
might be the main point of responsibility, they're not going to be the sole
point of failure, he said.
Sourcegraph, a Silicon Valley-based startup that provides analysis tools for
software developers, also has mandatory paid vacation policy.
It's the best way to create a culture where it's OK to take a holiday and it
improves communication and team work, said chief executive officer, Quinn
Slack.
When people know they're going to be totally off the grid, they spend more
time communicating their work to the rest of the team, and, as a company, we
avoid doing things that are so reliant on one person and difficult to scale up,
he said.
I've seen a lot of companies where the non-vacation-takers resent the
vacation-takers and vice-versa. That's toxic, and that kind of politics can
destroy companies.
Neither SourceGraph or FullContact have yet had to deal with an employee who
refused to take their allocated time off.
On the face of it, it sounds lazy, and they might be concerned that their
investors would get worried, Slack said.
I hope the policy takes off among tech startups, because they stand to benefit
from it the most and because they currently have a terrible reputation for
discouraging vacations.
Beyond health benefits
There is one industry famed for its long hours and workaholic culture where
mandatory time off has become standard practice.
Most banks and financial institutions require employees take a vacation of two
consecutive weeks during which they have to be away from the office and are not
allowed access to computer systems, even via smartphones and other devices. It
s not just an altruistic measure, however. It s reckoned that most ongoing
frauds and dodgy trades will show up in that length of time.
In 2008, rogue trader J r me Kerviel was convicted of fraud and forgery that
led to a 4.9bn euro loss ($6.46bn, in current dollars) for the French bank Soci
t G n rale. He said during his interrogation: A trader who doesn't take
vacation is a trader who doesn't want to let anyone else look at his book.
The former UK regulator, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) recommended
mandatory two week holidays in the wake of the Soci t G n rale loss. It wasn't
a new idea. The US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp has recommended it for years.
Is balance possible?
There are, however, some who feel we are best served by taking smartphones,
laptops or tablets on vacation.
Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, writing for BBC News, described the
benefits of doing just that during a 10-day break in Cornwall, England.
Kellaway described it as a worliday , combining work and holiday.
I would wake up, do a few emails and then go for a walk by the sea. Later, I
might write an article sitting under a window with a view of a stream. After
that, I'd go outside to light the coals to barbecue a sausage, she wrote.
As well as allowing workers to spend longer away from the office, Kellaway also
believes it can help prevent the shock of returning to a pile of work.
One of the main shocks: the overflowing inbox. The solution from German auto
manufacturer Daimler is to automatically delete all emails sent to its
employees when they re on vacation (for those who opt-in).