Americans famously get less paid time off than other developed nations, and yet we don’t manage to use it all. While it may seem better to have your employees working than to have them enjoying their PTO, the reality is that you should want them out of the office. Taking a break is good for them and good for your business. Here’s why and how to get your employees to take advantage of their PTO allotment.
Remove the Fear
Marketwatch reported that 54 percent of Americans don’t use all their allotted PTO because they are afraid—of getting fired, of coming back to work completely overwhelmed and that things will fall apart while they’re gone. These are all problems the company can resolve. Make sure employees know that vacations are planned for and expected. Focus on cross-training employees so that whenever one person is out of the office, someone else can handle emergencies. Make sure work is assigned out so that when an employee returns from vacation, they aren’t playing catch-up.
To keep reading, click here: The Importance of Paid Time Off and Vacation
I thoroughly agree with the need for employees to take vacation time off but employers need to not put the daily function of job on only certain individuals so that those individuals really do not have vacation.
You mentioned in article about why companies cross-train employees but left out how this is re-enforced in the workplace. Teamwork is an important part of most jobs but there is a lot of individuals who barely do their job requirements and are not tasked with raising performance level. Most of us who have worked have had multiple versions of these fellow non-productive co-workers.
When they take vacation time, the rest of the team actually works better because the workload is shared equally. But when one of the productive workers takes vacation, they come back to a situation of both daily work and catch-up work.
True this may be a management problem but there is reasons why this poor performance is tolerated and it has nothing to do with disability, etc. but more to do with this person’s ability to work the system to tolerate their poor performance. Labor laws work to both protect workers and abuse workers at the same time.
I am a specialist in my field. Each time I ask of time off it is a huge problem to get coverage for my position. I have been accommodating to management when scheduling, but have no guilt in taking my earned vacations. If I am not as productive because I am sweeping up a mess, so be it. In fact, when I take time off it give management a look into what it is I am doing.
I let the problems of my absence become a management issue, not mine.
I would love to be able to take more than a day at a time off, but I’m the head of the department. There are literally dozens of things I am the only one who can do them, for perfectly legitimate business reasons (certifications being one). I cannot pass those off to anyone else even for one day – it’s not legal or contractually allowed. I know I have to have surgery in the next few months, and I have no idea how we’re going to manage me being out of the office and incapacitated for more than a week – it’s just not possible! It’s not that we’re a small organization, either – we’re a 4 year higher ed institution. We’re a testing center – we are neither legally nor contractually able to pass off certain responsibilities to another person, unless they have the same contractural or legal permissions that I do – and there isn’t anyone. I took two days off this week, for the first time in months, and I still had to deal with work stuff remotely. I have had this job for two years, and other than the few days the entire institution is closed, I am “on call” every single day.
Your employer needs to get some redundancy. If you can’t pass off your duties to someone without the right contractual and legal permissions, they need to *have* someone else with those qualifications. If it were a small organization, that might not be practical, or even possible, but that’s apparently not the case. Just expensive, and the people with the purse strings don’t want to spend the money.
And you pay the price.