'So many of us don't have good work boundaries,' says academic, citing need for workers and managers to disconnect
In looking at the reasons why people “workation” (work while on vacation), manager behaviour comes out on top, particularly those who continue to email while away.
That’s according to a recent survey which identified three clear categories of vacationers: planned vacationers (29%) who intentionally plan to do at least some work while on vacation, bringing their devices and keeping notifications on; unplanned vacationers (43%) who head off on holiday with the full intention of disconnecting but end up being pulled in anyway; and true vacationers (28%) who succeed in disconnecting fully and are likely to be older employees or those without direct management responsibilities.
The Perceptyx survey involved 3,000 U.S.-based workers.
Poor workplace boundaries and workationing
Planned workationers are almost twice as likely as true vacationers to say their superior checks emails while away, the survey found.
While emailing seems a simple issue to address, it’s a larger issue that revolves around individual and organizational boundaries, says Jason Walker, director of the Industrial and Organizational Psychology program at Adler University in Vancouver.
“So many of us don't have good work boundaries, in terms of ‘These are my hours, this is when I'm available,’” says Walker.
It’s easy to have a policy around not answering work emails while on vacation, he says, but there is a physiological reason why most of us feel compelled to respond to an email in our inbox from our boss.
“We're conditioned to respond, and then we have this fear of missing out,” says Walker. “Whether it's socially or whether it's at work, we need to be in the loop, most of us, and missing that is very stressful for people… What people forget is most things are not urgent. Most things are not emergencies, and normally, typically, it can wait.”
Workationing managers feel the squeeze
The number one work activity respondents said they engage in while on vacation is answering emails from managers, followed by answering emails from teammates, the survey revealed. Even in organizations where employees are encouraged to disconnect, a boss who responds to or sends out emails on their own vacation is the biggest indicator of employees doing the same.
It’s a “trickle-down effect” that starts at the top and works its way to front-line employees, says Emily Killham, senior director and head of the Center for Workforce Transformation at Perceptyx.
“Managers are really feeling very pinched by the organization, not only from being asked to do more with less, fewer employees, more tasks, quicker timelines, all of those things. But then their own teams are displaying higher need than usual as well,” she says, adding that 70% of managers produce work in addition to managing their teams.
These conditions combine to make it increasingly difficult for managers to unplug from work.
“So, that's also playing in to this sort of squeeze. … If they unplug, what will fall apart while they're gone? What will they have to deal with when they get back?” Killham says.
The same survey showed that one out of four managers reported feeling “miserable” and that their jobs are only getting harder. Their teams are feeling the stress, with almost a quarter of employee respondents stating they are working for their “worst boss ever.”
This pressure from leadership and from their reports has middle managers stuck in the middle performing an untenable balancing act, “managing expectations of usually completely different priorities,” Walker says.
Disconnecting policies: culture versus strategy
The Perceptyx survey showed that leaders are 1.5 times more likely to be planned workationers, and often the most engaged employees are the ones who feel compelled to stay connected to work while away.
“The outcomes are poor in terms of anxiety, in terms of burnout, in terms of stress. And the interesting part of that is that the middle management role is seen as a rite of passage into the next level, in terms of ‘Can you handle it?’ which is actually quite counterproductive,” says Walker.
As much as an HR team might want to send a message of disconnecting to management, it will be an uphill battle if the organization has a deeply integrated culture of doing the opposite, he says.
“Culture eats strategy for lunch, right?” Walker says. “As much as people want to shift in that direction, like most things, it's a leadership issue. If we have leaders that are courageous enough to understand that if we do things differently, we'll do better in the market, we'll do better with our profitability, our employees will be happier and more productive and take less sick time and all those things, the shift will be quicker.
“But like a lot of things in North America, we tend to be behind the curve when it comes to those ideas of doing things differently and innovating around our workplaces.”
Humans are hardwired to mirror those around us, he says, and in work contexts, employees are especially likely to mirror their superiors.
“If you see your CEO, your boss, working weekends, and you want to progress, what are you going to do? You're going to model that behaviour.”
How HR can prevent manager workations and employee burnout
Killham suggests implementing “return to work surveys” to assess employees’ post-vacation experiences, by asking whether their backup plan worked and if they connected with their colleagues or boss while on holiday, “because I don't think it's possible to create good programs in an organization if you don't have the insights and sentiments of the people that they're impacting.”
Addressing redundancies is another important strategy; if critical knowledge is held by single employees, organizations need to work on succession plans to determine how to duplicate employee functions, she says.
“If, as organizations, we do care about the burnout of our folks, and particularly our most engaged folks and most productive folks, then the way to solve for that is we have to come up with a way to actually allow people to disconnect,” Killham says. “And we're not doing that, and one of the most important ways is to start with managers.”
