A graduate student in one of my Public Administration classes recently wrote a paper on the use of vacation time in the United States. It turns out that employees in this country annually turn back some $21 billion of unused vacation time. This represents 1.8 days of returned vacation per employee nationally. Here are some figures with regard to average annual vacation usage to think about: U.S. – 13, Japan – 25, South Korea – 25, Canada – 26, Great Britain – 28, Brazil – 34, Germany – 35, France – 37 and Italy – 42.
What ought to be of concern to an employer about these statistics is that an average score is probably not very significant. For example, to say that 1.8 days of vacation are returned by each employee in the country is not very revealing because the data is undoubtedly bi-modally distributed. As most every HR or Employee Services Director can attest, there are a group of employees who take every possible day off just as soon as they can. These employees never accumulate any vacation, personal leave days or sick leave. Whenever a day of sick leave goes on the book, they immediately get sick and use the day. Vacation and other paid days off are treated similarly.
On the other hand, there is that group of employees who are never sick and are almost forced by their employer to take vacation time. It is this second group of employees that give back vacation days and they probably average 6-7 days per year. While you are thinking about this, let me add a new statistic. I keep running into what appears to be a reasonably well known fact. Americans today are working 199 more hours per year than 30 years ago. Tying this back to vacation usage, while wages have gone up substantially over that 30 year period, both the amount of vacation time available for employees and the amount of vacation used has remained constant.
A substantial amount of my current work focuses on creating highly energized employees with the ultimate goal of creating a high performing organization. Last November I brought to your attention the book, The Power of Full Engagement (Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz). One of the strong points that they make in their book is that peak performance is not a continuous activity. Rather, peak performance needs a recovery period before one can move on to the next peak performance. In this context, vacation usage is absolutely essential.
With all of the above points in mind, I would like to offer the following three observations:
Having employees give back vacation time is not a good thing.
Long vacations (4, 5, 6 weeks) are not as useful for peak performance as more frequent, short vacations.
Effective supervision requires that the supervisor monitor time-off. Employees who never take time off should be a concern just like those employees who never accumulate an extra day of available paid time off.
One last thought – meal and rest breaks also impact recovery time. I was recently working with a client who had a group of clerical employees that all wanted to work through their lunchtime (1/2 hour). In other words, these employees wanted to pull out a sack lunch or go to the local deli and pick up a sandwich, and eat it at their desk while they continued to work – paid time of course. Beyond the fact that a clerical employee is not nearly as efficient when they are eating, a practice of working through your lunch hour ignores the importance of recovery. No wonder we all feel stressed out in this country when we can’t even take a half hour to put work aside and eat lunch.
Just to remind you, lunch period is unpaid only if it is completely duty free including being free of on-call responsibilities. Obviously if the employees are working a position where they have no choice but to be on duty for their full shift, then they ought be receiving compensation for the meal time and recovery will be a separate issue. By the way, you are completely within your legal rights to require employees to take a half hour or an hour lunch period. Scheduling the work day is a management prerogative.
As for me, I’ve decided to move to France where I can get a two hour duty-free lunch break and a glass of wine.
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