Take A Vacation

One of the things that has struck with since living in the US is the low level of vacation time that most people take. I know that most new jobs seldom offer more than 2 weeks paid vacation time unless you are in highly employable, highly desirable bracket, which to my mind is nothing short of ridiculous.

When life-coaching clients come to me with issues around stress management and getting their work life balance right I usually ask them when they last took a vacation. More often than not it takes some thinking about and even if it is fairly recently is it often no more than a long weekend. If I then ask them when was the last time they took a two week break I usually get looks that would suggest that I have asked the client if we could strip naked and dance round my driveway together holding hands and singing songs from 'The Sound Of Music' Trust me I never do that, not in the heat of Florida anyway.

You, and if you are an employer your employees, need to take time away from work. This isn't an optional extra it is a necessity for good mental health and stable productivity. The body needs time to rest and to re-charge itself, otherwise you see a slow decline in performance that can even lead to complete individual collapse. That is why so many people flit from job to job and why the retail and sales industries have such a high churn of staff. Rather that supporting staff when performance dips, they fire them and move on. This is false economy, because now they have the added cost of hiring, training and bringing up to speed of a new employee that is statistically no more likely to succeed that the person they just let go because they were worn out. Companies are seldom inclined to invest in employees in terms of a good training, listening to their needs and offering excellent benefits packages. After all, it is costly and there are profits and stockholders to be considered!

The anomaly with this is that when people are given time off, when they are paid a wage commensurate with their value to the organization (rather than the minimum that the employer can get away with), when they have health care benefits paid and when they are treated with respect and dignity they become happier and more loyal to the employer. Content employees that feel they are wanted (a major human requirement there by the way - to feel needed) are infinitely more useful to a business than miserable, run-down malcontents that are living from pay check to pay check.

If you work for somebody else, take your full allocation of vacation and forget about the full e-mail inbox you will come back to, the world will carry on turning. If you are an employer force your staff to work sensible hours, switch off servers after 7.00pm at night, insist holidays are taken and that medical check ups are undertaken. It may mean you take a short-term financial hit but the long-term benefits are higher productivity, higher profits and a line of the best people in the industry waiting to work for you. It's a no-brainer.



Take A Vacation - To learn more about this author, visit Tim Brownson's Website.

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