You earned vacation time — now use it
There is a word for people who can’t ever disconnect from the office. You’re sure to experience them the next month as people use up 2019 vacation days and stay out of the workplace. And we’re not talking about the casual vacationing employee who scans her email every couple of days or the staycation staffer who checks in with a co-worker to get an update on an important project. Not those workers. We’re talking about the hardcore company men and women, the guy who wakes up every morning at 5 a.m. on his honeymoon to email a series of questions to his peers back at the office and the co-worker who leaves five pages of detailed notes of what needs to be done when she takes a Friday off. Those people. Do we call them “dedicated?” “Committed?” “Professional?”
“Insufferable,” says Jean S., who doesn’t want her last name used. “I have worked with people like that my entire career and it is exhausting. Not only do you have to do your job when they’re out of the office, you have to do parts of their job but the worst part is that you have to babysit their projects. You have to check in on everything to make sure it’s all under control.”
Jean, who works for a large creative firm in Chicago, says she can’t box the always-in-touch employees in one group. “You would think it would be the people on the business side, the accountants and the attorneys — and trust me, they can be Type A about their time off — but the creatives are just as bad,” she says. “You want to be this free spirit at the office and have all these boundaries removed so you can be free to do your work but when you’re supposed to be sitting on a beach somewhere, you’re like Gordon Gekko, calling me every other hour to see if this is done or that has been started. It’s absurd.”
Technology makes it easy
Tori Wolfe, currently a career coach in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has worked in HR with PNC Bank and Bank of America, places you might expect to include workers who have a hard time cutting the cord when they’re away from the office.
“That’s the perception, anyway, but I think good managers — and there were a lot of them — know that their employees need a break, whether it’s a personal day or a 10-day trip to Europe, so they give them that space when they’re out of the office,” says Wolfe. “Actually, the best managers make it policy, even if it’s unofficial policy. They tell people to stay away. I worked with a woman who actually asked HR to block her staff from their email accounts when they were on vacation. She felt that strongly about the importance of their time off.”
Still, Wolfe says it’s nearly impossible to cut yourself off from work. “You carry your phone with you everywhere you go and that means you’re always going to be connected,” she says. “Think about 25 years ago. Even if you had a cellphone, you didn’t access your email. Your co-workers couldn’t text you. You had some distance from the office. But now you can be 1,000 miles away but as connected to the day-to-day stuff as you are when you’re sitting at your desk. That’s the danger of not setting limits. People feel as if they have to always be locked into work, even when they should be enjoying their time off.”
‘You need me!’
It’s not just the technology that’s closed the gap between that cruise down the Danube and the customer who needs an update on their software upgrade. “It’s ego. People think the place is going to fall apart without them,” she says. “Get over yourself. We’ll be fine when you’re gone.”
Jean says she once told a manager that they had everything under control when he repeatedly checked in from his vacation. “I felt bad for his wife and kids because he was spending all this time on the phone with me,” she says. “I finally told him to not worry about us and to go spend time with his family. Probably overstepped my zone a bit but we were friends so I thought it was just a casual comment. He didn’t. He snapped. ‘My family doesn’t need me! You need me!’ Who says things like that? The guy left for a new job a few years ago so I have no idea if he ever got over himself.”