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Vacation's All We Ever Wanted

Marc Tracy bizbox.slate.com

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June 30, 2009

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Apparently unsatisfied with merely hurting business across the board, the current recession has decided that it is even going to make vacations more stressful and less enjoyable experiences, even as summer approachse. An AP story reports that a specific challenge faced by small businesses is that already-lean workforces may have additional trouble bearing the burden of having too many employees out at any given time.

And Entrepreneur notes that vacations are stressful not only for the employer, but also for the employee (and, in the case of small businesses, the employer as well), who has to deal with the stress of missing work in this increasingly cut-throat business environment.

As to the former question, of how to ensure business goes on while still allowing vacations, the recommendation appears to be: be flexible, and don't institute cutbacks. It's one thing if you want to do away with half-day summer Fridays, which were always a little decadent to begin with. But don't cut back vacation days; and make it clear that vacation days are there to be enjoyed, not given up, even now. Which is not to say that you can or should tolerate a critical mass of your employees being out on a given day: this is why there are vacation policies, advanced notification, and the like. And it's also not to say that, if something "once-in-a-lifetime" suddenly comes up for an employee, you shouldn't let them take off work: you should. Morale is important.

Meanwhile, Entrepreneur's report has numbers to back up something that makes sense, but that you probably don't think about much: not only can work intrude on vacations, but specifically, the day before a vacation and the day after one are incredibly stressful. The post has some recommendations on how to alleviate this, which, rest assured, we ourselves will be following when we next take a few days off.

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