What's wrong with this picture? Only 14% of Americans took two weeks of vacation last year. (flickr user mjmermis (cc:by-sa))
Eric Jones, director of IT at iPass in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, hasn't taken a vacation in a long time. That wouldn't be the case if he worked for Eric Berridge, co-founder and CEO of Bluewolf, a global IT services company, because his company offers unlimited vacation. The company doesn't even track the number of days. As long as work is done, the company is happy. Is that the wave of the future? Kari Henley thinks so. She's director of the board at the Women and Family Life Center in North Haven, Connecticut. Only 14 percent of Americans took two weeks of vacation last year and the number of Americans taking family vacations has dropped by a third in the past generation. Are we just too busy to take a break?
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Not true. I know people who work for this company and they are tyrants - they say no vacation policy but actually they get less vacation than most people. They guilt you when you try to take days off, and since there is no allotted number of vacation days, you are not really "entitled" to any at all. It's like reverse psychology.
I daresay most people limit their vacations for the same reason I do: you go away, come back, and the workload is exhausting. Then you're behind for days or weeks while you try to get caught up on that as well as the current work coming in. It's not worth it.
While the idea of only being responsible for 'getting the work done' is appealing, what about law firms, where attorneys, paralegals and staff are usually responsible for hours billed? The other situation, which is quite frequent now, is getting the same amount of work done with fewer people, where getting the work done within a 40-hour work week is approaching impossible. Either of these situations requires either exhausting oneself in order to get the time to take vacation, taking working along on vacation, or exhausting oneself on getting back from vacation.