Who among us hasn’t done a little lying at work? A little CV embellishment here, a fake dentist appointment there. Today, people take real vacations while they’re at work, part of a trend called “quiet vacations.”
There is no precise definition of a quiet vacation, and it can encompass a variety of behaviors: traveling to a faraway place and saying nothing while continuing to work, or not working but keeping your mouse moving to give the feel like you are online. hope no one notices your drop in productivity.
On the one hand, this seems like a new and impressive possibility brought about by the rise of remote work. Responding to the 10th email of the day while sipping a margarita on the beach seems much nicer than doing it from an office while a nearby coworker loudly munches on their sad salad. If work gets slow in the summer, there’s no good reason to sit and stare at your computer.
On the other hand, the idea that people are under so much pressure at work that they feel like they can’t take real time off to disconnect from everything or even tell their boss that they’re working a bit outside of town is deeply depressing. . It’s a stark reminder of how broken American work culture is, just in time for summer.
“It may simply be a matter of psychological safety, or lack thereof, if the employee does not feel like they can openly discuss with their manager the possibility of taking actual time off,” said Rebecca Zucker, executive coach and founding partner. from Next Step Partners, a leadership consulting firm. “We are all big boys and girls, and the question is not where we work or when we work, in terms of working hours, but are we doing what we need to do.”
The whole talk of quiet vacations has been reignited by a recent Harris Poll survey on out-of-office culture. The study found that 28% of workers reported missing work without informing their boss. Basically, they are out of the office, but not “officially”. Millennials in particular have adopted this practice, with 37% saying they quit their job on the sly.
People feeling like they have to hide their whereabouts is not a positive sign.
It’s not that these workers are unhappy with the vacation time offered by their company: 83% of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their company’s paid vacation policy. The problem seems to be that employees don’t feel like they can actually use the free time they’re given. Eight in ten workers said they were not using the maximum amount of PTO allowed; some said they felt pressure to always be available, while others cited a heavy workload as the reason. Nearly half said they were nervous about asking for time off, and three-quarters said they wish their company culture valued breaks more. Workers also reported being tricky about the whole thing: About a third said they moved their mouse to make it look like they were online, and about the same proportion said they were scheduling messages outside of it. hours of work to make it appear as if they were working overtime.
The problem isn’t really that people are working elsewhere, especially if it doesn’t hurt their productivity. The bigger issue is what this means about their relationship with work and the incentives that have been encouraged in their companies. People feeling like they have to hide where they are isn’t a positive sign, and neither is feeling like the only way to disconnect is to stay half-plugged in.
People who take vacations on the sly might find themselves in organizations more likely to reward the overworked, said Malissa Clark, associate professor and director of the Healthy Work Lab at the University of Georgia. In turn, these quiet vacations can perversely reinforce the culture of always connecting, even when it doesn’t need to always be connected or lead to better business results. Clark, who also wrote the book “Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business — and How to Fix It,” pointed to a 2015 study examining how some men at a consulting firm were able to withdraw from work. while pretending to still work 80 hours a week. Their managers couldn’t tell the difference, and they were rewarded for giving the impression that they were workaholics, while men who were outspoken about the need to demote were penalized.
“That’s why there’s this pressure for people to constantly work and feel like if they take a step back, they’ll be left behind, because that’s a very real thing,” Clark said. “Apparently that’s what a lot of organizations reward.”
Pretending to work when you’re not or acting like you’re putting in more hours is not a new phenomenon. Zucker remembers working years ago at an investment bank where men left their suit jackets on the back of their chairs after hours so people would think they were still somewhere in the desk. But technology makes this behavior easier. The ability to connect from anywhere is a double-edged sword: sure, it’s nice to be able to respond to an email on a midday walk or work from a parent’s house for vacation, but it sucks knowing your boss knows you saw this. 10:00 p.m. A Slack message appears on your phone.
This is a uniquely American social problem. We are told to go, go, go, feeling like we will never be able to get off the treadmill for even a second, for fear of falling behind or giving up. We feel like we’re not making an effort. Often we don’t view time off as necessary and well-deserved, but rather as a sign of laziness and lack of work ethic. We don’t tell people to work to live; they are told to live to work.
Some of the fundamentals behind a leisurely vacation are positive. We live in a time where many people can work anywhere and have more flexibility to achieve a better work-life balance. The problem is the deviousness of it all. It would be much better if we talked about, say, “working hard from anywhere for a month,” or whatever you want to call it. (Or we could stop making up terms for work trends, the real dream.) It should be okay to have a conversation with your manager about spending a few days in the mountains or at the beach and, as long as the WiFi is ok, get rich. your duties as a capitalist soldier.
Clark said this trend could make employers even more eager to force workers back into the office. Managers don’t always like the idea of not knowing where their colleagues are and have the (often false) impression that being out of sight means not working.
Working elsewhere does not eliminate the need for a real vacation. Ample research indicates that time off improves mental and physical health, reduces stress, and increases productivity, among other benefits. Even planning vacations make people happier. People need psychological detachment from work to relax and recover.
By always feeling like you have to stay connected, you never get work back.
“By always feeling like you have to stay connected, you never get over work,” Clark said. “And so it’s like you’re constantly running a marathon, but then you never take a break, and what is that going to do? It’s going to exhaust your body slowly, gradually, to the point where you hit a wall . And then all of a sudden, you’re exhausted.”
If you’re off on vacation and your boss doesn’t know it, good for you, I guess. But it would probably be better if you could be honest about where you are and what you’re doing. And none of this removes the need for a real vacation. Regardless of how open (or not) employees are, ultimately American work culture is the villain here. The toxicity of hustle culture is the real problem, not the person working quietly in a cabin in the woods or the co-worker who was told to fuck off and takes three weeks off.
Emilie Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and economics.