An effective employee vacation policy isn’t just about the accrual of leave balances and the scheduling of vacations. Sometimes, it’s also about finding ways to encourage employees to take well-deserved time off.
According to Harvard Business Review, many American employees are reluctant to go on vacation and tend to work overtime quite a lot. They may do that out of a sense of responsibility or due to career ambitions. However, such workaholism isn’t always great. In fact, it’s detrimental to a person’s family life, physical health, and mental well-being.
No Vacation = Poor Career Outcomes
It’s a common belief that the more you work, the more successful you are. However, not having a good rest undermines your career and success.
A study found that employees who take days off frequently are more likely to get promoted. And in contrast, zero vacation time taken produces the following harmful effects:
- Low productivity | Exhaustion deprives you of the power to fight distractions and focus on essential tasks. As a consequence, you complete less work and show poorer quality results.
- Lost benefits | Those who skip vacation time also lose a lot of money. Just for scale, American employees are giving up approximately $66 billion as lost benefits yearly, which equates to $604 per employee on average.
- Burnout | Overworking is a sure way to burnout, which is bound to make you feel terrible on all fronts: emotionally, psychologically, and physically. And obviously, you can’t do anything well when your mind is fried.
- Other adverse health issues | Workaholics are naturally exposed to a lot of stressors, and they don’t sleep enough. And according to research, stress and lack of sleep can cause headaches, weaken the immune system, increase blood pressure, and affect many other aspects of your health.
- Problems in personal relationships | Not spending enough time with friends and family is harmful to one’s personal relationships and social life. And those who frequently neglect these two important things tend to become unhappy.
As you can see, overworking doesn’t always lead to career growth, and working hard doesn’t mean working all the time. To stay productive at work, you need to let go and relax once in a while. It helps to maintain a healthy work-life balance, increase focus, improve performance and creativity.
Why Do You Need to Encourage Employees to Go on Vacation?
You may think that each person has to decide for themselves whether to go on vacation or not. Nevertheless, insufficient rest time is as detrimental to employers as to employees:
- Poor team performance | Individual productivity issues and burnout can affect the entire team and impede collective progress, causing missed deadlines and project delays.
- Negative workplace atmosphere | Stressed and tired people are known to have bad moods and ill-natured attitudes, which can undermine healthy team communication and lead to conflicts.
- Increased payroll costs | Some laws require businesses to compensate employees for unused vacation time. So, if a worker doesn’t take their leave, the employer legally owes them a fair amount of money. And the larger the company, the greater this cost is – in companies with over 500 employees, the average figure may amount to $2,609 per employee.
These three points are exactly why companies need to step forward and encourage their employees to use the earned leave time. And to do that well, you need to create a good time off policy. But which specific measures can you undertake to motivate your team to take days off regularly?
Let’s delve into this question below.
How to Encourage Employees to Use Their Leave Time
1. Offer enough vacation time
First of all, you need to make sure that there are no irreplaceable employees on your team, and that you always have enough resources to handle the planned tasks. After that, you have to provide your workers with enough days off.
It might seem expensive to let your employees be absent for a few weeks a year, especially for small businesses and startups. Yet, in the long run, generous time-off benefits do pay off.
For example, unlimited vacation time is a much recommended time off policy for companies of any size and kind. It attracts talent, increases employees’ job satisfaction, and boosts their motivation, which leads to business growth and success.
2. Write encouraging letters
Some of your workers are so immersed in work that they entirely forget about vacation. Others may be unaware of how many days off they have on their leave balances and, therefore, can’t start to plan any long-term vacation in earnest. Luckily, there’s one good method to help these poor fellas out – encouraging emails.
Just compose personalized messages to remind your team members to go on vacation every six months or so. Be sure to acknowledge their hard work and note why taking a vacation is vital. State how many days off an employee can use and when. Include any important information about how they can schedule their vacation or simply refer them to relevant organizational guidelines in the letter.
You can get as creative with writing these encouraging emails as you wish. But since it can be truly challenging to make yourself compose meaningful and motivating texts, we prepared a brief sample letter for you. Use it to get inspired for writing your own, or just insert the missing info in the template and send it to employees as it is.
3. Pay for employees’ days off
Employees may refuse to go on vacation merely because of financial concerns.
After all, when an employer doesn’t compensate for leaves, long-term vacation can result in a significant monetary loss. And since losing money is not such a great experience for most of us (even if it happens for a very good reason), people prefer to continue to work without a break.
The only way to prevent that from happening is to pay for your employees’ leave time. If you find it financially impossible to compensate them for all the accrued days off, reimburse at least a portion of them. Thereby, your team members will feel safer using their accrued leaves and will like the idea of going on vacation better.
4. Embrace minimum vacation time
To reduce the risk of burnout among employees, some companies refer to the concept of mandatory minimum vacation time. In other words, they make taking days off an official requirement and organizational norm.
Of course, you shouldn’t punish your team members for not using the mandatory minimum time off. Your main goal here is to let them know that going on vacation, at least for a short period, is a great thing for everyone in the company. And to prove your point, set an excellent example by always utilizing your minimum vacation time first.
Employees usually regard their leaders’ behaviors as a standard. Thus, if you don’t overwork and take enough days off per year, your team members will definitely do the same.
5. Allow for impromptu days off
Asking your team members to be present at the workplace no matter what is a terrible practice. If an employee shows up at the office when sick or stressed out about a personal drama, they don’t work that productively anyways. Plus, their unfavorable state of health and mind can affect the rest of the team. So, to minimize this risk and make sure everyone uses their working time efficiently, it’s better to let your workers take improvised days off whenever necessary.
After going on an impromptu break, a person is bound to come back to work refreshed, feeling more productive and focused – that’s a win-win situation for you and them.
6. Simplify your leave management process
Cumbersome and time-consuming work processes are a drag. When an employee has to discuss their vacation plans with HR managers and wait for ages for their leave request to be approved, this alone can avert them from taking days off.
Thus, you need to make the leave management process as simple as it can be. And by adopting absence tracking software, you can do that with ease.
actiPLANS, for example, allows your team members to plan days off on their own, without referring to the HR department at all. With its help, you can also automate the approval of leave requests and, thus, speed up vacation management a great deal.
Summary
While we often consider vacation a personal issue, it should always be an employer’s concern as well.
Encouraging employees to take all vacation time they are entitled to is advantageous for every stakeholder involved. It helps teams to achieve high productivity, improve performance, and establish a healthy workplace environment. So, be sure to provide your workers with enough paid days off, go on vacation yourself, and implement an intelligent leave management system. The latter will let you cut down administrative costs and simplify the entire leave management process.
Sign up for a free actiPLANS trial today to streamline vacation planning, track employee absences with ease and prevent problems caused by unused leave time.
