When you work on a vacation, is it really a vacation?
Posted March 3rd, 2010 by Sharon MeersI recently went with my family on a wonderful trip to the Mayan Riviera, a beach community about 1 hour south of Cancun. A great adventure trip with snorkeling, kayaking, cave explorations and jungle ziplines. It was a perfect week except for one challenge: my blackberry. The red light was blinking. Messages were coming in. I felt a constant pressure to check to see if there was anything important. There wasn’t, but there was always that nagging feeling that I should be checking in.
When is a vacation really a vacation? As a working mom, I truly treasure spending a full week with my kids. I want to give them 100% of my attention. But that nagging red blinking light never stops. Am I a bad worker if I don’t constantly check in while out of town? It seems like everyone else does. But I feel like a bad mother when I am distracted by work even when we are across the country inside a beautiful cave learning about stalagtites and stalagmites.
Perhaps RIM (the company that makes the Blackberry) could create a blinking blue light that folks could activate when there really is an email that needs to be answered on vacation, an issue that no one else can address. Those do occur one in a while, but not often. Usually we check in on vacation because we want to feel important and our voice heard, even when we are not around. For my next trip I am going to try much harder not to pay attention to that blinking red light and really detatch. I am wishing myself luck.
Joanna Strober
2 Comments
I want to offer another perspective on the idea of detaching for vacation. I think that not fully detaching can actually be harmful for a company — and that by staying connected in some way, you could be missing a terrific opportunity for growth and skill development in your staff and planning for your organization.
Last year, my husband took a 2 week vacation from the company that he founded. Needless to say, it was incredibly hard for him to right himself with the idea that he would not be available to his staff during this time, and he did a ton of worrying and planning about it.
When we got back from our 2 week trip, what he found was not an office in disarray or a company that had fallen apart, but actually that his absence had empowered his employees and strengthened the leadership of his managers. He found that his direct reports, in his absence, had a new sense of ownership over their projects and that his absence had helped to clarify for them when he was really “needed” on a project or task.
He shared with me that he felt that leaving for those 2 weeks, and being really gone the whole time, was actually the best thing he could have done for his company and is part of what helped usher them into a new phase as a mature company.
So, as we think about our vacations and how we want to be available or not, I think a critical question to ask is, “what does it mean about my organization if would crumble without me?”
I think we all want to be building organizations that can stand on their own two feet, even if for a short time a single team member, or even a leader, is unavailable.
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Anita Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 4:46 am
@WorksAlot – thank you for sharing that great personal story! The perspective of the organization’s health is an important one. It’s inspiring to hear how empowered the employees and managers became.
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