"Legions of workers aren't taking paid time off this summer. That doesn't mean they're going without a break.
It's all about the art of quiet vacationing, the latest genre of carving out leisure time during the workday. Instead of requesting time off -- and using up finite vacation days -- some staffers are indulging in mini-vacations on the clock, while maintaining the facade of working remotely.
Like its precursors quiet quitting and lazy-girl jobs, the quiet-vacationing concept took off on social media and is playing out in real workplaces this summer. Millennials have been blamed for overindulging, but data shows it happening across the workforce. A recent Harris Poll survey of nearly 1,200 working Americans found over a quarter have taken unauthorized time off.
On-the-sly vacationing isn't just about working less, say those who are taking part. Instead, many practitioners say they do it because they get too few paid vacation days and want to use them judiciously. Or, they feel workplace pressure not to take them.
"I feel guilty using my vacation days," says a 37-year-old from Chicago whose contract-tracing job lets her work mostly remotely.
Of the 10 days paid vacation she gets a year, she's claimed only one so far. Her most recent secret vacation happened in May, when unbeknown to her boss, she flew to Las Vegas with her husband and friends for a few days. Though she logged on to her laptop poolside to respond to the occasional work message, "I wasn't working at all," she says.
She'd feel worse if her boss discovered her occasional deception, she says. Yet the guilt of asking for real time off is hard to shake. It stems from past jobs, when her co-workers would begrudgingly shoulder her duties whenever she did take a day off.
U.S. private-sector workers get, on average, 11 days of paid vacation after one year at an employer, and 15 days after five, according to the Labor Department. And that's if they're lucky -- one in five U.S. private-sector workers gets no paid time off.
Pressure to always be "on" prompts nearly 80% of workers not to take the maximum amount of vacation time they do get, the Harris survey shows. So "they're going to work around it and not put themselves in a position of vulnerability," says Libby Rodney, the Harris Poll's chief strategy officer.
In interviews with quiet vacationers across the country, most said they were reluctant to ask for official time off. One, a 22-year-old assistant at a nonprofit, sometimes works "slow days" from a beach hotel in New Jersey. He takes a couple meetings and does research in the morning, then goes to the pool or watches home-improvement reality shows.
Even employees at companies with unlimited vacation-day policies say they don't want to appear as if they're taking too many days off.
Nicole Walker, a 33-year-old customer-support staffer at a shipping company with unlimited time off, isn't a quiet vacationer per se. When she travels somewhere fun with her family, she'll still work a full day, sometimes from the beach, then switch to vacation mode once she's wrapped up her day.
She prefers the arrangement to using her paid time off. "It feels abusive to use it," says Walker, who takes an average one or two days a month of official time off. Plus she worries about not meeting her work targets, such as the number of customer calls she completes, if she's truly off.
"This gives me the freedom to take my family on more than one vacation a year and still maintain a good work ethic," she says.
Deepali Vyas, a senior client partner at organizational consulting and executive-search firm Korn Ferry, says she gets why some workers feel tempted to take stealth vacations. The boundaries between work and personal time have blurred with the rise of remote work, which has given more people the flexibility to do their jobs from far-flung locales.
Yet a quiet vacation is often counterproductive, she says. You're neither getting a truly restorative break from work, nor being that productive. Plus, there's the risk of getting caught. Frustrated managers she's spoken to say they often suspect team members are quiet vacationing when they consistently use a virtual background on video calls or take overnight to respond to a request.
They'll say, "I know my people are kind of vacationing, because the output is roughly 30% less than what I normally get out of them," she says.
Not everyone agrees. Jaimie Calderon, 33, says she works more effectively when she combines her work as a senior analyst at an insurer with the occasional getaway, since she plans out her days more methodically. She also puts in a full workday and gets her boss's signoff to start and end it earlier -- though she doesn't always divulge that she's in a vacation spot.
On a recent weeklong jaunt to a resort in Temecula, Calif., she worked from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. from her hotel suite, then spent the rest of her afternoons poolside.
"I genuinely really love my job," Calderon says. Her only gripe? "It takes up so much of my time to earn the money that's required to live a happy, balanced life," she says." [1]
You might like to work for jerks or bean counters, like Boeing.You might like that what you are making is killing people like Boeing airplanes. In case you don't like that, look for a company where the vacations are not "optimized" out of a team's work, where people are expected to do creative work and produce safe results. No such company around? Create your own.
1. It's Quiet Vacation Season. Don't Tell the Boss. --- Instead of using their limited time off, some take breaks behind the facade of 'working' remotely. Bangalore, Sanvi. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 July 2024: A.11.
