By Ben Roberts
I don’t know about you, but I miss the days of school summer holidays, when the only things that might worry you were your exam results coming out in August (good luck to everyone!). Back then, holidays meant a time of complete removal from schoolwork, where your brain switched off completely.
While these lengthy holidays were truly amazing – even though we didn’t know how good we had it – is such removal from our work these days really what we want?
The FT’s Lucy Kellaway wrote an interesting piece looking at what she calls the ‘worliday’. Essentially, she suggests that a worliday is what most of us now experience when trying to go on holiday – we use all of our clever gadgets to keep in touch with our colleagues and clients, and even do some work. She believes that this is no bad thing.
Personally, I can’t say I disagree. We are no longer at school and can find the actual process of trying to switch off from work to be difficult. On top of that, the mad rush to hand things over to colleagues and finish up all the necessary tasks before going on holiday can be stressful, leaving your mind clouded with work-related items as your holiday begins. As Kellaway suggests, taking advantage of technology and being a little more flexible with your holiday and work time can actually be far more relaxing.
Although I agree with much of the article, the point that Kellaway makes about having no fixed holiday time, I’m not so keen on. In an ideal world it might just work, but I think that, allowing employees to take holiday time as and when they please with none of it being recorded, would be very risky and open to exploitation. Would you allow your employees this extreme flexibility?
While the carefree holidays of our youth are surely gone, we should embrace technology and the worliday!
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