Start Vacationing For Better Productivity
Last updated
18 Nov 2016 . 3 min read
"A good vacation is over when you begin to yearn for your work." -Morris Fishbein
Humans are energy machines. We expend energy over the course of a workday and year in our body and brains, which use up to 20% of the body’s calories. Then, we have to replace our depleted energy or else fatigue sets in, stress and exhaustion builds up, and productivity plummets.
Juggling the demands of a career and personal life is not an easy feat. In fact, maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle became especially difficult after employees are being expected to do more with less–and even as things improve, the challenges persist.
It’s a basic law of effort: Quality output requires quality input. It’s called recovery in the scientific journals, and one of the best ways to get, is through the recuperative benefits of a vacation.
The concept of a vacation was invented by companies back in the early part of the twentieth century as a productivity tool. They conducted fatigue studies and found that employees performed better after a respite. The same is true today. In a study by Alertness Solutions, reaction times went up 40% after a vacation.
Vacations shut off the stressors and pressures of work. With the danger signal turned off, the stress response stops, and the brain can get to work on reparative and maintenance functions.
Vacations build positive mood, which crowds out negative experiences and thoughts and, “undoes” the physical and mental effects of stress.
Vacations: The Talent Insurance Policy
Since 40% of job turnover is due to stress, consider the vacation then, a proven stress buster, as an insurance policy against losing top talent and the high costs associated with replacing an employee. Some studies show that it can cost up to two times an annual salary to replace a valued salaried employee. Health complaints and exhaustion significantly decrease during vacation and there is an increase in performance levels when employees get back to the job.
Highly successful inbound marketing firm Hubspot, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers unlimited vacations to its employees and mandates that employees take at least two weeks of vacation. Another major company, Evernote, also has an unlimited vacation policy. To make sure people take time off, Evernote pays employees $1000 to take at least a week of vacation.
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary, in fact. People look to escape into the parallel realities of an ordinary life. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it, to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.
Ritika Srivastava
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