Are your workers taking advantage of their PTO? It is important for you employee’s to de-stress and take a break to continue to be sucessful. Ensure your employees are taking the time off they need to keep a happy and healthy workfoce.
According to a Forbes article, only 25% of Americans take their paid vacation. The article also gives insight as to how not taking vacation can impact your overall effeciency in the workplace.
It’s not healthy to keep working without a break. Vacation recharges our internal batteries, gives us perspective on what we do and fuels creativity and energy. Vacation also promotes creative thinking, expands our cultural horizons and sharpens cognition, especially if we can travel to another country. “Traveling shifts us from the solipsistic way we operate every day,” Joan Kane, a Manhattan psychologist, told me a when I did a story on vacations a few years ago. “It promotes a sense of well-being and gets you thinking in different ways. It can be life-altering.”
In the article The common workplace practice that’s costing employers billions by Cort Olsen, gives more understanding of why employees do not always take the time offered.
Having diligent, hardworking employees is every employer’s dream, but it can come at a cost. Studies have shown that employees who sacrifice their vacation time to maintain their work flow could be costing an employer more than it would to have one or two employees out of the office for a couple of weeks’ vacation time.
According to the U.S. Travel Association, employees who choose not to use their paid time off could potentially cost an employer close to $52.4 billion annually due to lost revenue, employee termination or resignation, and hiring and training replacements.
“When you look at a manager or someone in a leader capacity, we run into situations where managers don’t want to be out of the office or away from the team because they feel like they need to be available,” Sciortino says. “Some people who are not in a leadership position may be the only one who does a certain task, so they know if they are not there then the work is not going to get done.”
To combat this problem, employers need to train employees to be backups for other employees who are responsible for a specific task in the event that person is out of the office for a period of time, she says.
“From an employer’s perspective, we want our teams to take PTO, because turnover is costly,” Sciortino says. “You can lose employees because they are feeling burnt, and obviously rehiring and retraining people for positions frequently can be costly on their organization.”
Another costly issue employers face when employees do not use their vacation time is paying out that unused time. Claire Bissot, managing director for CBIZ, says she is against any employer that allows employees to be paid out for not using their vacation time at the end of the year.
Read the full article from Forbes.com here.
See the full article from Employee Benefit Adviser here.
Sources:
Adams, S. (2014, April 7). Only 25% of americans take their paid vacation [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/04/04/only-25-of-americans-take-their-paid-vacation/#ea0d8c22c5cf
Olsen, C. (2016, June 7). The common workplace practice that’s costing employers billions [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.employeebenefitadviser.com/news/the-common-workplace-practice-thats-costing-employers-billions