Mini Vacations Let Workers Maximize Their Time Off

Jack Nilles--futurist, USC professor, consultant--offers his own prescription for the perfect vacation: “Just goof off. Don’t answer the phone. Rent a boat. Get sunburned.”

He might have added one other piece of advice: Keep it short. Not that Nilles has anything against long, lazy breaks. It’s just that scheduling them to coincide with the routine of his wife, a producer of classical records, is usually impossible.

“The last, honest-to-God, long vacation we took was four years ago when we went to Egypt,” recalled Nilles, a physicist by training who likes to “commute” to work via computer without stepping outside his hillside Brentwood home. “Most of the other stuff has been long weekends.”

By some reckonings, at least, Nilles has a lot of company. Americans, it appears, are taking off from the daily grind more often than ever before--and coming back sooner, according to the U.S. Travel Data Center, a research arm of the travel industry.

The move to brief breaks has various roots, according to experts on the workplace. Most important, it arises from the time pressures in households where two spouses each have a career and calendar to worry about.

But in a broader sense, quick getaways may reflect a yearning by some for greater control over their time, frustration with commuting hassles and dissatisfaction with the traditionally rigid nine-to-five, 40-hour workweek. Not that the appeal of time off should be that mysterious: Americans have more vacation time than ever before--and, hey--who doesn’t want to skip work once in a while?

“The trend toward more flexibility--for both time on and time off--is growing,” said Helen Axel, director of the Work and Family Information Center at the Conference Board, a research organization in New York.

In many companies, employees have long enjoyed “summer hours” in which the place shuts down by midday Friday in July and August. What may be newer, though, is the growing number of workers who seem to be declaring summer hours of their own.

Suana Skogstrom, a public affairs assistant at Atlantic Richfield in downtown Los Angeles, takes off every Monday in July, August and part of September for trips from her South Pasadena home to the beach in Santa Monica or Orange County. The three-day weekend is ideal, she explains, because her complexion is too fair to endure two straight days under the summer sun. And there are emotional payoffs. Major vacations, she says, can prompt a sort of have-I-had-enough-fun-yet? anxiety. The shorter ones avoid that dilemma while preserving future time off to anticipate. “I think it’s kind of nice to dole it out,” she said.

Nilles suggests that quick excursions enable workers to avoid another sort of anxiety, one that is prompted by today’s climate of mergers, takeovers and other workplace changes that are swift and unnerving: “A middle-level person taking a few weeks off starts to think at the end of Week Two: ‘I wonder if my office is still there?’ ”

More Benefits

Not every employer is sympathetic. At Wells Fargo Bank, for example, employees are expected to take their vacations in chunks of at least a week rather than in “little snippets,” said Kim Kellogg, a spokeswoman for the bank in San Francisco. She said department managers may make exceptions, but the prevailing view is that fewer, longer vacations are easier for everyone to plan around than frequent, short vacations that can disrupt an office.

Such policies appear to be in the minority, however. A survey by the Mercer Meidinger Hansen consulting firm in late 1986 found that the requirement for workers to use up at least a week of time per vacation “is pretty much dead,” said Melvin W. Borleis, managing director of the firm’s Chicago office. And Americans are endowed with more vacation benefits than ever, with some employers granting veteran workers four or even five weeks of time off each year, he said.

Take Joe Shields, a financial analyst with IBM in Los Angeles. He qualifies for 25 vacation days a year--enough for two separate one-week vacations, while still being able to work four days a week throughout the summer.

Do all those Fridays that he stays home in Thousand Oaks with his wife and her four golden retrievers pose any sort of problem for the company? “If I have a problem, I’ll come in on a Friday, but I usually can work it out,” Shields explains.

The idea of a four-day workweek, of course, is not limited to use of vacation time. Employers with demanding needs for staffing, such as hospitals, for years have allowed employees to work long shifts--and fewer of them. At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, for example, a majority of the 600 bedside nurses have requested the 12-hour shifts, which entail three- and four-day weeks, said Jane Ramseyer, director of nursing operations.

Attracts Workers

But she pointed out that not all tasks are equally suited to the stretched-out working day. For example, shorter shifts are better for operating room duty, but the longer ones work well in labor and delivery, where “the patient goes into labor and she has the same nurse all the way through.”

Ramseyer added that the option of working three or four days a week helped the hospital attract nurses in a tight market: “I think people like to be able to control their own time, and the more flexibility you’re able to offer them, the better off you all are,” she said.

When Hermosa Beach placed 80 workers on a 7 a.m.-to-6.p.m. Monday-Thursday schedule late last year, a few employees worried at first that they they would spend too much money on their extra day off, recalled Robert A. Blackwood, the city’s personnel director.

“We even had one who didn’t want to have that extra time to be with his wife.” But now, he added, more are exploiting the time off to go camping, drive off-road vehicles and pursue other hobbies, while the public benefits from the longer hours of work.

While the four-day week remains rather exotic in the American workplace, there seems to be more attention to the concept known as “flexitime,” which, loosely, means a setup in which employees have some flexibility to decide their work schedules. Long heralded as the salvation for working mothers, distraught commuters and those who work according to an internal drumbeat, flexitime seems to be spreading into the workplace--but at a snail’s pace.

Details are sketchy, but a 1985 survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, found that 12.3% of the U.S. work force enjoyed some flexibility in working hours. “If you look at the bulk of the labor force, the great majority still work five, eight-hour days,” said Paul O. Flaim, a division chief at BLS. “But around the edges, there’s more flexibility than there was 10 years ago.”

Expert Predictions

One reason for flexitime’s appeal is a change in the kind of work Americans perform: In the increasingly service-oriented economy, employees can set their own pace without disturbing the larger work flow, whereas that would be harder in a traditional factory. Today’s tight labor market, with the need to lure retirees, non-working women and others into the work force, also is creating a climate amenable to nontraditional working arrangements.

“You can’t have half the people show up when the assembly line starts,” noted Douglas R. Barile, a consultant with the Hay Group. “But clearly there are many conditions in today’s work environment where that’s not an issue.”

Some experts predict that the changing social environment is unleashing pressures not just for flexitime--but for less time. The workweek declined steadily from about 53 hours at the turn of the century to about 40 hours in the 1940s. And there it has stayed, with workers parlaying most of their subsequent productivity gains into fatter paychecks rather than fewer hours.

Actually, the 40-hour week is something of a misnomer: Workers toiled an average of 43.6 hours a week in June, according to a recent BLS survey. In any case, it all may change, as gender responsibilities change within households. “Now that she is working--and women are sometimes insisting that men share in the household responsibilities--that is a force for shorter hours,” maintains Sar Levitan, director of the Center for Social Policy at George Washington University.

But Levitan acknowledges that it is unclear when such pressures will prompt significant change. For the present, at least, some workers have found that the easiest way to modify their workweek is to season it with a dash of vacation time. It’s hardly a mass movement, but that’s just fine with enthusiasts. “It might stop me from doing it,” fretted Arco’s Skogstrom. “I can’t imagine them letting the whole department take off on Monday.”

SHORTER VACATIONS Americans are doing more leisure travel but spending less time away on each trip, surveys indicate. The surveys for each year took into account all vacation-time trips that involved traveling more than 100 miles from home. The figures show the average duration of Americans’ vacation trips. Year Average Trip Length 1984 5.9 nights 1985 6.0 nights 1986 5.7 nights 1987 5.5 nights 1987* 5.4 nights 1988* 4.3 nights * figures for first four months Source: U.S. Travel Data Center