The Endless Electronic Workday
If you think summer means lazy days and fun in the sun, then you didn’t get the last memo. Folks are packing work right along with the flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts.
Take sales executive Greg Ganoff. At a bluff-side Michigan vacation home overlooking Lake Huron, Ganoff rises about 6 a.m. while he’s away from Interactive Pictures Corp., a San Jose-based company that peddles a 360-degree photographic technology for Internet sites.
Ganoff may be away from his Florida office, but he’s never far away from the job. On most of his days off, Ganoff launches into a familiar routine of checking for phone and computer messages and perhaps touching base with key clients--all before his wife and two teenage sons arrive at the breakfast table. The ritual is repeated at midday and in the evening, Ganoff said.
“Interactive Pictures Corp. is a young company,” he explained. “We’re all working very hard to make sure everything goes well and the company makes lots of money.”
Ganoff’s off-work working habits are not unusual in these days of economic ferment, labor shortages and never-ending corporate cutbacks.
In a recent survey of more than 5,000 executives by Management Recruiters International Inc., a Cleveland-based search firm, 82% confessed that they end up working during their vacations.
What’s more, 28% admitted that they kept in touch with the office by telephone and 13% said they usually checked their e-mail during days off. About 13% have cut vacations short because of work.
“A high percentage of people do stay in touch with their offices,” said Mike Bryant, manager of the Culver City office of Management Recruiters International.
“The economy is percolating at such a fast pace,” said Bryant, who recently interrupted a four-day weekend to reschedule job interviews. “Workloads have increased and you have to stay in touch so you don’t fall behind.”
But employees--no matter where they are in the organization--can be harmed by constant work, said Nancy Mellinger, an Inland Empire human resources consultant who is president-elect of the Professionals in Human Resources Assn., a 4,000-member group based in Los Angeles.
“We know that it’s important for a company to have their people take vacations,” Mellinger said. “People get burned out . . . and the company also needs them to go on vacation” so that company officials know that the business can operate without them. Security experts note that one reason an employee might not want to take a vacation is that illegal activities may be uncovered during his or her absence.
Human resources experts gathered by the Conference Board business group said the technology that has improved productivity and made telecommuting possible can also tether employees to their offices, though perhaps not by formal policy.
The endless workday “is partly management-driven, even if managers don’t realize they’re driving it,” said Deborah Parkinson, a research associate at the Conference Board who wrote a report in December on technology’s impact on the work/life balance.
Parkinson said it is important for managers to set boundaries.
“The culture has to change,” she said. Managers should start by, while they’re at home or on vacation, resisting the urge to send e-mail to subordinates, she said.
As for Greg Ganoff, he insists that he enjoys his job selling imaging products to hotels, cruise lines and other tourism operations so much that some spillover during vacation is not a problem.
“If my kids didn’t see the cell phone in my ear or didn’t see Dad on the laptop when they woke up in the morning,” he said, “they’d think something was wrong.”
