All Work and No Play? No Way

Like many Americans, Maris Friedman finds it hard to completely chill out on vacation. A senior manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles, Friedman says it usually takes her “a few days to decompress,” and she finds herself checking her office e-mail daily.

To discourage such behavior, the accounting giant shuts down its U.S. operations between Christmas and New Year’s, giving virtually all employees the time off with pay. Friedman calls the hiatus “fantastic. No one’s on e-mail, there are no phone calls, no nothing.”

Worried about employee burnout and turnover, some employers are forcing workers to take the vacation time they are entitled to. Determined to take some of the “labor” out of Labor Day and other holidays, employers are encouraging these workaholics to switch off their cellphones and log out of e-mail while they’re away.

Some employers even go a step further -- giving weaker performance reviews or lower pay raises to those who don’t make use of their allotted time. The 400 employees of the American Management Assn., for example, risk being dinged for poor time management, said Manny Avramidis, head of human resources for the New York-based training group.

One Chicago hotel offers to help electronically addicted vacationers relax by locking up their cellphones and laptops during their stay.

But it’s a tough sell. With companies thinly staffed and employees under the gun to do more with less, “vacation” has become another word for “remote work site.”

“Organizations are very lean now, and without adequate staffing the idea of coming back from vacation to a disaster is very upsetting,” said Ophelia Galindo, a health and benefits consultant for Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

For some employees, a “post-recession fear” of being laid off keeps them at their desks, said Jennifer Sullivan, a spokeswoman for CareerBuilder.com, an online job search firm partly owned by Tribune Co., parent firm of the Los Angeles Times.

The U.S. may be the only industrialized nation that has no mandated national holidays or vacation period that private employers are compelled by law to recognize. Labor Day, for example, is a national holiday, but employers have discretion on whether to let workers have it off.

On top of that, Americans get fewer paid days off, from 10 to 14 annually on average, than workers in any other industrialized nation, according to various surveys. By contrast, the French and Austrians loll about for six weeks or more each year, and even the industrious Japanese and Chinese have more than three weeks.

American workers give many of those vacation days back. About a third of Americans routinely tell researchers they don’t use all the time coming to them. And past surveys indicate that of those who pack up the minivan, half are likely to sneak a peek at their e-mail or lug their laptop poolside.

“Workers are stuck in a vise grip between spiraling workweeks, lengthening work hours and shrinking vacations and time off,” said Joe Robinson, a Santa Monica-based business consultant. What he calls a real vacation -- time physically and electronically disconnected from work -- is becoming “an endangered species.”

Vacation neglect has consequences, experts say. Overworked employees are more likely to make mistakes and resent their bosses and co-workers, said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. They’re also in poorer health and more likely to be depressed, she said.

Companies are “definitely seeing higher productivity” from employees who know when to stop compared with those toiling nights and weekends, said Juan Garcia, director of research services for Employers Group, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm focusing on California companies. “There’s a point of no gain” when workers have gone too long without time off, he said.

In addition to compounding worker stress, unused vacation time represents a major liability for companies whose employees can cash out banked days when they leave.

In its 2006 Vacation Deprivation survey, Expedia.com estimated that Americans failed to use 574 million vacation days over the last year, worth about $75.72 billion based on workers’ average hourly earnings.

As a result, many companies have moved to a use-it-or-lose-it policy in recent years. Some lump vacation with sick days in a time-off bank that employees can draw on for any reason during the year -- but they lose unused days. In its 2005 benefits survey, Mercer Human Resource Consulting found that 39% of companies offer such accounts, up from 35% in 2001.

Robinson, the Santa Monica business consultant, takes a dim view of these time-off banks “because they hold vacation hostage to your health.” He adds: “For people with a chronic illness or an accident, it can wipe out your vacation.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers already had a use-it-or-lose-it policy by 2003, but many employees still wouldn’t take their allotted time off, said Jennifer Allyn, a human resource manager for the firm. As an experiment, the company decided to shut down U.S. operations between Dec. 24, 2003, and Jan. 2, 2004, with just a skeleton crew on call for emergencies.

“The CEO was inundated with thank-you notes,” Allyn recalled.

The shutdown was so popular, she said, that PricewaterhouseCoopers has done it each year since, either over the Christmas holiday season or around the Fourth of July.

After opening a financial planning practice in 1981, Ron Kelemen found that work was taking over his life. The resident of Salem, Ore., credits a strategic coaching program he took with boosting his productivity and reviving his passion for business by helping him set boundaries.

A few years ago, Kelemen started taking Fridays off to bike or backpack. He volunteers at a school and meets his wife for lunch.

“It worked so well for me that I started feeling guilty, so I tried to expand it,” he said.

His five employees now have pretty much the same deal. On top of staffers getting 18 vacation days a year, the office closes at noon on Fridays and Kelemen gives them additional paid days off before or after major holidays.

During annual performance reviews in December, he learned that “the extra time off was the most valued perk.” He also noticed that “all of a sudden people weren’t getting sick anymore.”

Moreover, Kelemen believes it has helped his bottom line.

“We may sound like a bunch of slackers,” but, he said, his asset base is growing faster than those of his competitors.

Office manager Lani Moore says the schedule motivates her to work harder during office hours.

For some workers who don’t take all their vacation, it’s a “status thing” to work constantly -- or at least appear to be working, said Peter Rose, a partner with the marketing research firm Yankelovich Inc.

“If you’re walking through a hotel lobby on the phone, for some people that says, ‘I’m important. I’m going to let you know that I’m needed by someone else,’ ” he said.

Rick Ueno has a suggestion for those folks: Hand over your BlackBerry and chill out.

Ueno, who manages the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, offers to lock away your cellphone, pager and any other gadget tethering you to the office.

A “recovering BlackBerry addict,” Ueno said he gave up the popular mobile communication device months ago because it stressed him out and annoyed his wife and son. He now carries a basic cellphone instead and says he’s much calmer.

Ueno said he was flooded with supportive e-mails after he announced his offer in June. But he’s had only six takers so far. One was an executive whose secretary had called ahead, begging Ueno to order the man to turn in his BlackBerry.

“We had a good laugh over it” when the man arrived, Ueno recalled. The executive did hand over his device but bailed it out a couple of hours later.

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molly.selvin@latimes.com

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Begin text of infobox

There’s room at the inn

Americans are entitled to fewer vacation days than workers in other developed countries and give back more time as well.

United States:

Number of vacation days -- 4, vacation days not taken -- 14

Australia:

Number of vacation days -- 2, vacation days not taken -- 17

Canada

Number of vacation days -- 2, vacation days not taken -- 19

Britain

Number of vacation days -- 1, vacation days not taken -- 24

Germany

Number of vacation days -- 1, vacation days not taken -- 27

France

Number of vacation days -- 2, vacation days not taken -- 39

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Source: Expedia.com

Statistics are based on the mean of all employed adults