"Others goof off work, Indians, says new study, goof off holidays."
The latest study by Expedia, an online travel firm, shows interesting stats reflecting Indian behaviour towards vacations:
• Indians leave 20 percent of their vacations unused. 29 percent of Indians couldn’t plan their holidays due to work pressure.
• Fifty-three per cent of Indians regularly check in on their emails and work status even during vacations.
• 28 per cent Indian respondents said they would prefer getting paid for unused vacations.
The study concluded –
• Europeans and Brazilians treat holidays as necessity
• Japanese and Koreans treat holidays as rare treasure (since they hardly get it).
• And Indians view holidays with guilt habit.
Worrying symptoms as stress and burnout are reported among all categories of Indian employees. Now you know where it is all coming from! Recently when I did a session on ‘health and Stress Management’ for the Chief general Managers of Reserve Bank of India at Chennai I equated such symptoms with the parable of a boiled frog. The frog’s body cannot detect slow changes in temperature and hence if it is kept in a beaker containing water at room temperature and the water is slowly brought to a boiling-point the frog stays and doesn’t jump-out. The frog stays, stays and dies in the same water. Stress & burnout is also similar. It is a silent killer. Most of the times slow and gradual changes in stress-levels are not detected and suddenly one day the lid just blows-off.
Strangely, many times the organizations can do very little about it. I remember when Mr. Narayan Murthy of Infosys wanted his employees to go back from their office early, the employees themselves objected. Recently I have met so many people willing to work more and earn more in a very less time (even encash vacations!). There seems to be a mad-rush.
Talk about employee’s contribution to engagement? The cost of rising prosperity is too high.
4 comments:
Behind this practice where Indian's encash their vacation leaves or use their mobiles & laptops in vacation, we as HR professionals are somewhere responsible too.
1) We have made such policies which encourages the employees to get the cash benefit. If we can design the compensation structure where the same amount of money can be availed through some other incentive schemes or some cash benefit program disabling the paid vacations, then in such case the employees will not be lured to do so.
2) Why does an employee need to pick a call or a mail when he/she is in vacation? This reflects that there is improper talent pipeline, or succession planning is done.
a) A basic principle of creating high performance work culture is building a transparent talent pipeline which is more of a process driven rather than people "individual" driven.
b) Why don't we create teams which does not need any supervision?
Recently in Economic Times dated Dec 2nd on Page 9(career & business life), it was stated that a culture is being set where TEAMS working WITHOUT SUPERVISION at RPG. In fact this concept was first started by P& G followed by Dupont. Here the teams are trained & empowered to plan,execute & review their work. The teams review problems, brainstorm & come out with possible solutions themselves, therefore there is less or no supervision.
If we don't start anything, any alternative solutions then there will be time when we might need to wake up patient(supervisor/employee) from the hospital & make him/her answer the calls or reply to mails.. :)
Vacation means to break away from routine. If you "think the routine" during vacation you are not on a break . who needs break ? everyone ! IF they want to rejuvenate themselves to come back. Job/career is just one slice of the pie called life.
Poor planning at work, existence of teams that do not work together ( basically unmotivated employees who cannot share responsibilities ) , overestimating the capability of workers and poor time schedules ( poor managerial abilities) means the company has poor work culture.
Solutions : Plan to take a vacation. If your manager does not allow, it is time to move on to a different group. HR should make it mandatory that all workers should use up all vacation.
Break away
Hi Anrosh,
Break away or break down...the choices shall determine sustainability.
Thanks for commenting. Valuable.
Cheers,
Debashish
Dear Dev,
You have raised some very pertinent questions. However, sadly, answers do not seem to be coming. Everyone is in a mad-rush. Engagement priciples always advocate sustainability.
Cheers,
Debashish
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