Holidays are for travelling
My in-laws were two incredibly organised people. When my wife was little, they had two fixed trips every year. In September, they went to the island of Aruba and at the end of the year they travelled to Orlando, in the United States, and took the opportunity to visit part of their family who lived there.
The holiday trip was something they worked for all year long. It was the biggest thing they planned in advance. They had timeshare accommodation and were really looking forward to relaxing and having fun.
The pandemic presented a problem: no one could travel. What was the point of taking a holiday if I couldn’t go anywhere?
It turns out that even today I have seen this belief in several people. They don’t take holidays because they can’t travel.
Essential staff
Another situation I have seen occur is that of essential staff. I am a firm believer that everyone should be able to go on holiday and that work teams should be prepared to cover for those who are temporarily absent, but this is not always the case.
I’ve seen teams where those who don’t have children are ‘penalised’. They always have to stay behind so that others can go out and enjoy their summer holidays. The problem is that they don’t go away at the wrong time or in the ‘low season’ either, because there’s always a lot to do.
Making yourself indispensable has many facets. It may be a lack of leadership, a failure to develop the necessary mechanisms for the rest of the team or processes to cope with the temporary absence of one person, but it may also be encouraged by the way the employee works, who does not favour automation or independence in key processes in exchange for a certain feeling of security and recognition.
Digital disconnection
It was relatively common for ‘indispensable’ people to stay in touch when they took holidays. They did not go to the office, but they were present from a distance, even maintaining some functions that they were not willing to delegate to someone else. These people remained ‘digitally connected’.
During the pandemic, something else happened: we couldn’t go out to work and we did everything digitally from home.
During this period, for many people, it made no sense to talk about holidays. There was nowhere to go. You couldn’t travel or have visitors. It was probably the period when we enjoyed our holidays the least.
Now, if you took a holiday but stayed connected, there was no difference. Your holiday was no longer about ‘not going to the office’ and had to become about not working remotely… you had to disconnect.
Attention is one of our most precious commodities. It is where we focus our minds. What problems we are solving. Who we are serving.
It is well known that a change of focus benefits many processes. A simple active break in the middle of the working day benefits our health and can make us more effective, avoiding the lethargy that comes with tiredness.
Similarly, disconnecting during our holidays will free up important space in our minds and make it available for other activities. Some may travel, others will take care of things at home or take up a partially forgotten hobby, but they will be able to do so fully and without distractions.
The importance of knowing how to delegate
As for what will happen at work, processes and people will benefit from taking on the space we are leaving behind. We can work to train our colleagues to take on key tasks and give them the vote of confidence they need to grow.
In the end, it is a decision, a vote of confidence to disconnect and believe that everything will be fine. Of course, for it to work, we have to do everything necessary to make it happen and perhaps take a leaf out of my in-laws’ book, setting ourselves the goal of taking a disconnected holiday.
