Working from home due to the novel coronavirus pandemic has blurred the boundaries between work and life more than ever. And the fact that businesses were all suffering the recent, and still ongoing, economic downturn meant that working for more hours is becoming more of an obligation than an extra milestone. Losing one’s job during those times of soaring unemployment and salary cuts isn’t really an option for a lot of employees either, so, they can’t really complain. And to add insult to injury, the corona-accelerated digitization of many things in work will make it possible for a lot of people to work during holidays and vacations as well, and that’s a bad idea.
Why is it a bad idea? We have evidence-based answers for you right here… And if it’s completely unavoidable, we also have a couple of tips for you!
3 Persuasive Reasons to Completely Disconnect Form Work During Vacations and Holidays
1. Intrinsic Motivation
To be intrinsically motivated is to feel energized towards what you do because you’re interested and have the will to do it. Working during holidays and weekends, research conducted by Harvard Business Review suggests, reduces your intrinsic motivation. And that’s not good for productivity.
Whether you’re an employee or you’re someone deciding when employees work, working during time off will make work less engaging and meaningful and hence negatively affect its quality.
2. Recovery and Well-Being
This may seem like common sense, but there are studies that support it. A paper published by Jessica De Bloom of Tampere University’s department of psychology shows that — although its effects aren’t permanent — vacations of different sizes and holidays help you recover and improve your well-being in general.
Results of another study backs that up. It found that even one short-term vacation can reward you with “large, positive and immediate effects on perceived stress, recovery, strain, and well-being. And these rewards last for at least a month post-vacation.
“What neuroscience is showing is that we require down time in order for our bodies to go through the process of restoration,” said clinical psychologist Deborah Mulhern to ABC News. “Without time and opportunity to do this, the neural connections that produce feelings of calm and peacefulness become weaker, making it actually more difficult to shift into less-stressed modes.”
Evidently, working during vacation will negatively impact you health..
3. Productivity and Getting Ahead at Work
Professor of organizational psychology at the University of Mannheim in Germany, Sabine Sonnentag, concluded that an inability to take time off of work carries the baggage of burnout and hence reduced productivity with it.
Furthermore, although it doesn’t apply to all professions, economists have found out that the most productive factory workers who work a lot more than 48 hours per week have a much lower productivity..
Time Off, a research group funded by the U.S. Travel Association, found in 2016 report that a correlation between taking 11 or more vacation days per year and receiving a raise or a bonus exists for U.S. employees.
So, the main lesson here is clear: taking time off of work will help your health and productivity in general. Not doing so can fling you into burnout and the negative mental and physical health impact of stress.
What If You Have To?
If you absolutely have to do some work during your vacation days, you should take notes from Harvard Business Review’s studies on the matter. In one study, they told one group of people working on a Saturday, “People usually use weekends to catch up or get ahead with their work” and the other group were told that, “People usually use weekends to relax and take a break from work.”
What made the first group more engaged and interested in their work, according to these studies, was that they mentally labelled the time off of work they labored in as “work time”.
Sadly, evidence on the effect of vacations and holidays on our health, productivity and career advancement are scanty if at all existent for employees in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
Do you believe the above studies aren’t applicable at all for employees in Egypt or the MENA region because of their differing work cultures and traditions? Tell us what you think?
