Vacation Pragmatics
(This post is written from the perspective of the German labour work legislation, but applies in spirit elsewhere.)
What’s the value of vacation?
When employers request their employees to take as many as possible of their remaining vacation days in the current year instead of carrying them over into the coming year may give raise to that question. This is because some people have a habit of scheduling vacations in small bursts (say, sprinkle their vacation day budget over a multitude of single days), or of carrying over a vast amount of days into “next year”, and risking to lose some.
The value of vacation is to give employees time to rest. Properly rest. Take their minds off of work. As much as someone may enjoy their job (as do I), it’s simply healthy to not be concerned with it for an extended amount of time every now and then. Or to at least shift the focus of a major part of waking hours from work to something else (as do I - I’ll freely admit: I’m almost never 100 % offline).
This is why we have vacation days, and this is why the German federal vacation law (yes, there is such a thing) is very strict about them: employers need a good reason to deny a vacation request, vacation is to be granted contiguously, and it must be taken in the year it accrues in.
What’s a good reason for denying a vacation request? Urgent operational needs, for example. When the person requesting vacation is really necessary to get something done that is important to get done during the requested time. Say, a software release is scheduled, and the release manager doesn’t have anyone trained as a deputy. (There’s a job for the manager to do here as well, for sure.)
Contiguous vacation? Oh yes. It’s not considered proper resting if it’s scattered over multiple single days. It better be several week-long absences. No one is going to convince me otherwise - not taking proper time off will have an impact, even if it’s maybe delayed. Resting is an important component of burnout prevention.
Take it in the year it accrues in? Yup. Vacation days may only be carried over if the company really could not grant vacation to someone, or if the employee simply could not take vacation. There are few good reasons for both of these cases. The latter one is, especially, not justifiable by the plain desire to save some days.
Vacation is important. It really is. Let’s take it seriously.
Tags: work