How many times have you heard your staff saying they have too much to do to take time off? Whether it’s not wanting to dump extra work on colleagues or worrying about the deluge of emails they’ll have to read through when they get back, it’s common for people to avoid taking a break altogether.
52% of American employees gave up unused vacation time in 2017, which is worrying considering the wealth of health benefits linked to doing so. Thankfully, there are ways to encourage your workforce to get away from their desk – such as introducing employee benefits that encourage financial wellness.
But what are the proven benefits of getting away from the workplace?
Stress reduction
We all need to be able to take time out for our bodies to relax and recover. Without these opportunities to unwind, we find it harder to produce feelings of calm, making it more and more difficult to de-stress.
Removing ourselves from the activities or environments that we associate with stress helps us to detach ourselves from those feelings. It’s not just work that we get away from when we go on vacation either – there’s things like school routines and cooking too, and taking a break from it all is proven to lower our levels of mental and physical stress.
Increased productivity
While many will think it’s counter-intuitive, taking time off often actually helps people to get more done. It’s normal to return from a vacation feeling refreshed and noticeably happier, and when we feel happier, we also tend to be more productive – and produce a higher quality of work.
There’s also an argument that knowing you’ll be spending less time at your desk forces you to be more productive in the time that you are there, too.
Better sleep
There are countless issues that affect sleep, but work-related stress is a big one. Working long hours and having too much on the brain makes it more difficult to switch off when you get into bed, but a change of pace can help us to get some much-needed shuteye.
Not having to set an alarm to get up helps, as does spending time resting around a pool or on a beach. Being able to reset our sleep patterns helps us to break bad habits, and with better sleep comes better moods, improved memory and more.
Enhanced creativity
Just as having different workspaces available to move between can help staff tackle difficult tasks and break down mental walls, travelling to a new environment on vacation forces us to step away from our routines and see the world differently.
Writers often cite how disconnecting from a piece of work and coming back to it later helps to provide clarity of thought, and the same goes for most types of work. A break is often all we need to approach tasks in new and creative ways.
If you notice your team isn’t using their vacation time, it might be time to encourage them to do so. After all, it could help your company out just as much as it does them.
