(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) With the Memorial Day weekend kicking off the vacation and travel season, as well as the opening of many a swimming pool, a recent report suggested that some remote workers might be giving their employers the short shrift while enjoying extra holiday benefits.
The Harris Poll, a market research and consulting firm, revealed the growing trend of “quiet vacationing” in a recent analysis on “out of office culture.”
It follows the confluence of several recent fads, such as the “quiet quitting” of workers in the milllennial generation (ages 28-43), and younger professionals entering the workforce with a growing sense of entitlement.
Employers, on the other hand, may be increasingly seeking to exploit their workers for lower wages than their market value as the economy struggles under the boot of Bidenflation. Despite claims of robust employment and spending, only a select few governments subsidized sectors of the economy have continued to grow, and many of the new jobs have benefited non-citizens.
Faced with rising overhead costs and reduced revenue from belt-tightening customers, the first impulse for some may be to promote a “do more with less” mentality to the office culture that relies heavily on unpaid overtime hours, for instance, or non-vacations in which the employee is still called upon to work.
Roughly 60% of workers struggle to disconnect while away from the office, and about two-thirds said they dreaded the buildup that awaited them upon their return if there were nobody there to cover the absence.
Those circumstances helped to foster last year’s phenomenon known as “quiet quitting,” in which some employees focus on meeting the bare-minimum expectation without the same allegiance toward company success that has characterized past generations of workers.
Meanwhile, the growing trend toward fluid worksites and work schedules that developed during the pandemic means that some employees, feeling they have already earned their keep, may decide to bypass the process for seeking paid time off and simply continue to clock in while on vacation.
“There’s a giant workaround culture at play,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at The Harris Poll.
Roughly 40% of the 1,170 employees surveyed for its recent research confessed to taking unauthorized time off without telling their boss, as CNBC reported.
“They will figure out how to get appropriate work–life balance, but it’s happening behind the scenes,” Rodney noted.
In response, some companies have moved to an “unlimited PTO” model or using other creative strategies designed to enhance productivity while relying on a PTO system that provides for sufficient recovery.
In some cases, that ironically has led companies to things like mandatory time off.
Many employees report being satisfied with the amount of time off that is provided by their companies with roughly three-fourths of respondents, especially younger workers, saying they did not use all of their allotted time off.
About 63% said the pressure to meet deadlines and maintain productivity had deterred them from using more of their time, while about half said they got nervous requesting time off.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
