Out-of-office alert! Or how the holidays bring stress to your employees.

22 June 2022

5 minuten

Nearly 2 out of 3 employees (62%!) are stressed out before the holiday really starts. You would think that simply setting up automated out-of-office mails just before the holidays would bring ultimate peace of mind for your employees. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Discover in our blog post how you can reduce that stress.

"I am on holiday. I will get back to you as soon as possible. For urgent matters, you can reach me on my phone. "

You would think that setting up that automatic mail for your employees would bring ultimate peace of mind. Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost 2 out of 3 employees (62%!) are stressed out before the holiday really starts. They want to finish their list and hand everything over to their colleagues. This has been shown by a study conducted in Belgium by Protime, in cooperation with Wavemakers and Ivox.

And this out-of-office appears not to be entirely a 'I'm on holiday, please leave me alone' attitude. Some examples:

- Only 40% of employees are able to completely let go of work.

- 14% take their work phone calls during the entire holiday.

- And another quarter (27%) choose to answer the most urgent calls.

- On top of that, 40% of employees keep a close eye on their incoming e-mails.

- And another 8% answer every mail.

You can't really call that relaxing.

Hybrid work, a well installed home office (thank you, corona!), established collaborative work tools (such as Teams, Zoom,...) and on point technology offer employees a lot of individual freedom. But for many, it also caused a blurring between work and private life. And thus also resulted in such shocking figures.

As an employer, you must make sure that every colleague takes his or her well-earned rest. This demarcation between work and private life is crucial. Not every colleague has this under control. The employer can therefore play a major role here.

1. Set a good example. Make sure you have a good backup and respond as little as possible to e-mails and phone calls.

2. Ensure that clear rules about holidays (and overtime) become part of your company culture. If the holiday periods are clearly respected in your company, your staff will also feel inhibited to answer an e-mail or phone call while on holiday. And rightly so, because everyone deserves that well-earned rest after weeks and months of concentration and effort.

3. Make the number of hours worked by your employee transparent. Through time registration, the employee can see how much he or she has already worked. This allows him/her to put the brakes on in time or to indicate that the workload is becoming too high. As a manager, you can also monitor and intervene in time, for example by agreeing on priorities, or by passing on a project to someone else.

4. Spend time on an awareness campaign, giving your colleagues concrete tips on how they can prepare for their holiday. Think for example about setting up an out-of-office in time, avoiding important meetings just before and after a holiday and the usefulness of a written handover document.

At certain times of the year (during the summer, the end of the year or the school holidays), it is not always easy to know who is working and who is not. Especially when teleworking, it is sometimes even more complicated to keep track of colleagues' availability.

With myProtime, everything becomes simpler and more transparent: managers and employees have quick and easy access to the calendar of their teams, but also to that of the rest of the company. This gives everyone a real overview of the absences and holidays of the various employees.

With just a few clicks, you know who is on leave, when and for how long. This enables managers to organize their teams and employees to know when they can and cannot call on their colleagues (and thus not disturb them during their holidays).

All requests are centralized and easily accessible to both managers and employees. There is no need to submit a written request or send an e-mail, just a few clicks to send and approve a holiday request.

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