Sun, sea, sand and mobile phone calls from work — give us a break

SOME people are really organised.

You know yourself, the ones who send you an email telling you they’re off on holidays until such-and-such a date.

You respond immediately to wish them well, and up pops a message saying this is an automatic response because they’ve taken their bucket and spade and gone right there and then.

Will it bother them to come back from vacation to a series of messages like yours sitting sadly in their inbox?

Not at all. These are the folks who have their work/life in balance, whose labrador is in a good kennel and who don’t worry about roaming charges because they even turn off their mobile phone.

They don’t click on Breakingnews.ie every five minutes while they’re away either. Nor do they buy newspapers from home while overseas.

They shut down; abandon ship; forget the workaday world; devote themselves to recreation, rediscovery and recovery from the tough year they’ve had. They are healthy, integrated, sensible. They have their priorities right. You have to hate them.

The rest of us just transfer the day job to a different location and time zone. More sunshine, less sleep, because if a client rings you at nine, their time, it may be three or four in the morning, your time. Interestingly, the callers tend to note the funny overseas tone on a mobile phone, but rightly figure that if you pick up, you’re on the job. The person taking the call feels indispensable and deeply virtuous.

They may need to take a long, hard look at that feeling. Evidence is emerging that failure to take holidays — real holidays, that is — may not only be bad for you, but may demonstrate that you’re not really that productive anyway.

Of course, the very idea of long summer holidays developed at a time when holidays didn’t mean much anyway. It just meant the kids could be got out of school for six weeks or so, to help with the harvest.

From their point of view, it was better than algebra, but then, anything would be better than algebra. Does algebra still happen to unfortunate school-goers? I do hope not. Any time I feel put upon by life, all I ever have to do is say to myself: “This is better than algebra,” and I become wreathed in smiles.

Taking the young ones out of school and putting them baling hay was a healthy break from the sedentary studies they did for the rest of the year. But not everybody had a harvest to bring in, so generations of city folk rented summer houses or caravans and took off for as long as they could, the breadwinner husband visiting at weekends and settling in for most of August.

Our family went to Laytown mostly, although one year we went to Skerries — the stony beach side, now that you ask — which was lovely, except that the people who rented us their house lived at the bottom of the garden in a kind of a shed.

Never mind fairies: there were landlords at the bottom of our garden, and it took the edge off our summer delight, knowing they were down there with their clothes hanging off ceiling hooks, sleeping on camp beds and fighting with each other because of domestic over-crowding. They seemed happy enough, but we figured they were just putting up a good front.

Back then, holidays happened. They happened at a set time for almost everybody.

Choice was not much of an issue. You went to foreign places if you were rich or had relatives there, you went to a seaside hotel or caravan if you couldn’t afford air flights, or you might stay at home and go to the beach a lot. The one thing you didn’t ever do was go to work. Indeed, those were the days when, if you were lucky enough to work in a bank, failure to go on holiday lit up a red light in your manager’s head that perhaps you might have got a little of the bank’s money mixed up with your own and were afraid to leave your till in case your replacement found out what you’d been at and how you’d funded your trips to the bookies’ shop.

TODAY, holidays, for many people, do not have the boundaries they used to. Particularly if you’re South Korean. If you’re South Korean, not only do you work an average of 2,250 hours a year — at least 400 more than we do in this part of the world — but you get just 11 days’ annual leave.

Up to now, South Koreans didn’t bother much with taking those 11 days in one chunk. They sprinkled their time off throughout the year, apparently because of the workplace culture where wage slaves are afraid that if you take a holiday and aren’t missed, this will be taken as evidence that you weren’t really necessary in the first place.

Increasingly, however, employers in that part of the world are insisting that their people take real holidays, rather than long weekends throughout the year, and that they don’t sneak into the company’s computers by long distance while they’re away.

The Shinhan Financial Group in Seoul, for example, has brought in a system which prevents their people from accessing the computer network at work while they’re on vacation.

Shinhan Financial Group would be a bit exceptional in this. A global survey just published by Robert Half, a recruitment company, found that huge numbers of people in countries including Chile, Russia, Hungary and Poland — where staff work longer hours than people in western Europe — tend to link up with work via the internet when they’re ostensibly on holiday.

They may do it because they’re bored on holiday. They may do it because work is their addiction — remember Noel Coward’s comment that “work is more fun than fun”? Or they may do it as a way of managing their bosses’ expectations, since those who stay connected would appear to be in lockstep with employer demands.

“People from Singapore and Hong Kong were regularly connected to work during their vacation time,” Ted Hird of the recruitment firm said. “And over 90% of employers expected their employees to be available and connected during their holiday period.”

Now, we all know that Singapore is a model of productivity, has no chewing gum on its streets and generally ticks like a clock. But the interesting thing is that South Korea, where they work at least as hard and are entitled to less than half the annual leave accorded to workers in Singapore, has an appalling productivity rate. The BBC says it’s one of the lowest among the OECD’s members.

According to a book entitled The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, a 20-year study of working women found that the ones who took fewest vacations were twice as likely to get a heart attack as those who took the most.

“Overall, infrequent vacationers had a 20% higher risk of dying from any cause,” says the book’s author, Tony Schwartz.

Maybe, in the interests of productivity and survival, more of us should take real holidays.