What is quiet vacationing and how do you stop it from happening on your team?

Good morning and welcome back to Managing Made Simple. Today I am launching something kind of fun. This is Wednesday Trends Day and this is where I’m going to look at a workplace trend that’s happening and comment on what it’s about and what we can do about it as people managers, team leaders, and business owners. So I’m going to pop over literally right now to Google News and type in workplace. Let’s see. What is trending right now?

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature ops playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.

From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Okay. So we’ve got busy bragging. Interesting. Okay. We’ve got some workplace safety stuff. We got, okay. Quiet vacationing. Let me see what this is. I’ve heard about this, but I want to describe it to you. So quiet vacationing is described as employees taking vacations without formally announcing or completely disconnecting for work.

This trend is particularly prevalent amongst millennials reshaping workplace dynamics. Okay. Quiet vacationing. This is what we’re talking about today. Now, quiet vacationing, just like with all these kind of other trends that started probably on TikTok or somewhere else, quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, all of that, you know, I think the biggest problem with these trends is we hear something and then we feel like we have permission to do it, even if it puts our job at risk.

So I would say anyone that’s a manager or not that’s thinking about doing this to think, hey, just because there’s a lot of people doing this, or this has gotten media attention, it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Okay. So first of all, now quiet vacationing, this is, like we said, taking time off without notifying anyone or without fully unplugging. So this is going to be more prevalent with a remote workforce or a hybrid workforce. And in that situation, there’s already a lot of strain on trust, on really understanding, you know, what the status of work is, where folks are at.

You’re really, you’re relying on a lot to, a lot of assumptions we made that, hey, when someone’s on the clock, they’re working, they’re focused, they’re in an environment that they can actually be really, you know, dedicated to the work. And when they’re off, they’re actually unplugging and they’re taking that time. So quiet vacationing in and of itself really breaks that trust down. So it’s problematic for that. Now I’d also say, so let’s talk about actually the two sides.

So from the employee side and in digging into some of these articles a little bit more, it says, you know, it’s a recipe for burnout, right? If we’re not really unplugging or we feel like we have to be checking emails and logging into meetings while on vacation, then we’re not really able to disconnect. We kind of can start to feel like we can never step away. It starts to lead to burnout. And that’s not good for the employee experience.

But managing made simple is really about managers and what we’ve got to deal with to manage a team and lead a team effectively. And I would say it’s a way bigger problem for the employer, for the leader. Because when, again, we don’t know that when someone, you know, when we have a remote team member or someone’s not physically in the office and we’re relying on them to get their work done, there is an assumption made that they are in a place that they can do that.

And quiet vacationing, which means, you know, hey, I’m going to go where I want to go. I’m going to take the time off. It starts to lead to folks saying, oh, I’m going to be camera off for that meeting because they’re actually not somewhere they can be working. We’re working from our phone instead of actually in the right environment to really deliver results. And it gets the job to be this place that’s very transactional, right? Where, yeah, we might be getting it done.

We might be physically, like, logged into a Zoom meeting. But are we able to fully participate? Are we able to think bigger than the task at hand? Because right when we shut the laptop or go off the phone, we’re going back to the vacation. We’re hopping back in the pool, right? So, it’s not it’s not the pact we’ve made with our team members, right? Now, if you are in the habit of reaching out to your team members over text, over email, scheduling meetings and things that they have to be on when they are on vacation, well, that’s a different thing to work through around boundaries and what are your working norms if you have a team where someone does have to be on call.

Maybe, you know, you are you have an engineering team and there’s folks that have to be kind of supporting around the clock. PR companies, right, or event planning, there’s sometimes moments when you have to be available, right? Medical, right? Okay, there’s all there’s reasons. And that I would say your team members understand this. We’re talking about a situation where folks just are like, yeah, I’m going to try to do the best of both worlds. Now, I think because we have so many ways to connect with technology, it can feel like, well, why do I have to take days off?

I don’t have I don’t have any meetings today. I’m fine. I’ll be looking at it. And I think I would really encourage you as managers to really talk about your expectations. Okay, what does it actually mean to be working? What are the kinds of things folks should do between meetings with idle time? And that’s why in my Ops Playbook program, we really spell out all of those norms and expectations. We talk about, hey, when you’re on vacation to fully unplug, we spell that out.

When are we communicating? What modes are we using? You know, when is something escalated? When would a kind of urgent text come through? We spell that out so that it’s not a surprise and folks are on different pages because these little communication breakdowns, that’s what leads to things like quiet vacationing where people think like, well, no one’s going to notice. Now, another thing that could lead to quiet vacationing is not giving people enough time off. Okay, if someone literally has two weeks a year and that has to be included for things like doctor’s appointments or kids’ music recitals or, I mean, my preschooler has all these half days and they get thrown on you with one day notice.

If we’re having to take vacation for things like that, folks may feel like they have to be taking more time away and balancing themselves. Then it’s a working norms conversation around asynchronous work. Okay, how do we carve out time so folks can sort of manage all of the competing responsibilities as a person living in this world trying to get everything done? So, quiet vacationing, kind of to wrap up where we’re at. This is something that I think starts to happen when we don’t really have clear norms around, you know, what’s expected of a full-time job, of a good job, of being physically present, of really being proactive, thinking beyond the task.

And we get people clear on that by having conversations about that and by really connecting the dots for people between their job, what it looks like to fully solve a problem, what you do when you are between sort of tasks, like where the rut, how we know what to work on next. There’s a lot of things that we can do to fill those gaps. It also is prevented by setting very clear work life, work kind of life boundaries and honoring those, right?

And giving people the space, encouraging them to take vacation, stepping away yourself, right? Not reaching out to folks at night and weekends unless you have some kind of conversations around that, like we already talked about. And it really is about re-establishing trust with your team members. I think, you know, the more we have trust and the more they feel bought in, the less they’re going to try to say like, screw this, I’m just gonna like, you know, dial in from wherever I am.

That is, that to me and, you know, maybe it’s because I’m an elder millennial, right? That I think this way and I’m happy to share other opinions on it. But it is it does come down to a feeling of like, I’m taking something back for myself. And if someone’s coming at it like that, that means there’s an opportunity to reinvest and re-engage that person. And I think it is really problematic. I think we’re, we’re seeing more and more folks wanting to have more boundaries and more time and we have to show up for them.

We have to have a conversation around what that looks like. We’re seeing high turnover when we don’t honor those boundaries and that’s really expensive. But I think this is not something that, you know, is going to be good for a small business, for establishing trust, for productivity. If, if we keep seeing trends like this, all it’s going to do is to further degrade that trust. So we want to get ahead of it. So let’s all commit to have conversations around quiet vacationing.

Summer is coming. We got to sort this out and we got to make sure that we feel like, hey, I know where my teams are, where stuff is at. I know the status of work. I know what’s going on without having to micromanage. Well, that comes through lightweight systems and conversations. Okay. Two things I could very much help you with if you’re feeling stuck. All right. Quiet vacationing. That was our trend for my first Wednesday Trends Day, and I will see you next time.

That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.