Spring Break Series: America’s Weird Relationship With Time Off

As I’m writing this it is mid-March. I have enough friends and clients with kids to know that Spring Break season is nearly upon us.

From college down to day care, it is common in the U.S. for there to be some sort of week-long break around now. Teachers are trying not to lose their minds, students are getting antsy because the school year isn’t done yet, but it’s close.

For parents who work, Spring Break can mean a fun family adventure OR a very stressful interruption to well-established patterns of school drop-off, weekly activities, and the knowledge that your kids are out of the house from roughly 8am – 3pm. Hang in there, ya’ll.

While I was mapping out the first half of this essay project, my treatise on PTO emerged as Essay #15 in the series. Calendar-wise it matched up with Spring Break season, and I thought – let’s make this a series!

Taking an equitable approach to paid time off is something my clients often ask me to help them re-imagine. There seem to be material, relational, and symbolic landmines afoot when trying to navigate time off from work in a culture that conflates “number of minutes your ass is in your chair” with company loyalty, ambition, and “leadership qualities.”

So here we go! I am proud to present my 2024 Spring Break Series as an interstitial offering inside my broader Essay Project.

Over the next five weeks, one-by-one, I will write an essay each on the following:

1. American PTO, generally

2. Sick Leave

3. Holidays

4. Vacation, and

5. Bereavement

I hope you find each helpful, and packed with actionable items you can use to shift both your policies and cultural approach to the simple reality that workers need time off.

Alright, so America’s strange approach to PTO, generally. It’s a love/hate relationship. Or if we were trying to share this on Facebook, we might tag our relationship status as “it’s complicated.” Theoretically, we are a culture that likes play. We value fun, joy, reckless abandon, and sometimes that comes in the form of vacations. Either epic road trips, weekend adventures, or even long planned plane trips that take us somewhere memorable to do something Instagram-able.

All that said, “On average, US workers receive about 10 days of paid time off per year, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. This is significantly less than what workers in other developed countries receive.”

Years ago, I crafted a tool we titled “Taking An Equitable Approach to Paid Time Off.” At the top of that tool, I wrote that taking a wise approach to Paid Time Off will require, first, that you re-ground in your goals.

“The PURPOSE of providing paid time off to your employees:

a) You want your workers to be well. Some time off is required to promote and preserve wellness (ex. physical health, mental health, emotional health, motivation, creativity, rest, restoration). When your workers are well, they are more capable of doing good work.

b) You want to retain staff. More and more, the modern American workforce is really clear that they value their time, and flexibility of their schedules a great deal. For some, time is reported as even more important in selecting an employer than salary.

c) You want adults to be able to make choices that work best for them. Of course different days in the year are important to different staff in different ways and for different reasons. Equity is centered on the understanding that different people need and want different things. Offering workers choices in their days off helps ensure that they get the time they need when they need it most.”

Unfortunately, after reading over 100 organization’s staff handbooks, time off language reads to me as though American workplaces are in near constant fear of a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” playing hooky type situation. PTO policies I’ve read are chalked full of phrases and tone that might as well just say, “We’re afraid you might be a lying liar who lies to us.”

Whoa. Deep breath. I get it. Americans (myself included) have a cultural allergy to being taken advantage of. We do not want to get screwed. Additionally, we suck at rest, restoration, and holidays. And it’s clear why – capitalism.

Capitalism, colonialism, competition, and a culture driven by a Protestant Work Ethic, the U.S. workforce has long had a not particularly subtle undercurrent akin to “The Hunger Games” – a Darwinian “only the strong survive” type of vibe.

No wonder workers are afraid to take time off! And no wonder workplaces are unpracticed at treating workers like fallible human beings who cannot simply keep going like automatons.

Changing our practices around Paid Time Off will require a number of paradigms shifts on our part. In good news, in my opinion, these shifts are supported by logic that most of us can grasp and believe:

o Just because we work a lot, does not mean we are being more impactful.

o There are diminishing returns – more days working in a row or more weeks without time off comes with the eventual consequence that we make mistakes and what we produce and do suffers. Our quality of work actually decreases.

o Decision-fatigue, compassion-fatigue, bodily fatigue all limits our ability to be creative, innovative, or good problem-solvers.

For part one of this five-part Spring Break Series, I’d like to leave you with some wisdom from a booklet I keep on my bookshelf. It’s entitled “How to Relax” and is 116 tiny pages accompanied by simple, yet evocative line drawings. These are teachings from the famed monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. From page 10:

“RESTING

Whenever animals in the forest are wounded, they rest. They look for a very quiet place and just stay there without moving for many days. They know it’s the best way for their body to heal. During this time they may not even eat or drink. The wisdom of stopping and healing is still alive in animals, but we human beings have lost the capacity to rest.”

Next week I’ll dig in on Sick Leave, followed by Holidays, Vacation, and Bereavement. Between now and then I highly recommend you do some of your own reflection on your relationship to rest – to time off – to “productivity” in general. Once we understand where our own excitement and resistance are coming from, we can open up to new ideas that might serve ourselves and our communities much better.

As always, you are welcome to reach out (trina@trinaolson.com) if you’d like coaching and support around putting better PTO policies into practice. I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned!

Yours,