You might think that a long vacation is the way to beat job burnout. But the kind of vacation you have is just as important – if not more important – than its length, concludes Prof. Dov Eden, an organisational psychologist from Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Management.
“Using work cell phones and checking company email at the poolside is not a vacation,” Prof. Eden says. “People who do this are shackled to electronic tethers, which in my opinion is little different from being in jail.”
For the past ten years, Prof. Eden has been studying respite effects, which measure relief from chronic job stress before, during, and after vacations away from the workplace.
Electronic connectivity exacts a price from those who stay wired into the office while away from work. It marks the end of true respite relief, and is a cause of chronic job stress.
“If I were a manager, I would insist that my employees leave their cell phones at work during vacation and not check their email while away,” Prof. Eden warns.
“In the long run, the employee will be better rested and better able to perform his or her job because true respite affords an opportunity to restore depleted psychological resources.”
The key to a quality vacation is to put work at a distance, and keep it there
“Employees who feel compelled to be at the beck and call of work at all times are unlikely to recover from the ill-effects of chronic job stress. This is a causal chain that eventually gets internalised as psychological and behavioural responses that can bring on serious chronic disease.”
Recently Prof. Eden surveyed 800 professors from eight universities in Israel, the United States, and New Zealand. He measured stress and strain before, during, and after a sabbatical leave of a semester or a whole year.
He found that those who took a long sabbatical break experienced about the same amount of relief (and returned to pre-sabbatical levels of stress and strain in just about the same amount of time) as people who had taken either a week-long or long-weekend vacation.
Whether a vacation was as short as a long weekend or as long as a year, within three weeks back at work (and possibly even before that), the respite-relief effect had virtually washed out, Prof. Eden observed.
“Among many employees we have studied over the years we have found that those who detach from their back-home work situation benefit the most from their respite,” says Prof. Eden.
“Moreover, these individuals are probably less likely to experience job burnout. It’s the ones who can’t detach from the constant flow of job demands that are most likely to burnout.”
Prof. Eden’s most recent findings were presented at the last biannual meeting of Work, Stress and Health in Miami, an event sponsored by the American Psychological Association.
Adapted from materials provided by Tel Aviv University.
