Vacationers Bring Work Along
Despite the drawbacks, taking work along on vacation is a new fact of life for many people. Two recently released surveys bear out the trend that people are finding it harder to get away from work, reports HealthScoutNews. In addition, there is a physical price to pay for mixing pressure with pleasure.
CareerBuilder, a job search and recruitment firm, conducted one survey of more than 1,300 randomly selected workers. Just more than half of those polled say they plan to stay in touch with work while on vacation, up from 40 percent last year. A second survey of 645 business executives, conducted by the American Management Association (AMA), found that one-quarter of the executives planned to be in daily contact with the office while on vacation, and more than 60 percent planned to check in at least once a week.
Brooks Gump, an assistant professor of psychology at the State University of New York in Oswego, has researched the health benefits of vacationing. Mr. Gump’s study, part of a larger trial, included more than 12,000 middle-age men who were at high risk for heart disease. He found that the more often these men took annual vacations, the less likely they were to die from heart disease during a nine-year period.
Moderator Comment: Do you continue to do business
while on vacation? Should businesses discourage this in practice as well as
rhetoric?
There has been much made in recent years of the channel
blurring affect on retailing. You have also probably come across reports on
workers spending time on the job handling personal affairs. The simple fact
of the matter is that all of the lines of demarcation in American life are blurring.
For many of us, every day is a non-stop test of our time
management skills. Demands (personal, professional, self-imposed and otherwise)
have increasingly put us in the position of having to cram more things to do
in the average 24-hour period.
Employers (and marketers) need to be aware of the complete
picture and not focus on any single element. This will help reduce stress all
the way around and let us get on with living. That is what life is for, is it
not? [George
Anderson – Moderator]