The Importance of a Vacation

              The vacation is a chance for the employee to unplug from the work load and focus on their families or self-care.  Time away from their daily grind is important because knowing that the company care about their well-being increases productivity in many cases, it also enhances collaboration as well as their effectiveness. It has also been shown that vacations increase their creativity. That little amount of predictable time off is also said to help them maintain their work to life balance.  These reasons may not be measurable to you but the fact that vacations and the ability to detach oneself from their jobs reduces burnout. This should be measurable in the reduced turnover rate.

I read an article where the CEO OF Ford is increasing the workers pay and giving them 40 hours week work. It reported that Ford was having trouble with the next generation valuing their time of more then the low wages Ford was a paying. The report stated that many of Fords younger employees were coming to them after working a shift at Amazon. The article also claimed that the CEO was taking a page from Henry Fords play book when in 1914 he doubled his workers pay to $5.00. That may seem believable to some but I think the CEO realized how costly it is to train new employees. How after Ford eats the cost of training someone another company comes along and see the value which Ford created but doesn’t acknowledge then lures them away. I do not believe that it about the people I believe that Ford’s CEO discovered how not giving their employees as well as other would cause their actions to affect their bottom line. That is the reason why Ford’s CEO changed his way of dealing with his employees.

A recent Deloitte study has shown that the health and wellness of employees has cost American companies a trillion dollars loss, that’s look like $1,000,000,000,000.  Another study discovered that out of 12,000 men in high-risk jobs of heart disease who were followed for twelve years found that vacations and healthier and longer lives. However, it also discovered that of those who didn’t take time off had a thirty percent higher rate of heat attacks. So, not only do employers who refuse a comfortable working wage with regular scheduled time off lose their employees to the competition they also lose them due to poor health condition and death.

I was talking with my cousin the other day and she told me that her uncle Hans in Germany who is a wielder by trade employers gives him a mount off paid vacation at a health spa that gives great massages and five-star accommodations. I think Americans would be shocked to know how the other leading countries view the American workers treatment. It’s the old adage again, we point our finger at how third world countries treat the populations; how they force children to labor in under unsafe conditions. It appears we Americans our guilty of not keeping pace with the worlds working conditions standards ourselves.

The truth is we’ll never know the benefits of doing these simple things until we’ve adapted them and studied the changes they bring. In America the bottom line may not be the worlds bottom line. There are many other facts we need to start considering when we develop our working strategy. What is the cost of unprepared and unmotivated employees? What is the cost of un healthy employees? What is the cost of employee burn out? What is the cost of constantly training employees? We can look at the workforce and blame it on their laziness , but wouldn’t it be more productive to change what we can to battle these drains on our employees?

Note: Images on this blog site are from a free source or taken by the author. No image or group of photos is intended to represent the people the author serves. The author does not care about Race (that is a politically correct term that he does not like because we are all of the same Race, the Human Race. He prefers the term ethnicity, color, religion, sex, gender, marital status, disability, genetic information, national origin, source of income, Veteran or military status, ancestry, citizenship, primary language or immigration status.) He is a service provider for all people. We will all rise together when we band together and help one another. Joseph Erwin is a Real Estate Broker, DRE # O2131799, and a CA general contractor # B 696662.  He resides in Southern California.