SOME people cannot switch off. They work every hour of the day and wake to the ringing of their mobile phone each morning.
On holiday, they do not recharge their batteries, just their Blackberries. Technology means that only the backdrop to their occupational misery changes – their body might be lounging by the pool but their minds are still connected to the office.
Moira Elms, board member responsible for marketing and communications at Price Water-house Coopers, has occasionally seen such people pay a heavy price for not taking time to relax. “They become physically ill and just burn out,” she said.
But Elms admits she, too, takes her Blackberry with her when she goes away. She said: “It enables me to enjoy holidays much more because if there’s a problem, I’m contactable. I used to kill myself the week before a holiday, making sure everything was done so I could go away without worrying. Now, if I know something’s coming in from a client, I can switch my Blackberry on and just look at that one e-mail. But it stays switched off the rest of the time.”
A survey by Stark Brooks Associates, a recruitment consultant, showed 97% of holidaying business people took their mobile phones and 68% either a laptop or a Blackberry. Just over a third would not consider staying in a resort without wireless access.
To some, this inability to disconnect from work might sound like hell. For others, it’s their lifeline to salvation.
Elms believes that discipline is vital – using the technology, but not becoming enslaved by it.
“People are very demanding and think that if they send you a message at any time of the day or night, you’ll pick it up,” she said. “It’s up to us to stand up against that. If you use a Blackberry with discipline, it can really help you manage your work-life balance.”
Nigel Brown, director of employee relations at the insurance group Axa, uses the technology on train journeys and other previously dead times during his working week. But when he goes on holiday, his Blackberry stays at home.
“To me, the point of going on holiday is to switch off from work,” Brown said. “If you keep this umbilical cord of the Blackberry and mobile phone, you never entirely do that.”
Senior staff at Axa are debating whether to issue ground rules on taking Blackberries on holiday. Some argue that they stop their owners worrying, but Brown believes the devices can do more harm than good.
“People used to have their trusted No 2 take charge while they were away,” he said. “One of the consequences of the availability through Blackberries and other technology is that you miss that opportunity to empower people further down the organisation because it’s so easy to refer every decision upwards through e-mails.”
Brown ensures that someone reliable covers for him when he is away. The deputy will have details of the hotels he will be staying at in case there is a big problem. The extra effort involved in contacting him ensures that only genuinely urgent messages are passed on.
Edward Wild, a headhunter with the Corporate Consulting Group, is relaxed about maintaining a link with work when on holiday. Indeed, he talked to The Sunday Times while on a family break in the Cotswolds.
“It’s now difficult to be completely cut off from work, and at a senior level it will be assumed that people are sufficiently committed to their work, their organisations and their clients that they will stay in touch,” he said.
“But the extent to which that could be regarded as a problem is exaggerated. On balance, it is not a great inconvenience for people to call into the office or check their Blackberries to deal with anything that needs an immediate response.”
Some academic studies suggest that mentally disconnecting from work during a holiday helps most people recover from the stresses of their job faster.
Peter Totterdell, senior research fellow at the Institute of Work Psychology at Sheffield University, said: “In light of these findings one would expect that maintaining contact with the office during vacations would be detrimental to the extent that it prevents employees detaching from the negative aspects of their work.”
But that was not the whole story, he said. “Increased work-load on returning to work can also be a problem, so some individuals may use technology to communicate with the office while they are on vacation as a means of coping with that. There’s unlikely to be a single solution that suits everyone or every vacation,” Totterdell said.
Caroline Waters, director of people and policy at BT, said that holidays, like working styles, were personal matters.
“People are individuals, so we don’t try to prescribe what they do on holiday,” she said.
“There’s probably a slight majority at BT who take a laptop with them and most would make a call or be happy to take a call. But it’s not a problem if someone decides to disappear totally off the radar for two weeks.” Waters said that in her own team, staff were paired to ensure that one covered for the other during holidays. The details were agreed between the two individuals themselves, she said, although the process was overseen by line managers.
Gary Chaplin, regional director of Stark Brooks, said surveys showed that holidays were increasingly being respected.
In 2007, 17% of professionals polled by the consultants did not take their full entitlement, down from 24% five years ago.
“There are still some professions that suffer from old-fashioned egocentric cultures where holidays are not fully taken, but thankfully these are becoming a rarer occurrence,” Chaplin said.
He argued that those who kept in constant communication with their work during breaks gave themselves no time to relax and recuperate.
He suggested a compromise. “It’s important to come to an arrangement that gives you peace of mind, knowing that all is running smoothly back in the office, while also getting to spend quality time with your other half,” he said.
Wendy Brooks, a director of the training company Hemsley Fraser, said that it was important to consider the impact of work on family and friends when on holiday.
“Some senior professionals get it right because they’ve agreed the ground rules with their family beforehand,” she said. “But I’ve seen it be very destructive when they haven’t.”
