Is Setting Your OOO Stressing You Out?

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5 minute read

Hard as it is to believe, we’re coming close to the end of the summer and that means that if you haven’t already taken some annual leave, you might be in the process of preparing for your time off. Preparing used to mean going for a special holiday wax or having a final dash around Penneys for a few extra cover-ups for the pool but it’s different now.

With our always-on, always accessible culture it’s no longer possible to stand up from your desk on a Friday, wave goodbye to your colleagues and tell them you’ll see them in a fortnight.

Firstly, you’re probably waving goodbye to them on a group video call and instead of a friendly chat around the water cooler about the weather in the Algarve, you’re probably talking them though the detailed handover you prepared, reassuring them that you’re only down in Achill and to ring if there’s a problem.

Things had gotten bad before the Pandemic, with emails on phones that were permanently glued to our hands and quick calls from the office being acceptable after 6pm, but now that most people are working remotely it’s harder to keep colleagues in the loop with everything you’re doing. And so, we all must operate as an island, one which doesn’t even have a buoy available to keep you afloat for two weeks in Kerry.

Claire, a director in a project management consultancy in Dublin finds holiday season stressful.

“I don’t like saying this, I really don’t, but I dread the summer. I want to take a couple of weeks off and in my head I want all my team to do the same but when everyone starts lining up with their holiday requests I feel like closing my door and walking away. We submit everything through a portal which should take a lot of the stress away, but there are invariably people looking for the same date who ‘technically’ could be away from the business at the same time and so I often end up as referee.”

“I’ve attended company wellness days and corporate talks where everyone speaks of the importance of time to unwind away from the office, but nobody ever mentions how stressful the holiday months are for everyone. It used to be the case that the summer was a bit quieter client-wise and so we could facilitate everyone’s breaks but it’s not like that anymore and it becomes a real scrum.

“That’s all without even thinking of my own holidays. I don’t have a team member that can slip in to cover for me and so I end up working later hours in the weeks before and after a break to plan ahead and catch up. Sometimes I almost feel it’s not worth the hassle.”

Claire is not alone in feeling like this. The prep involved in being able to take your annual leave is often so labour intensive that it actually puts people off booking in their rightful holidays.

Handover documents, prepping clients and colleagues and trying to finish projects that ‘just can’t wait’ means that you end up working so many additional hours before your break that you are burnt out and exhausted for your trip.

The burden of packing for a family and making sure everyone has everything they need also usually falls to the woman in the house and so you need to factor that into the weeks before as well as everything else.

Fiona, is a senior accountant in Cork had enough and effected change in her company. “I had ended up sick for the last couple of years on holidays and I knew that something had to give so I made some changes. I stopped doing the crazy prep that I used to do at home in the lead-up to holidays. I was often buying everyone new clothes and killing myself getting everything organised. Now I throw everything summery into a basket as it’s washed and pack the nice bits. I make a list for my husband that includes SPF, insect repellent, armbands and those sort of things and make him responsible for that. He’s a man and so isn’t as obsessed as I am and rightly reminds me every year that if something is missing we can buy it there. It has helped.

“At work I spoke to some senior managers about the stress involved in annual leave and we formed a steering group and made some changes. We now let clients know that we’ll be away, give them an emergency contact and reassure them that everything will be in hand when we’re back. We don’t do lengthy handovers for anything up to two weeks. Everyone on every level does the same thing and it makes taking holidays much easier.”

What we need more than ever, and it would be great if we could sort this at the same time as a four-day week, good paternity leave, and a helpful national childcare plan, is a real understanding of the importance of a break from the office.

We pride ourselves on being closer to the US than Europe but there is nothing to cheer about when it comes to American work practices with their lack of employee protections and almost non-existent vacation days.

If we are to take workplace wellness as seriously as the HR budget large companies put into it, we need to acknowledge that working twice as hard as usual in order to take five or ten days off is not best practice. We need to be able to fully step away from work and not worry about what’s happening while we’re not there.

There are some changes we can all make:

Don’t make unrealistic promises about getting back to every email. Change your Out of Office message from ‘I’ll get back to you on my return’ to ‘I am out of the office until xx and will not be checking my email. For urgent help contact my colleague xx.’
Reasonable people understand why you have taken a holiday and will be prepared to accept that. A call or email in the week before to let clients or colleagues know where you are with a project and that you’ll pick it back up on your return should be totally normal.
Make sure you’re not the person making quick calls to people you know are on holidays to ‘double check’. Treat others how you want to be treated.

It’s not realistic to expect us to become like Parisians who leave the city and work en masse for August, or the Italians whose OOO tells you they’re at the beach, but if you’re in management the least you should do is take your holidays, don’t make a big deal out of it and lead by example. Everyone needs a break. More than one break actually.

Jennifer Stevens, August 2021