Ensure Your Team Uses Their Vacation Time

Vacations are helpful to your company's success. When team members have their time off, they come back to work more productive and engaged. However, many employees don't take advantage of their vacation time. Usually, this is because they fear their managers will think lesser of them. So, here are some strategies to show your team that you value off-time, and to enforce vacations.1. Stop and check your own vacation balance.You can't expect your team to take a break if you're not showing the same behavior. Be a model of work/life balance.2. Make the business case.Take a few minutes from a weekly meeting to discuss the benefits of vacations to the business. Share research that discusses how engagement and creativity increase due to vacations. This shows them that you think highly of taking breaks.3. Measure and manage your employees' vacations.You can publicly track how much vacation time each employee takes. You can use a board and put symbols (such as a check mark) to associate a completed vacation. This creates positive peer pressure for more people to use their vacation time, too.4. Make transitioning to vacation as smooth as possible.Ensure that you have someone to backup and cover every aspect of your team member's role while they're away. This will help your employee feel more confident that their work will be in good hands when they're on break.5. Make returning from vacation a smooth process, too. Some employees worry about the pile of emails and work they'll have receive upon returning. Have another team member cover that person's role the day they return, so they can catch up on work. Or allow that individual to work from home their first day back to help transition.Remind your team that you value their well-being and work/life balance, and enforce the importance of vacation time.Source: HBR