Take Some Time Off, You Slacker

Frank Butler  00:17
Hello, Busybodies, welcome to another episode of the buisiness paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey  00:23
Good day, folks.

Frank Butler  00:24
And on today's episode, we're really going to talk about taking time off. But really, before we get into that, we just want to share a couple things that we thought were pretty cool things. The first one being Apple has said that they're going to give paid time off to those employees to go get the vaccine. I think that's awesome.

Paul Harvey  00:45
The COVID vaccine for anyone who's not been paying attention the last 400 days or so.

Frank Butler  00:50
Right, right, exactly. But that's so great that we had an episode on the four day work week, where we were talking about one of the benefits of the four day work week is that during the week, you can go to a doctor's appointment and get your physical or whatever it is, without having to take time off,

Paul Harvey  01:07
You have the option of using a weekday for those things, right? Because they're often closed on weekends. 

Frank Butler  01:12
Yeah, exactly. So that's what's so great about this, though, is that Apple saying, look, we're gonna just give you the paid time off if you get that shot. So I would love to see more companies do that. Again, I think one of the things that we try to do here on the Busyness Paradox is focusing on how do we create value for the employees. And I think this is this is just a small gesture that can go a long way to improving the work morale of an employee,

Paul Harvey  01:38
Which benefits the company. 

Frank Butler  01:40
Sure 

Paul Harvey  01:40
Win-win, hopefully

Frank Butler  01:41
It's not like the company's gonna fall apart because that employees taking some time off because they got this shot.

Paul Harvey  01:47
Now to clarify, was this time off to take to get the shot? Or is it because I know some people after they get the especially the second dose? Have a rough 24 hours or so is it like for that recovery time after the shot? Or is it just the time to go and get the shot?

Frank Butler  02:03
I think the focus really was on just having time off because you're getting a shot. Yep. Which I think also included the recovery, right? Because I know for example, when I got mine, my arm was pretty sore, but I was okay.

Paul Harvey  02:17
That second one apparently,

Frank Butler  02:18
It's the second one, right? And that's the concern. Now I know India, for example, she felt a little bit more fatigued after the first one and really struggled a little bit more with it.

Paul Harvey  02:29
My wife had a much harder time with the second one. 

Frank Butler  02:32
Well

Paul Harvey  02:32
I have not had one at all yet, so

Frank Butler  02:34
I'm looking forward to the second one. 

Paul Harvey  02:36
Yeah

Frank Butler  02:36
That's all I can say. 

Paul Harvey  02:37
Yeah

Frank Butler  02:38
Anyway, so the other thing that we thought was pretty cool was that after our podcast, our two-part podcast on email and efficiency. Interestingly enough, Wall Street Journal had an article about emailing anxiety. Hmm, coincidence? 

Paul Harvey  02:55
Definitely

[Laughter]

Frank Butler  02:59
Anyway

Paul Harvey  03:00
We'd like to think we planted a seed in someone's head over at the Wall Street Journal

Frank Butler  03:04
You know, it, it wouldn't be a huge surprise. If you look at some of the locations of where people are reading, or I'm sorry, or listening to our podcast,

Paul Harvey  03:14
They might read the transcripts too

Frank Butler  03:16
Yeah, that's true. They might read the transcripts. But we really have an interesting geographic spread of listeners to the Busyness Paradox. We've got folks in New York, DC, Washington State, Australia, we are hugely Cypress, Cypress, which I believe is one of my former sushi students. So if it was you, thanks for listening. Germany, England. We've had some African nations in there. So it's really amazing how 

Paul Harvey  03:45
We hit my old stomping grounds of Hungary recently too

Frank Butler  03:48
Oh, yeah, we've had China. So, I just really encourage now Latin America seems to be a weakness of ours right now. Be like, nice to see that happen a little bit more. But maybe one day, 

Paul Harvey  03:59
Get on the stick, Latin America.

Frank Butler  04:02
If you guys know somebody in Latin America, who might benefit from listening to our podcast, please share it with them, because we'd love to see that engagement as well. But I guess, let's talk about what we're going to talk about today anyway, which

Paul Harvey  04:16
Well, it relates to the anecdote about Apple there

Frank Butler  04:20
Right, it actually is related. And it's been something that's been on my mind for many years, as I've mentioned in our introductory episode, and just as a refresher, I did spend three years living and working in Germany. And one of the things that was interesting was that they had required paid time off. Not only do they have the national holidays as paid time off, but they also had required and I believe at the time, it was like 21 days off, if you were working the 38 Hour Work Week, which was also capped so you can only do 38 hours. I was on a contract that was a little different. I had 40 Hour Work Week. But I also got 28 days off. And that was required. They couldn't give me any less, for example, and 

Frank Butler  04:20
Right 

Paul Harvey  04:20
Paid time off

Paul Harvey  05:07
28 paid days off, right? 

Frank Butler  05:09
Yes, paid days off, these are paid vacation days. 

Paul Harvey  05:11
Gotcha. 

Frank Butler  05:12
And so what was interesting is somebody tweeted the other day about paid family leave, and that there should be some federal requirements for paid family leave. And we've got an episode we we talked about with regards to parents and such. And we talk a little bit I think about that there. And that's really what spurred this latest idea to me of saying we need real discuss the idea of having to bond federal paid time off for federally required paid time off for employees, because the US is the only developed nation in the world that has zero requirements about paid time off, and to throw a monkey wrench in the whole thing. I was looking at this the other day, and apparently Afghanistan has 15 holidays that are paid, required to be paid, and a requirement of 20 paid days off. Afghanistan!

Paul Harvey  06:03
So I'm going to take the other side a little bit of this, particularly in terms of the federal mandate. I see the angle there. I just don't like the idea of getting the government involved with something that granular as employees scheduling decisions. I understand the argument in favor of it. I do think we should have more paid time off in the US. I just don't love the idea of it coming from that particular governing body.

Frank Butler  06:32
I...I will say I agree. I'm not big on federal requirements. But when you look at the overwhelming lack of change, you know, sometimes the government does have to do something to help regulate these kinds of things, because businesses are not doing it themselves. I mean, that's why we have Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank.

Paul Harvey  06:54
Okay. So that though, is I think the important question. Is more paid time off, what we're talking about America here, what American workers want, because historically, American workers have had less time off than our counterparts in Europe, and pretty much everywhere else, but also been paid proportionally more per time per day work per hour worked, what have you. So basically, Americans have historically taken more of their compensation in the form of salary or wages, then in paid time off. And that's just kind of been a decision that's been collectively made over the last couple hundred years. Now, I've been saying for, I think, for at least the last 10 years, and I've been kind of watching some indicators of this. I'm gonna say actually closer to 20 years, I remember I was driving down to Tallahassee, Florida, from Connecticut, moving down there for grad school, when I heard an NPR story on this stuff, it's been about 20 years now, 

Frank Butler  07:52
You're old

Paul Harvey  07:53
Old! And the youth have been since that time, they mentioned that younger, whoever was 18, 19, 20 years old at the time entering the workforce was showing a bit of a divergence from the past there that I guess, if we must use the term millennials, indicating that they would prefer lower salary, lower hourly wage, and more paid time off. And so ever since then, I've been watching like the Gallup polls, and everything that they do every year. And I think it's safe to say at this point that a very large chunk of the American workforce would prefer to have more paid time off, even if it means less total salary.

Frank Butler  08:34
And I think one of the challenges you face is that oftentimes, the people who are leading those companies are ones who woraked the 40-plus, typically way more than 40 hours a week, don't like the idea of that I didn't take any vacation time, you know, walk uphill in the snow, both ways to work, blah, blah, folks, and not to say anything about that. I mean, there's no question they put in their time. But was that necessary, always?

Paul Harvey  09:03
Right

Frank Butler  09:03
And is it necessary today? Again, if you think about when we talk about the buisiness, and the 40 Hour Workweek episode that we had our first real full episode, we talked about how technology has really impacted how people can get work done. And you look at these organizations now that do have more vacation time, these companies aren't collapsing. In fact, there's a much greater impact on employee productivity, employee happiness, all these kinds of things.

Paul Harvey  09:31
There have been some studies that show that employees, American employees who use all their vacation time, all their vacation days, because even though we don't get as many as the rest of the world, we also have that thing where we don't use all the ones that we do have the ones that take them all, at least in some studies have, they've shown that those employees are more productive. Sorry, more likely to be promoted than the employees who don't take all their vacation time.

Frank Butler  09:57
Really. Yeah. I wonder why that is. I guess it's...probably there's got to be a link to their output in some way.

Paul Harvey  10:03
That's a good question.

Frank Butler  10:05
Maybe their creativity. I know, for example, that I've seen it with organizations that kind of reward people for taking a technology free vacation, there's companies out there that will pay you in essence to vacation.

Paul Harvey  10:17
That's an interesting thing. That's more recent, though, this study that I'm thinking of is from several years back, yes. But you know, I think there might be something to that, right, you're getting refreshed a little bit by going away, not having to be in the office all the time, and so on. I have to think that's the root of it, is that you're taking that mental downtime, the niksen that you talked about in your blog post, but anyway, this study that I'm looking at, it says, study found that 78% of for fitters, those who forfeited some of their vacation days received a raise, or bonus in the following three years compared to 84% of those who took all their paid time off. So 6%, it's a meaningful difference.

Frank Butler  10:56
Yeah, no, I would say so. That's interesting. I like it. I like it. I do think companies tend to be overwhelmingly tight fisted when it comes to vacation time and unnecessarily. So I would like to go back, you had said something about how we would take higher salaries for less time off, but I'm wondering if that still holds true anyway. Because you know, wages haven't really increased truly over the past, what 20 something years as it is now. So I'm wondering if we're really seeing that there's that much of a difference, you take into account exchange rates and even taxation question. Because I know, for example, in Germany, even though I might have been not paid as much, although I was paid pretty well, my retirement and my health care were taken care of. So it actually gave me more money in my pocket

Paul Harvey  11:40
Total compensation package, then you factor in like the the VAT taxes and stuff. It's really complicated to figure out who makes more 

Frank Butler  11:48
Yeah, it really is

Paul Harvey  11:49
In the end, yeah.

Frank Butler  11:51
Because there is certainly a certain quality of life difference. I know, for example, the Europeans, the Germans, in particular, again, I can only speak really, to my experiences. They don't carry as much debt, typically, they tend to take much longer vacations, all those kinds of things. But they also, I don't think I really didn't see that anybody who's making really any different real money. Now, maybe at the top top end, maybe at the executive level, the pays weren't quite as high. But it's hard to say because being in a medium sized enterprise around some thousand people

Paul Harvey  12:22
I'd be surprised if

Frank Butler  12:23
You're not seeing huge paid executives in that level anyway

Paul Harvey  12:27
Especially with the…Germany's the country that has the like the mandated labor representation on the board of directors. Is that right?

Frank Butler  12:34
Supervisor board, yeah

Paul Harvey  12:35
It's hard to imagine those boards signing off on the compensation packages for executives that we have in the US,

Frank Butler  12:41
Right, for sure. And I also think that most of what we see when it comes executive packages, typically, are those large corporations. Yep, we're not really seeing right, yeah, average Corporation, which isn't as high as No, keep digging. That's true. These medium sized enterprises, they're not paying their CEOs $30 million a year, you know, they're getting maybe $400,000 in salary and a few 100,000 in bonuses, which is I mean, great money, don't get me wrong, I would like to be making it. But the reality is that they're not outsized compared to what we see like JP Morgan Chase paying their CEO or something along those lines.

Paul Harvey  13:15
So much of that comes from, you know, stock options, stock bonuses, that if you're not a publicly traded company, which the vast majority of companies are not, you don't have that lever to inflate the compensation levels, either.

Frank Butler  13:27
Right, exactly. But going back to also the idea about the government mandate, I, I do tend to not like government mandating things, I think companies should be doing the right things. But if you can't get the companies to do the right thing, you kind of have to do something. And I think this is one of those things that sometimes you have to push the hand of the organizations to do the right things. And this is why for example, I'm a big believer in dangling the carrot. So hey, we're gonna give you tax relief, if you do invest in more green opportunities, or if you do provide paid time off, those would be cool. Like I would say, that's a great way of doing

Paul Harvey  14:05
I would prefer that much more than a federal mandate.

Frank Butler  14:08
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think there are some organizations that they're going to be just buts about the whole thing. True. Yeah. I know. I've seen it with manufacturing in particular, they hire people on they're getting hourly pay anyway. And then they're asked to only have five days off and they get five days off for three years. And then they get 10 days off and you're like, come on,

Paul Harvey  14:28
when I worked in manufacturing, I wasn't in manufacturing myself, but it's in the finance wing of it, but man they gave those the shop floor people as much time off as they could, any chance they got to. Yeah, but they kind of want to do like every single holiday like Flag Day. All right, we're shutting it down. Just to the idea was to try to squeeze the production into smaller time spans and then not be running all the equipment and everything goes few days as possible. So you A lot of that was probably company specific. But yeah, it's just, it's, it was just very different from my experience

Frank Butler  15:07
Oh, there  probably is something to it right. It's like they know that there's seasonality in demand or what have you, or they know the pipeline. They're building up? No, there's a lot of reasons for it. But one of the things that I noticed that, especially in that end of it was in this, this is a company here in Chattanooga, I'm not going to really talk about the necessarily about who it is or anything, but they did have a very poor vacation time policy for the factory workers. And actually, not just the factory workers for the actual spine workers too. So those who are in the more, quote unquote, white collar, and I know we, Paul, and I don't really like the white collar blue collar terminology. It's not really accurate, necessarily, but it's not a great descriptor, I guess.

Paul Harvey  15:45
Yeah, forget accurate. It's not even, like, meaningful

Frank Butler  15:49
Right it's not meaningful, there's no, right, exactly. But they are very much on the five hour, I mean five day time off, and they have the worst turnover and you’re like, you can fix some of that by focusing on the right things and doing the right things and some of these angles. And so I think there's something to be said about making it where there's some leveling of the playing field, too, because some of these people can't necessarily move to a new job very easily.

Paul Harvey  16:17
I think, you know, the ultimate question is, will the average worker accept the trade off of say, you can have more vacation time, it will require a proportional cut to your overall salary? And what will the average person do?

Frank Butler  16:34
Why would we have to cut salary?

Paul Harvey  16:35
Because you can't get blood from a stone, right? You're paying money out for less production. Whatever it is that you're paying people to do, they're doing less of it.

Frank Butler  16:44
But are they actually going to be doing less?

Paul Harvey  16:46
So you know, that's the question,

Frank Butler  16:48
And doesn’t that go counter to our whole focus on output, instead of

Paul Harvey  16:53
Yes. You stole my thunder. But yes

Frank Butler  16:55
I know, I'm sorry.

Paul Harvey  16:57
I think the thing that you have to question is that assumption that if you increase paid time off by 100%, will you have a proportional decrease in productivity? Or will it stay the same? Or will it maybe even improve, like we saw in that study of people who take all their vacation time being more likely to be promoted? And like we keep saying, having that downtime, or that that time off, not just to refresh your cognitive circuits and everything, but also to squeeze some of the time that might otherwise be spent on busy work - unnecessary meetings, you know, when you have to squeeze down the amount of time you have, you trim the fat, you know?

Frank Butler  17:38
That…there's a cascading impact, right?

Paul Harvey  17:40
Yes

Frank Butler  17:41
So, I think that's it. I think that's the key. We know how much time is being filled up with busy work. And we also know the benefits of having time off, you have people who come back, they're refreshed, there's got to be a mental health implication for that for sure. A work life balance implication. And I think you do get the greater production out of it. But on the other end of the spectrum, we see those companies like Google who do the unlimited vacation time, and people actually take less

Paul Harvey  18:06
Yeah, we really can't do an episode like this without talking about that. We're bemoaning American companies for not offering enough paid vacation time. And we super bemoan the American companies, they give unlimited vacation time. It's like, what the hell,

Frank Butler  18:19
there's no structure. Remember, there’s no structure. I think that's the deal is there's no structure, right? 

Paul Harvey  18:23
So the social norms kick in and you say, “I don’t know how much to take off. So I'm gonna take off less than Bob over there. So I look better than him.” Yeah.

Frank Butler  18:30
Yep. Well, I would be curious as to what you all think about time off, and should it be required? Or should the government do something to dangle the carrot for that? Or what do you think is the right way of addressing this question? 

Paul Harvey  18:43
I would like to ask on top of that, if I might, is Yeah, what do you think of this hypothesis, that offering more paid vacation time might be a breakeven or even a net win for a company from a financial perspective at your companies do you think paid time off could increase without seeing productivity, profitability, whatever drop as a result, because of higher efficiency, and more mental sharpness and that kind of thing?

Frank Butler  19:11
I like it.

Both  19:12
Tell us

Frank Butler  19:13
We want to know. Thank you again for listening to another episode of the Busyness Paradox.

Paul Harvey  19:18
Take some time off.

Frank Butler  19:19
We'll see you next time. And yeah, take some time off. Take a nice…enjoy.

Paul Harvey  19:22
Enjoy.

Frank Butler  19:23
You usually end with a good day.

Paul Harvey  19:24
Good day.

Frank Butler  19:25
[Laughter] Alright I'm stopping.

Paul Harvey  19:29
The Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from It’s Business Time by Jemaine Clements and Brett McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'd love to hear from you. Please send questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input@Busynessparadox.com or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, Busynessparadox.com to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, I-Heart Radio, Google podcasts or your preferred podcast provider.