In the 24-7 Economy, the Workcation Emerges As An Alternative

An acceptable option for the obsessed, the guilt-ridden and the fearful. And probably pretty close to what they were going to do anyway. JL

Rachel Silverman reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Americans are pretty lousy at taking vacations, so workcations may just formalize what most workers already do: check in on the job while away. Is (it) detracting from the vacation you were going to have, or is it enabling the vacation you otherwise wouldn’t have had?
This spring, Shirley Bloomfield spent a week at a Delaware beach house, taking long walks along the shore with her husband and their golden retriever, Cassie, and roasting marshmallows in the rental home’s fireplace when the weather grew chilly.
But the couple was there to work. Ms. Bloomfield, the chief executive of the NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association, a trade association for rural telecommunications providers, wanted a break from the bustle of Washington, D.C., but had a full slate of work already on her schedule. So she decided to try what she called a “workcation,” logging in remotely from a vacation destination.
Rare is the modern professional who can fully disconnect from the office during time off, so a small but growing number of workers are instead petitioning the boss to combine work and vacation: time away from the office that includes a few days working from an exotic locale.
Workers often pay for lodging and travel, but may take conference calls or write project updates from a resort or rental home, spending off-hours sightseeing or being with family, without having the time counted against their vacation days.
These are working vacations by design, —different than having a relaxing getaway interrupted by calls from the boss or co-workers. But management researchers caution that these arrangements can result in burnout if workers never get real time off during the year.
Americans are pretty lousy at taking vacations, so workcations may just formalize what most workers already do: check in on the job while away.
Overall, U.S. workers are taking less vacation than they did a decade ago. In 2013, the average worker took 16 vacation days, down from 20.9 in 2000, according to an analysis by the U.S. Travel Association’s Project: Time Off, an initiative to encourage more workplace vacation.
Not all bosses may be on board with the idea of workcation, especially if the organization lacks a flexible work policy or if the job doesn’t lend itself to remote work. About two-thirds of companies have policies allowing occasional telecommuting, an increase from 50% of firms in 2008, according to an analysis from the Families and Work Institute.
Rick Hamada, CEO of Avnet Inc., AVT 1.09 % favors “creative ideas” to improve employee engagement, such as telecommuting. Staffers at the technology distributor informally combine business trips with vacations, but Mr. Hamada says he’s doubtful such arrangements work for all, such as a salesman whose territory is Texas.

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“What are you going to do [work-wise] in France for a week?” the CEO says. “Workcation is very interesting. I just think there are a limited number of roles that lend themselves to that kind of program.’’
Working vacations are the “wave of the future” but not always in a good way, says Deborah Good, who teaches human-resource management at the University of Pittsburgh’s business school, and who is researching these arrangements. She says that some firms are beginning to offer working vacations as a perk to employees, allowing them to log in from vacation destinations but not have those days counted against vacation time.
A change of scenery may refresh a worker’s perspective at first, but Dr. Good notes, “there may be a backlash among employees if they feel they must work all the time and can’t ever have a real vacation.”
The rise of the workcation may be emblematic of many Americans’ obsession with work and their inability to realize that the office would do just fine if they actually logged off for a few days.
“It’s not a good thing for employees who are vacationing to feel like they are always on an electronic leash,” says John de Graaf, president of Take Back Your Time, a group that advocates for more time off for workers.

‘Is the workcation detracting from the vacation you were going to have, or is it enabling the vacation you otherwise wouldn’t have had?’
—Kenneth Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute

He adds, though, that for various reasons, people might choose or need to work from remote destinations, and logging in from the beach may be more relaxing than clocking into the office.
Adds Kenneth Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute: “Is the workcation detracting from the vacation you were going to have, or is it enabling the vacation you otherwise wouldn’t have had?”
Ms. Bloomfield says she enjoyed her Delaware trip, but “it wasn’t quite the Zen sense you would get from a real vacation.”
Co-working companies, which provide shared workspaces for remote workers, have opened locations in vacation destinations such as Lake Tahoe and the Canary Islands with Wi-Fi for working vacationers.
Jamie Orr, founder of Tahoe Mountain Lab, a co-working space in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., says that about 25% of her clientele are tourists keeping up with work projects between hitting the ski slopes and hiking trails.
For Bill Raymond, Disney World proved an ideal workcation destination. In February, Mr. Raymond and his wife flew from their suburban Boston home to Orlando, where they spent a couple of days touring the theme park.
For the next two days, Mr. Raymond, a solutions architect at enterprise search firm Voyager Search, clocked full workdays from the Orlando resort, hunkering down with his laptop and taking sales calls by the pool.
Mr. Raymond even wrote a post on his personal blog with tips on how to be a productive “workcationer” at Disney, pinpointing locations at the resort that offer fewer distractions. (Among his top picks were the pool at the Disney Port Orleans French Quarter resort, which he says wasn’t “overrun with kids being kids.”)
Brian Goldin, Voyager’s chief executive and Mr. Raymond’s boss, was “totally fine” with the arrangement. “The idea of the traditional office environment doesn’t really exist that much,” Mr. Goldin says.
Adrian Granzella Larssen, editor in chief at career advice site The Muse, has taken weeklong workcations with her husband to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico for the past two years.
Working for a startup, she says she felt irresponsible taking a full week off. She researched Internet connectivity ahead of time to ensure the couple’s lodgings had reliable Wi-Fi.
The working vacation kept Ms. Granzella Larssen, 32 years old, current with her email; she also felt more productive in a tropical setting because she wasn’t being pulled into impromptu meetings. And despite being by the beach, “I felt completely plugged in.”
To get the boss’s signoff, career experts say a worker should stress the benefit to the company, explaining that he or she is volunteering to work so as not to leave the company hanging. An employee should also spell out to family, along with bosses and co-workers, when and how they will be on duty, and when they plan to be offline.
Ms. Bloomfield and her husband, a lawyer, carefully scheduled their work tasks so they could maximize downtime together. They placed a conference call schedule on the kitchen table of their beach rental, so they could be busy at the same times. She also made it clear to her staff of 150 that she was working as usual and reachable when needed.
But, she says, “I may have been taking their phone calls while my toes were in the sand.”