The Institute of Leadership & Management's recent press release is very revealing about the state of UK workers' relationships with holiday and leisure. A third work in some way while on holiday while 80% frequently respond to emails. 40% feel more stressed when they get back.
A lot of this is because of the normalised behavour of keeping on top of your emails via BlackBerry even during your holiday. The reseach says that two thirds check emails at least once a day. For some, this is less stressful than facing an inbox running into four figures when you get back. For others, it will be the unbreakable habit of compulsive checking and the anxiety of not knowing what messages are careering around the company.
The end result of all this is that people are not getting the benefit of being on holiday and their families' scarce time away is diminished by the pull of emails. In the US, they are inevitably a couple of years ahead of us and the phrase "Shrinking Vacation Syndrome" has already entered the lexicon to reflect the trend towards missing holidays altogether. This has to be a damaging trend for personal resilience, work life balance and family life.
Speaking of research, I am conducting my own study as part of my MSc into the relationship between BlackBerry use and workplace stress, something that has not been done as a quantitative academic study before. I welcome indivdual respondents to the brief online survey which can be found here. I am also keen to recruit organisations for whom I am prepared to do a complimentary bespoke version of the survey. Please get in touch separately if you's like to pursue this
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