Give people more days off

You might have today off. In New York, it’s Indigenous People’s Day and Italian Heritage Day. We used to call it Columbus Day. Other places call it lots of different things.

But regardless, this second Monday in October is one of the most inconsistently celebrated American holidays. Federal workers have it off, and there’s no mail delivery. But the stock market is open. In my neck of the woods, schools and courts are closed – but parking meters are still in effect.

Years ago, when we hired our first employees at my old agency, we had to draft up an official holiday calendar for the company. It’s one thing when it’s just a couple of owners plugging away whenever we could, but we had to get our act together when it came time for running payroll. We started with the basics for a couple of years – Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, etc. Not too hard.

But then I saw a friend’s company do something radical: instead of picking and choosing holidays, they just did all of them. The some do/some don’t holidays of MLK Day, Indigenous People’s Day, and Veterans Day – all off. The day after Thanksgiving? Off. Every public school holiday? Off. All the Eve’s? Off.

They gave two reasons. The first was practical. Their team was getting older and having kids, and suddenly, a large chunk of their team needed to scramble to figure out how to cover childcare when the kids had off from school. A sizable number of people were taking off anyway, so they elected simply to close the office and make it easier on everybody.

But second, people just liked having more days off. They had a happier and more productive team, and they were a more attractive place to work because of this.

So we copied them. We closed for everything. We closed between Christmas and New Year’s. We made those weird days around the Fourth of July into an extended mid-summer break. And the results mimicked theirs: people were happier and the work was better.

(An aside: We also found that by giving these extended breaks in July and December, we ultimately had less disruption to our work than before. You see, every year, a number of our employees would regularly take long trips to visit family abroad or embark on an extended bucket-list vacation. Before these closures, these trips might be spread somewhat randomly around the calendar, and we’d find ourselves scrambling to cover for a two-week absence in March or October. But after giving the team a collective week off, many of us ended up planning these trips to overlap with those periods, resulting in a much shorter coverage period.)

In 2021, Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday in decades. But still, we only have 11 of them – and zero are mandated paid time off. Cambodia and Iran lead the world with 27 public holidays. In this hemisphere, Argentina leads with 19. There are proposals for several new holidays, some celebrating Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, and Rosa Parks, though unfortunately, none seem to be anywhere close to becoming law.

There are all sorts of benefits associated with more time off. One investigation showed that for every additional 10 hours of vacation time, employees saw their year-end performance improve by 8%. Another study found that if you take a vacation less than once every six years, you’re eight times more likely to have heart problems than peers who take trips twice a year. There are mountains of papers that will all point to the obvious conclusion: if you take a break, you’re happier and healthier than if you don’t.

The problem is that we are really bad at taking breaks. Pew Research finds that 46% of American workers don’t take all of their allotted paid time off. And the higher up you go on the managerial and income ladder, the less likely you are to take advantage of your vacation days. When they ask these workaholics why, two of the top answers are that they “worry they might fall behind” and that they “feel badly about co-workers taking on additional work.”

We should certainly normalize American workplaces giving more vacation and personal days. But that’s not the full solution. We should close up shop altogether more often. That’s how you can actually make people take a much-needed break – lock them out!