- Employees taking holidays to catch up on their workloads
- Annual leave used instead of sick leave when staff are ill
- Police officers particularly at risk of burnout, say experts
Your employees are loyal and hard-working, always prepared to go the extra mile and put in discretionary effort to help you stay on top. But is such dedication coming at the expense not just of their evenings and weekends but even their holidays?
The hidden and damaging phenomena of ‘leaveism’ – the practice of taking holiday instead of sick leave when you are ill, or using annual leave to complete work at home that can’t be finished during normal work hours – seems to be highly prevalent, according to experts, particularly in the public sector.
In a recent study of the practice among police officers, 76 per cent admitted they had taken annual leave instead of phoning in sick or leaving work unfinished. A research paper, Leaveism and work-life integration: The thinning blue line, also found that officers practising leaveism actually worked longer hours than colleagues who did not use their holiday in this way.
Professor Sir Cary Cooper of Manchester Business School, co-author of the paper, says the police are likely to be a bellwether for the entire public sector, as budget cuts squeeze staffing levels and employees experiencing insecurity try to manage ever-expanding workloads. “We have now discovered that leaveism is endemic in the public sector,” he says of his ongoing research into the trend, which he highlighted at the CIPD Annual Conference. “We’re getting a lot of that now as the public sector has been reduced by 20 or 30 per cent. It’s affecting the police, local government and central government.”
As cuts bite, the inclination towards leaveism may begin to wane as employees reach work saturation, which could prompt increased sickness absence – with obvious costs and disruption for employers, suggests Cooper. “People who don’t take their full holiday entitlement to get away from work is a real problem. It’s not healthy.”
For overworked staff too frightened to admit they can’t cope, access to work anytime, anywhere via smartphones and laptops might seem like an answer. By working on mobile devices, people can easily conceal that they are enduring long hours. But with UK workers regularly putting in 40- to 50-hour weeks, in addition to lengthy commuting times, doing extra work when you should be recuperating or relaxing is unsustainable, says Cooper.
With the UK now seventh in the G7 for productivity and 15th in the G20, it seems we’re working harder but not necessarily smarter. And the rise of presenteeism, where people come into work despite being ill, adds weight to this argument. Almost a third of employees admitted to presenteeism in the CIPD’s 2015 Absence Management survey. However, employers may not be taking the issue seriously enough, as the research also showed that only 54 per cent of organisations are taking any steps to discourage the behaviour.
Suggestions that leaveism could be prevalent across the public sector, masking ill-health and work overload, should raise troubling questions for HR professionals, say experts.
Research by Jonathan Houdmont, assistant professor of occupational health psychology at the University of Nottingham, highlights how these issues could already be manifesting in the police. His biggest concern is burnout, or total emotional exhaustion. Houdmont says that in a regular sample of human service workers – people who work with the public – he would expect around a third of respondents to be scoring above the threshold for high burnout. In the police, his research revealed this stood at more than 70 per cent in 2014.
“There’s a growing body of literature from around the world that shows police officers who score highly for emotional exhaustion are more likely to be aggressive, show impaired performance and be involved in assaults,” says Houdmont.
And there have already been high-profile cases, such as the death of Baby P, where staff shortages and heavy workloads have been blamed for serious failures in the public sector.
So what can employers do? John Murphy, national representative of the Police Federation, says: “We can’t do everything. Saying no to things goes against the grain, but we’ve got to look after our staff. The police will have to rationalise what cops do and say: ‘Actually we can’t do all of this anymore.’” Barry Pirie, president of the Public Sector People Managers’ Association, says the figures on leaveism “appear to be a symptom of higher expectations during a period of tighter resources” and urges employers to focus on building resilience in staff.
Cooper adds: “There should be strong guidance on not accessing your emails at night, over the weekend or on holiday unless absolutely necessary. And in extremis, shut down the server at the weekend. Employers could also give people training in how to prioritise their work. Ultimately, unreasonable and unmanageable workloads simply should not be given to people.”
Signs of leaveism
• Managers receiving work emails in the evening or while staff are ‘on holiday’
• Employees making requests for holiday at very short notice without explanation
• Employees visibly struggling with workloads during the day