Work-related e-mails eating into precious holiday time

HOLIDAY STATISTICS:MOST IRISH executives spend up to five hours of precious holiday time answering work-related e-mails, according to a new survey.

The survey - conducted appropriately enough by e-mail - assessed the work patterns of 1,035 Irish managers and discovered the vast majority took care to ensure work e-mail would be available to them during their break.

The findings come as a separate survey found that almost nine out of 10 Irish families will take at least one holiday this year.

In its survey, employment rights adviser Peninsula Ireland contacted 1,035 managers and 483 employees from its own client list, and discovered that 87 per cent of Irish managers admitted checking work e-mails during their holidays.

The survey also found:

• Some 71 per cent of managers or executives ensure they will have internet availability when booking a holiday.

• Of the 87 per cent of the survey who admitted to checking work e-mails, 77 per cent said they did so on a daily basis.

• Those who checked work e-mails said they spent an average five hours answering them over a typical period of at least 10 days while away on holiday.

• Some 76 per cent of the managers said they felt their companies expected them to have contact with the office at some point during their holiday.

Alan Price, head of Peninsula Ireland, said employees who find themselves on a beach checking work e-mails from a laptop with a glass of Sangria in one hand, should close the laptop and start enjoying the holiday.

"Irish employees are becoming slaves to modern technology and because e-mail has made it easier than ever to keep in constant contact with the office, they are finding it hard to get a true break from work," he explained.

"It is common knowledge that people's work life is busier than ever and this survey highlights the sizeable role that work plays in our lives.

"However, holiday entitlements are there for a reason and employees should be using this time to relax and re-charge themselves," he insisted.

But good management as well as employment rights dictate that employees should take steps to reduce the need to contact the office during annual holidays.

These steps include ensuring that colleagues and clients are given contact details of someone else who can deal with problems or queries as they arise.

Mr Price recommends setting up an automatic "out-of-office" reply to an e-mail account as a good way of letting people know who else to contact.

He also recommends holiday-makers include a return date one day later than their actual return, to allow themselves to catch up on the backlog of e-mail, giving a smoother transition back to work.

But if some holiday time is lost to work, there is still good news in the number of families who take a second holiday each year.

According to the website dedicated to parents www.RollerCoaster.ie, some 65 per cent of Irish families take a break more than once a year.

Some 337 parents took part in the website's survey indicating that nine out of 10 respondents would take at least one holiday - almost two-thirds of these to a foreign destination.

Some 62 per cent of the respondents to the RollerCoaster.ie survey said the primary benefit of going on holiday was in spending more time with family members.

Clinical psychologist Marie Murray said the surveys - particularly the Peninsula survey - appeared to raise the "dispensability issue" in which some managers believed something untoward would happen if they were not personally overseeing the business. But she said "a holiday is not a holiday if people are checking in like that".

A spokesman for the Irish Management Institute (IMI) agreed the survey "raised the question of work/life balance".

While he said the IMI would not have "an official policy" on answering work-related e-mails while on holiday, he added "everyone needs to be aware of the challenge of work life balance".