- Quiet vacations, where employees take time off without telling their boss, are on the rise.
- CEO David Barkoe said his employees don’t feel the need to sneak away to take time off.
- He advocates trusting employees to do their jobs where and when they want.
Taking a quiet vacation, that is, taking a holiday or working on the other side of the world without telling your boss, is becoming increasingly popular.
Millennials, in particular, seem particularly fond of this trend. A recent Harris Poll found that nearly four in 10 millennials surveyed admitted to taking time off without telling their bosses.
So what should a boss do if he wants to stop his employees from leaving the office without his consent?
David Barkoe, CEO and founder of Florida-based public relations agency Carve Communications, said it all comes down to creating a culture of trust with your employees.
“Live your life, but do the work,” Barkoe told Business Insider in describing his approach. “I’m going to trust you from minute one, from the moment I hire you, to just do the work, the way you feel you’re best at doing it.”
In practice, this culture takes many forms. Sometimes it’s an employee who works a few hours early in the morning so they can make it to their child’s swim meet. Other times, it’s an employee who goes on a three-week trip to Europe where the first week is a paid vacation and the second two weeks they simply work in a different time zone.
Barkoe said the open and flexible culture, actively encouraged and practiced by superiors, means employees don’t feel like they have to slip away just to take a break.
“It’s absolutely a cultural issue,” he said.
Barkoe believes that people take leisurely vacations because they feel their employer doesn’t trust or respect them, so they take the vacations they want anyway.
As for bosses who worry that such a flexible culture will lead to a drop in productivity, Barkoe has seen the opposite. When Carve moved to remote work in 2020, Barkoe said he quickly realized they were never going back to the office.
“It just worked. People were more motivated,” he said.
While it may be different in a company with thousands of employees, Barkoe said, “As a small organization, if you’re not doing your job, it’s pretty hard to hide.” He added that if someone is taking advantage of your situation, they’re probably not the right person for your team, no matter what.
Ashton Mathai, deputy director of content at Barkoe’s company, told BI that she’s taking full advantage of Carve’s unlimited paid time off policy and remote work culture.
Last year, Mathai traveled around Europe for two months. She took 10 days of paid leave to start the trip and then spent the rest of the time working in places like Scotland, Amsterdam, Portugal and Italy. Since she was in a different time zone, she often worked from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time and spent the morning sightseeing or going to the beach.
“I lived my life in the morning, then in the afternoon, in the evening, I did my work,” she said.
Mathai said that before she left, her bosses told her that they had complete confidence in her and knew she would do her job while she was away.
“It wasn’t a threat. It was a real, total trust,” she said. “I went in knowing I wanted to make them proud. I wanted to be proud of myself and do my job.”
In addition to working abroad, she said she also takes a lot of paid leave. Earlier this year, she traveled to India for two weeks with her family and didn’t work.
“There’s a lot of encouragement from the leadership, from David himself, to take time off,” Mathai said of Barkoe.
Barkoe said many companies offer unlimited vacation time in theory, but there’s a difference between saying it and doing it. He tries to actively encourage and remind people, in a positive way, when they’re taking advantage of Carve’s flexible culture.
“You just have to have the mindset and the willingness to consider personal life as part of work culture,” he said. “Not the other way around, where work culture is part of personal life.”
