August 2005 – Working on holiday

August must be the most schizophrenic month in the calendar. I know people who would not be seen dead in the workplace at this time. Yet there are others who seem to warm to the gentler routines of what has to be one of the quieter times of the year, at least in the northern hemisphere.

I have one friend, who, no matter how busy he may be at the end of July, will hang up his coat, switch off his mobile phone and take off to Spain for the month of August to reappear refreshed and ready to go again in September. He is disciplined in work and equally disciplined at leisure.

How many of us can be like that? Just now I am writing flat out to get away myself, resisting the advice of a friend to take my work away with me. I would much rather work head down for a few weeks then put it all to one side for a while.

So the laptop will stay at home. The mobile phone will come with me but will be switched off most of the time or out of range. I can still find places where the things don’t work. Anything related to office work will be put aside to the end of the month. The out-of-office memos have been added to the e-mail basket and voicemail.

Just as there are different attitudes to working in August there are different approaches to work during holiday times. Some, like me, will do all in their power to remove themselves from the working environment. A substantial minority, however, find they just can’t break away completely.

In a recent YouGov poll carried out on behalf of Hudson, the recruitment and human resources consultancy, one in six of the 1,619 employees contacted in the survey, said they planned to check in to work during their holidays either by telephone or email. Most of them said they would be in touch each week and some said they would ring in every day.

These are the people who have admitted they plan to keep in touch. In reality I would expect the figure to be even higher, as it is among London-based professionals. I wonder what the proportion would be among Blackberry users? I would be tempted to guess that the majority of people with Blackberries will take them away on holiday, will look at them and will respond to e-mails.

Just as those who drink too much resent criticism of their habit, the Blackberry user can become aggressively defensive of his or her attachment to the little electronic box.

I have yet to hear anyone who has a Blackberry say that it is a nuisance. On the contrary it is a gizmo that people like to discuss in the same way they talked about their mobile telephones when few others had one. “It’s wonderful. I don’t know what I would do without it,” they say. It is sad to report but many people have formed an emotional attachment to a communications device. People used to say the same about the Filofax.

But, if outside work we adopt the very same behaviours we have on the inside, where are we going to find the stimulus and ideas that will allow us to see things differently when we return?

The problem with the sort of work that can be done any place – and that is a large proportion of what has been termed knowledge work – is that, once free of the confines of the office, it spreads itself like water spilled out of a bucket. The result is that we either try to mop it all up, which is impossible, we learn to swim in it or, and this is where stress can take its toll, we flounder and sink.

No-one can swim all of the time so the holiday becomes like an island – some dry land where you can have a rest before jumping back in to the sea. The more we work, the more we need those islands.

On the other hand, I do wonder whether the holiday is becoming something of a historical artifact that will be subsumed eventually by the short break as a new do-anything, go-anywhere generation opts for an annual assortment of different experiences instead of one or two gentler stretches of relaxation.

After all, the formal paid holiday for working people, beyond the breaks at the religious festivals, Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide, did not exist in the UK before an act of parliament in 1871 introduced the August Bank Holiday. There is no reason to suppose that formal holidays of two weeks or longer will maintain their existing popularity.

As people begin to enjoy more leisure time there will be a greater need to spread work and leisure and we may need to re-think the role of the big school holiday. Just as Cambridge University runs its summer schools that provides high quality courses for people who want to study for the fun of it, schools and teachers in future may find advantages in adapting themselves to working informally within the formal breaks.

Working In the Twenty-First Century, a new book I mentioned in a previous column, noted that during the 1980s holiday entitlements increased for many workers, although not for everyone. The abolition of legal minimum holiday rights in Wages Council industries left some in low paid non-unionised work with no holiday rights.

The book pointed out something we can easily overlook amid all the discussions of the UK’s long hours culture: that the number of average hours worked each week has been falling since it peaked in the mid to late 1990s. The fall in male workers’ hours coincided with the implementation of the European Working Time Directive in 1998. This suggests that the directive has had an impact in spite of the opt-out clause that allows people to work more than a 48-hour week if they choose to do so.

Historically working hours fell for most of the 20th century from typical working weeks of about 55 hours for men during the 19th century. The number of weekly working hours began to creep up again during the 1980s and began to fall back again after 1997. This still leaves the hours worked by UK employees some way above those of its European partners.

Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley, the book’s authors, believe that rising affluence holds the key to more leisure time. But how much of this leisure time will be used on leisure and how much on other kinds of work? The temptation to use the time out of formal work to do other things may transform our concept of relaxation. Much holiday time will mean work with another face.

If the work is quite different – say a physical activity in place of work that involves stressful decision-making, the change may be just as good as a rest. But we should never forget the pleasures of taking it easy.