Millennials prefer to take vacations in secret rather than specifically asking their bosses for days off. This is the result of a new survey.
According to a survey by the American market research and analysis company Harris Poll, Millennials (born 1980 to 1996) would rather take a secret vacation than ask their boss for paid days off.
The survey also shows that 78 percent of American employees do not use all of their vacation days. This is particularly true for younger professionals. As CNBC reports, Generation Z (born 1996 to 2010) and Millennials feel pressured to meet deadlines and be productive.
Further, CNBC reports that nearly four in 10 Millennials have taken a vacation without reporting it to their boss. They would still be active on their company’s communication platforms, but without actually working. For example, they would send messages outside of regular working hours to give the impression that they are working overtime.
“There’s a big culture of avoidance,” Harris Poll strategy director Libby Rodney told CNBC. Millennials prefer to secretly take days off instead of officially asking for a vacation. In this way, they try to achieve a good work-life balance. This practice is known as “quiet vacationing”.
The survey also shows that many Americans support the introduction of laws regulating boundaries between work and leisure time. These are common practice in Europe.
According to information from the Munich Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the minimum entitlement to paid vacation for employees in Germany was set out in the Federal Vacation Act of 1963. According to this, employees are generally entitled to “at least four weeks of paid vacation” per year. It is interesting to note that in the German legal system, Saturday is still considered a working day, so the law provides for “at least 24 working days per year as paid vacation entitlement.”
According to the Munich Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the following regulations could apply with regard to the length of the working week: With a six-day week, the employee would be entitled to “at least 24 days of vacation”, while with a five-day week they would only be entitled to “at least 20 days of vacation”.
As “Merkur.de” reports, employees in Germany have comparatively few vacation days, with an average of 29 days off per year.
According to a comparison carried out by “Resume.io”, only employees in Greece have fewer days off with a total of 26 days. Workers in Austria and Malta, on the other hand, can enjoy the most vacation days at 38 days.
The USA is at the bottom of the comparison. Employees there only receive ten paid holidays and no legally required paid vacation. In the USA, how many vacation days an employee has is entirely at the discretion of the employer.
The choice of employer is therefore even more important. Gen-Z in particular has clear ideas about which employers they do not want to work for – and are in a “boycott era”.
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