Two Chaps - Many Cultures

Why We (Don't) Take Time Off and What Culture Has To Do With It

• Christian Höferle and Brett Parry • Season 2 • Episode 19

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Ever wondered how your cultural background shapes your vacation habits? Join us as we unpack the profound effects of regional and professional environments on the way we take time off. From the importance of vacations for wellness to the intricacies of planning around family and pets, you’ll gain insights into how various factors influence your break from the grind. We also delve into the distinction between loving your vocation and being tied to a demanding job and how that impacts your need for a breather. Plus, we invite you to share your own vacation stories and habits.

How do Australia and the U.S. differ in their attitudes towards vacations? We juxtapose the laid-back, generous vacation policies of Australia with the hustle culture of the United States, where workplace visibility often trumps personal time off. Learn about the cultural norms and economic factors driving these differences, and discover how Mediterranean regions treat time off as a sacred right compared to Asia’s strategic use of limited vacation days. From the art of crafting autoresponder emails to balancing professional performance with personal well-being, we'll broaden your understanding of global vacation perspectives and work-life balance.

𝙏𝙬𝙤 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙨 – 𝙈𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝘾𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 is the world’s #1 show on the business of culture and the culture of business. Christian Höferle and Brett Parry ponder culture in short bursts and deep dives, featuring your questions and comments related to culture, business, and personal growth.

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more great content: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoChapsManyCultures

Visit https://theculturemastery.com/ for more information about the skills for working in a global context.

The music on this episode is provided courtesy of Sepalot.
“Duum Diip” - Artist: Sepalot - Label: Eskapaden - Copyright control



Speaker 1:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Speaker 2:

So let's take it. What about Jill?

Speaker 1:

Maybe it doesn't make Jill a dull boy. It makes Jill a dull girl me. So why don't we take a trip? All right, should we go and relax a little? Maybe we should, and yet a lot of us don't feel like we're getting enough time off, that we're really not kicking it back enough, and it may have something to do with where we actually work. That may very much influence how we take time off. Let's take a closer look.

Speaker 3:

Welcome to 2Chap. Many Cultures. In an increasingly globally connected world, it is vital to possess the essential skills of cultural intelligence. Listen along as we present the topics, tips and strategies you can use to develop the power of cultural understanding in your personal and professional life. Here are your hosts Christian, huffala and Brett.

Speaker 2:

Parry, hello again and welcome back to Two Chaps, many Cultures, the only show on the planet where too much culture is barely enough.

Speaker 1:

And where too much vacation is barely enough, if you ask me.

Speaker 2:

That's another point too. Yes, welcome to the show where we talk about the business of culture and the culture of business. And today we are talking about vacations, where the origins of where you live or where you work might have something to do with the amount of vacation you take or don't take in this particular case. But before we get started, I will ask you that please subscribe, hit that bell and listen along, make sure that you get informed on the next episode and be a part of the conversation. So, my friend, taking a good break slightly.

Speaker 1:

I have taken a break. It was good. It was not great. It was a good break. Could have been a better break and I'm not complaining. It was a break. And we're curious.

Speaker 1:

As you ring the bell, as you subscribe to this channel and stay part of the conversation, share with us in the comments to this episode how often do you go on vacation? Do you do it once a year, twice a year, once a decade? Do you take long breaks? Do you take short breaks? Do you take them as a solo traveler with, maybe a life partner? If you have young ones in the family, do you take them along or do they go on separate trips? What do you do with your pets, if you have pets? All of these considerations that go into planning a vacation or a trip doesn't necessarily have to be a vacation. It could be time off spent with loved ones or friends at home or near your home. The concept that we're talking about is in the US. They call it PTO personal time off. Do you take time off and do you do it enough? Do you do enough, brett? I do a lot. I guess.

Speaker 2:

Well, I guess it gets around. We talk about vacation, but I want to always bring in the conversation about vocation. You know, do you have a career, do you have a vocation, do you have something that you love? I mean, I just think that doing the work we do every day is a work day for me, is a work day for me Not only if I'm talking to clients directly, but could be that I'm just developing information for clients. In that sense, so we love this work.

Speaker 2:

So we understand not everybody is like that and if you've got a job which especially, maybe even physical right, if you have a physical job that puts demands physically on your body but also something that really taxes your brain, I would like to think that what we do taxes our brain a little bit, especially me. But you know a lot of thinking and a lot of work we need to take a break from from various points of view the point of view of the physical well-being, the psychological well-being and something that you certainly talk about. There might be some of that spiritual side of things, more of the connectedness that we need to feel with the people we actually go to work and spend time away from.

Speaker 1:

Well, while I understand that not everybody on this planet has gainful employment that is fulfilling in a spiritual way, that is actually a passion project that they have created a meaning for themselves around it, I do recognize a lot of people have a job because it pays the bills. I don't know, was it Karl Lagerfeld, the late German fashion designer, who said things that you hate doing, that's the job. Things that you love doing, that is work in the sense of meaningful work. And there's other quotes around that surrounding, like if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. Well, I don't know how much of that is true.

Speaker 1:

Work a day in your life? Well, I don't know how much of that is true. I love what I do and still I feel once in a while that is in fact, work and that it is draining or exhausting to a certain degree. And I think, in physics, anything where we put performance into, where we power into it needs recuperation, energy needs to be restored. There is, it's not. You don't have an unlimited amount. That's why we have vacation, right?

Speaker 1:

that's why we have personal time off now we've come across some statistics and, as we're recording this, of course this is a timeless episode.

Speaker 1:

You can watch this any time of the year. As we're recording this, it's the holiday season in the northern part of our globe and there's news articles about the statistics being published about how much time do people actually take off, and there was one particular company who is in the travel industry who has created something of a what they call a vacation deprivation index or similar. I'm not quite sure about the language, but it sounded like if you're not taking enough, you feel deprived of your vacation, right, you're stripped from the privilege of recuperation, and in some countries, that feeling might be stronger than in others, because in some countries, people are not used to taking a lot of time off, where in other economies, in other countries, time off is baked into the work year and is much more of a habitual thing rather than a choice. What is it like in your native country? How do people down under take vacations, and are they serious about it, or is it more of a? Well, let's do it.

Speaker 2:

I think the hint can be found in the way that when you're working with folks from different cultures, that they show how much they want to be seen right, how much the importance of visibility In Australia. I guess it may have changed more recently, but I always remember it not being as hard driving to be visible in the workplace. Yes, you wanted to be seen as valuable, but not the need to be seen as dispensable or indispensable, right? So you don't want to kind of put out the feeling that if I don't go to work then somehow people are going to forget what I do and diminish my value. That is certainly, I hope, in the business world in Australia still prevalent and I think a lot of people I work with that go to Australia do.

Speaker 2:

When they arrive they see and again it gets back to perception they may come from a culture where visibility and appearance and being seen all the time is important, like maybe perhaps here in the US, and therefore there's a reticence to take time off because that makes you kind of disappear and out of sight, out of mind comes into play, whereas in Australia, where we enjoy the outdoors, we have the benefit of enjoying the outdoors to a greater degree and we really like our time with our families and things like that and our workplace, the social contract with the society also, because healthcare isn't really tied to your job as much. Those kind of support networks are not tied to the job. Maybe there's a little bit of a subconscious feeling that I'm going to really make sure that I take my vacation and there's also a lot more vacation allowed in australia. So, very quickly after being employed, and and on and on on an ongoing basis, in a very short period of time you accrue additional leave.

Speaker 1:

How many work days or how many vacation days do you get in Australia per year?

Speaker 2:

Well, I remember you know very quickly you got a full month's paid vacation. It was something that was just baked in, like you said. That's the thing that's baked into it. And then pretty soon you know a lot of jobs historically had this after 10 years you got long service leave which would tack on another whole month at a time.

Speaker 3:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

And then more, and it was a reward for the commitment and the loyalty to the company that they said let's throw you some more paid vacation and off you go right. And there wasn't that importance that you had to be there. There seemed to be more of a support network. Of course, it was different when I came to the US as a business person. I found people where even you could offer them all of that vacation but there was no way they were going to take it for getting very few paid vacation days or days off.

Speaker 1:

And there's other ways to take time off in the US workplace maybe unpaid, or sometimes people take what's called sick days in order to recharge their batteries. But not all of these days are fully paid. And, as you mentioned earlier, in US US culture, it is a little bit more important for a lot of people at the workplace to be seen, to be recognized, not in the sense of being seen as a star contributor or as indispensable, but being recognized as present and an active contributor to the team. And if you're not there, then people might think hey, Jim or Jack or Jill are not here today and work is still getting done. Do we really need Jack on the payroll? What can we do without Jack? Because he was gone for three days.

Speaker 1:

So that is an insidious fear. To be be honest, that is very often that plays into those decisions. I think another factor might be overall economics of travel. Right. In some markets your average pay may not allow you to travel the world as much, because the currency that you're paid in may not make it easy for you to go to destinations that are very sought after. So that might play into it.

Speaker 1:

And for me as a European, I always found that what makes it really hard for working families in the United States is how the school system is structured around the calendar year, Whereas in Europe a lot of countries the school year is broken up into multiple pieces, with short vacation breaks, like a week or maybe two weeks, for the children or students, and then there's longer breaks in the summer. There's even a break in the winter around certain holidays, and in the US the bulk of the vacation time for students is the 10 to 12 weeks in the summer. So if that happens for most states in the United States at around the same time of year, you can't just send 100 million working Americans on vacation at the same time. That simply doesn't work. So all of these are social and economic and also cultural factors that play into that decision making, right yeah?

Speaker 2:

that's a good reminder too, because the school year in Australia is much longer. The main summer break really only lasts about six weeks.

Speaker 2:

It's not a long break in comparison, but there is more opportunity during the year, so during even the winter months there's opportunities. So employers can share, or employees can share, the load of taking vacations and things like that, yeah for sure. So I I just think as a, as a manager, um, going to a new culture, if you are, one of the things you really have to kind of do research in is what is the attitude around vacations? And of course, as you mentioned, in some European countries taking time off is sacrosanct. There is sometimes laws that are in place that prohibit anybody from the employer's place from contacting people when they're on vacation, and that can sometimes cause some stress, of course, if you think that person's got information that is needed.

Speaker 2:

But there's another thing is that that visibility that we see in the US, where people can kind of silo their information and they can keep it to themselves, in Europe may not exist so much. There is more of an open, shared environment where people are willing to kind of because for their own well-being they don't want to be called on vacation, right, they? They don't want to be called and checked in on on vacation, they want to be able to just give fellow workers the stuff and and and be off on their beach and, uh, and sit there and drink their cocktails unimpeded.

Speaker 1:

And I find that interesting because we work with global professionals, brett and I, and when I contact people via email, the out-of-office responders I get often tell me one, which country they're from and two, the home country nationality of their employer. So if they work for a Europe-based company, they're out of office. Autoresponder emails often clearly state that the email is not going to be forwarded into that individual's inbox until that very date. And if you have an urgent request before that, here are three different names, phone numbers, emails that you can contact. So that is a very more distributed knowledge base or contact base. And then I get autoresponders saying well, I'm out of the eye the individual, I'm out of the office. In urgent cases, call my cell phone. I'm out of the office. In urgent cases, call my cell phone. So that still leaves the back door open for being contacted, even though I dedicated time off for myself.

Speaker 1:

And what you said earlier, there are sacrosanct times for some cultures, especially in Mediterranean cultures, how certain days of the calendar, or maybe certain weeks, you really don't get anyone on the phone. Now Nobody answers an email. And in Italy it's the famous Ferragosto, which is around the middle of the month of August, where every Italian is apparently out of the office. I've seen a talk show just recently a talk show recording with an Italian participant and he was joking about this. Yeah, on August the 15th, if you fall sick and you have to go to the hospital, you might as well die because nobody's working at the hospital. Of course it was an exaggeration, but for some cultures time off is a human right. It is an essential right, it's non-negotiable, Whereas in other cultures that is a more fluid concept that can be renegotiated depending on the seniority of your job or your relationship with your employer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely Well, I certainly like my breaks there's no doubt about that, and I take a lot of them. But again, I tend to work on my breaks. I don't know, I have a very blurred line between my uh work and and free time, um, but that is the privilege of course. We've got to recognize that sometimes, if you get to do what you love, um, and love what you do, you get the privilege of doing it uh, mobile.

Speaker 1:

So that's no, it also. It also factors in that uh, are you employed? Are you in? Are you in a salaried employment position, or are you in an hourly job, in a 1099 contractor situation? Or, like Brett and myself, are you self-employed, do you run your own business? And that may very well influence how much unplugging you allow yourself during your breaks. What I found interesting, looking at the statistic that I mentioned earlier, is how different cultures around the world seem to have different PTO strategies. Right, and especially in Asia, it seems that cultures that may not have, or countries where they may not have, a lot of vacation days paid vacation is available they are very strategic in using those vacation days around national holidays and weekends to combine them into more short trips or short periods of time off throughout the calendar year, instead of taking a three-week cruise, right, so they they take shorter breaks, which may or may not be the the key to their perfect uh recharging, who knows?

Speaker 2:

well, although you would, maybe it's got something to do with the again. The cultural thing is that when I'm speaking to Japanese people or Chinese people, even though they're short of breaks, they tend to kind of switch off very quickly.

Speaker 2:

This ability to get very centered and go, I can remove myself from that mindset of working very quickly so I can kind of rest my brain and my body and connect with my spiritual side. If that drives you and perhaps there is a bit of a resistance or an inability to do it in a culture like the US where you tend to be, you know, maybe that kind of worry am I being missed? Am I not being missed, which is even worse, and so there is that kind of buffer that is longer, that To really rest. They don't really have the access to that kind of period of rest because they're not taking long vacations here, but they might think that they're taking longer vacations a week or two weeks, but it's still a few days for your mind to switch off.

Speaker 1:

It does and I think some of it also is, and that's a cultural factor is how do we view our production time, no matter what you do for work, right? How are you productive, creating value, and how are you enjoying your life? The often quoted work-life balance right? I'm not a huge fan of that terminology because I think it can't be descriptive. Everybody needs to find their own balance and see what works for them. But I think in different cultures there is the self-image and the self-worth that people feel is more determined on their job, and in other cultures it's more determined on other factors.

Speaker 1:

Here in North America, canada and the US, work very often is one of the determining factors of who I am, not only in the public eye, in my social environment, but also for myself. How important or how good do I feel about myself? For North Americans is often connected to how well am I performing in a professional sense. If you talk to people from Brazil or from Greece, they will give you a different answer. They will tell you that, yes, work is part of that, and also my personal relationships, my family, my constant growth outside of work, whether it be travel for relaxation or travel for learning new things, or travel for learning new things, meeting new cultures, eating different foods and exploring history, architecture, societies of different places. That is also part of who I am. The memories that I collect during my lifetime make me the person that I am. So self-image and identity are different in different cultures, and I think that also plays into how do we, how important do we, make personal time off, and that reflects in how much time people spend on vacations.

Speaker 2:

That brings in the word of ascription. We use this in our work to say how do different cultures identify individually? And I often use this phrase when I'm working with professionals that are going off on their first international assignment and I'd say welcome to the club and they kind of not want to know what club that is. And I say well, the club of expatriatism, it is a club.

Speaker 1:

It's the expat.

Speaker 2:

Right and it's not an exclusive club.

Speaker 2:

Plenty of people get to do it, you know, and and obviously we're working with people that are doing it by choice.

Speaker 2:

There's obviously a great deal of the population in the world that are moved involuntary, involuntarily, uh, through conflict or other happenings, but in their case we're talking about people like this, and I use that term and then I'm kind of bringing in that conversation about now. You identify with a certain group of people that perhaps are now exploring the world and it's got less to do with your job. You might find your job becomes less important to you now that you open your eyes and you'll broaden your horizons in the excitement and the possibilities of connecting with different cultures. And it sounds a bit woo-woo, it, you know, gets into the realm of, but I truly believe it myself. It's kind of like I would rather collect airline miles, not for the sake of saying I've got a lot of airline miles, but to say that I'm collecting them because I'm going and exploring new horizons yeah, and whether or not you fly to your destination or you ride your bike or you walk or you just move yourself from the bed to the couch or whether you drive yourself.

Speaker 1:

Um, I I was reminded of this recently. I read a headline in the German news because in Germany we have different states or different administrative subdivisions of the country that have different vacation times, so they stagger the school vacations from north to south so not that the whole country has vacation at the same time in an attempt to take the pressure off the travel infrastructure, road infrastructure and yet we still have traffic jams around the main holiday season. And the headline was is it worth driving into the traffic jam If it's only five hours? Is it still worth going into it, or should you start on a different day? So just think about this the concept of I know I'm going to be stuck in a car not moving very quickly on the highway for five hours as the beginning of my vacation, and that has normalized. Apparently that is not something we even question. It's like that's part of the trip. We need to do this.

Speaker 2:

It's the cost of doing business.

Speaker 1:

Cost of doing vacation, I guess. So I mean, I laugh about it. And yet these are all the unwritten rules of PTO, and those differ from country to country. Right? Brett just talked about collecting miles on his airline account. Well, in other cultures, having a miles account is an indicator of travel. Not well done, because we're polluting the air with too much co2.

Speaker 1:

Right, there is flight shaming in some cultures, so there is a tendency to spend your time off differently. I'm not going to be the judge of that, because I have miles account myself and I try to limit my carbon footprint as well. But it's finding the balance that works for you and that you feel makes you a responsible traveler. And as we talk about this, I am reminded of this.

Speaker 1:

Maybe a quote that has maybe been quoted too often, but the great Mark Twain, a famous American literary figure and I'm probably butchering the quote now said something like travel is the best antidote to xenophobia and to ignorance and to disrespecting other cultures. So only only the, the traveler will be able to see the world through different eyes, because only at home are you one of them, once you go outside of your own little bubble, or the if you're a fish that is choosing to swim outside of your pond into a different body of water. That's when you learn the most, when you're confronted with difference and when you are challenged to use your brain a little differently than when you're surrounded by everybody. That is the same Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

Difference, a lot of difference, beauty and difference. I find, anyway, that's just me and I try to be. It's a good point, though I do try to be relatively strategic when I'm traveling, especially with clients. I like to kind of group my now because a lot of our clients actually the companies themselves, and rightly so wanting to kind of encourage their employees to be very strategic about how they travel and their impact on the planet, and that's rightly so. I mean we're seeing it change before our eyes, so we want to be partners in that.

Speaker 2:

Of course that's something that we if you're working with people in companies like that, to kind of find out some of the underlying things. Yes, they do a particular function, they sell a particular product, but there's some really good initiatives in a lot of the companies that we work with and we try and match those and it encourages us to kind of be very strategic. It's a long way from spending 10 hours in the back of the station wagon in mom and dad's station wagon in Australia to drive overnight to go and see grandma and grandpa in another state. That's what we used to do when we were kids, no seatbelts.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I'm going to be vulnerable here and I'm going to divulge too much personal information, but bear with me. This is how nerdy I am or can be. On a recent trip the one you asked me about, our last trip as as a family, we drove. We didn't fly, we drove, and we drove quite a distance, and the distance we had to cover to get there was about 620 or 630 miles. So for those of you who think in metrics, that's, I think, more than a thousand kilometers almost 1100 kilometers.

Speaker 1:

So my goal? I knew that there I'm still polluting the air with my car, but the car was full with people, so it was utilized to the max and my goal was to get to the destination on one tank of gas. And I knew it was going to be a stretch and I had to drive economically and have a soft foot on the pedal. And I managed to do it. Wow, I do it. Wow, I loved it. So I knew I'm still not doing the greenest thing to get to that place where I was going, and yet I was managing my carbon-related resources as best as I could.

Speaker 2:

Well done, all right. Well, tell us what's your idea of a right amount of vacation. How do you define that, how do you use your vacations and what do you do to maybe reduce your impact on the planet while you're vacationing, instead of collecting airline miles like us?

Speaker 1:

And what were the biggest learnings you had about other cultures when you were a prod? We would like to know. Write it in the comments or send us emails, or send us a video response. Whatever you want to do, we are curious. What makes a great vacation for you and maybe what have you learned in a different culture and that you can apply at your work in a way that makes you more efficient and productive.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Like and subscribe. Hit that bell again and don't forget our podcast. You can take a vacation from looking at us and you can just listen to us. Maybe, if you're on a you're trying to do that, one trip on the tank of gas we can put our dulcet tones into your ears while you're doing that. That'll make you slow down, if nothing else. So enough of us. Thank you very much for listening. Good to see you again, mate, for another week.

Speaker 3:

My pleasure.

Speaker 2:

Just thank you again for listening to the show, where too much culture is barely enough and we talk about the business of culture and the culture of business.

Speaker 1:

We will see you next time and I need a break from him. So, pto, bye, oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.