I came back to the office from a week of PTO (Paid Time Off). As one person after the other asked me “How was your vacation?”, I found myself saying “I didn’t have to work/check in too often,” with an added half-smirk or chuckle. As the volume of questions died down and now in hindsight, the gravity of my response has weighed on me and I realized I have been sending the wrong message.

Leaders must promote real PTO

PTO is deserved, earned, and healthy; leaders need to encourage their teams to take time for themselves. PTO should be automatic with the only criteria that individuals are planning with their work manager(s) to make sure all the team’s needs are covered.

Leaders must not glorify how they worked while on PTO

Leaders must not showcase to anybody that they worked while out on PTO; it delivers the absolute, wrong message. To your team, it says that there are expectations that you are available to work while away from work; a precedence has been set that is hard to negotiate in the future for everyone. To your superiors, it says that your time is not yours, its theirs. Everyone understands the need for flexibility, but boundaries need to be established at the same time. Team members will become bias and listening to the actions over the words.

Team members must educate and prepare

This is not all on the leaders. Team members need to make sure that they are offering up ample time to provide the team the means to cover their work while they are on PTO. If you are someone who have a complicated role, don’t want till the last minute to work with your team to ensure they can handle it. By waiting, you are not setting them, and really yourself in taking your PTO, for success.

As a leader that truly does believe in the need for PTO, I realized that my actions and how I expressed them had the potential of generating misinformation for my team. Even if you have to lie to yourself and others, working while on PTO is not something to be proud of or boast about. It is a sign of either bad planning and/or someone’s personal relationship they have with work; neither of which are things team members should compare themselves to.