You can and should completely disconnect from work when you take leave. By completely, I mean not answering that call from your boss, not passively reading emails to stay abreast of the happenings since you started taking leave, and not addressing the issue where you are the subject-matter expert. It all waits until you come back to work.
If that seems irresponsible, it is probably because you are not adequately preparing for your leave. With the exception of unforeseen leave, for something like a medical emergency or death in the family, you can plan in advance to make your absence as undisruptive to your coworkers and leaders as possible. This is the ticket to keeping those around you happy and your supervisor approving more leave going forward.
I am a subject-matter expert at my place of employment. In recent months, I have invented new tools and processes to facilitate my coworkers’ ability to do their jobs, but some of those innovations have a learning curve and require assistance from me. Despite numerous recent innovations in which I am essentially a product owner and main source of expertise, I am currently In Mallorca, Spain with my phone in airplane mode so nobody from work can call me. And no, my work emails do not come to my phone. I will not be reading any work emails until I return to work in July.
You should also be able to take a two-week (actually, a little more!) vacation without worrying, or even thinking, about work. However, that vacation should be stress-free because you actually planned to make your employer successful during your absence. My vacations are not carefree for lack of caring if chaos ensues in my absence; that would mean coming back to chaos on July 1, and I do not want that. Instead, plan in advance to keep your employer happy while you enjoy a blissful vacation.
Schedule in Advance
The first and most apparent step to taking time off responsibly is scheduling your leave in advance. The further out you schedule your leave, the more likely nobody will already have leave scheduled. The worst thing you can run into is seeking to schedule some time off when everyone else has already scheduled to be away at the same time.
In the United States, this is most important with summer vacations. In general, offices keep working through the summer since folks take time off at different times during the season. However, most employees try to take time off sometime during the summer, so be sure to schedule your leave before your coworkers do!
If your employer continues work through the Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Year’s holidays, scheduling your vacations far in advance is similarly important for those times. I am taking some leave around Christmas this year and already have it in the calendar. As I write this in May, I am the only person on my team to have scheduled December leave.
If you are taking leave at a different time of the year, planning in advance is a little less important because coverage will be easier, but I still recommend it. Last year, we took our largest periods of leave in early May, before the summer rush, and late November/early December, before the big end-of-year leave period. I probably could have delayed notifying work about this leave, but I still put it in the calendar early. If you do enjoy taking last-minute vacations, getaways in times like October or February are best, but plan in advance when you can.
Beyond the actual scheduling of your leave, make sure you communicate it to your coworkers and supervisor! Over-communication is preferable to potential under-communication. Here is what I do to record my upcoming leave:
As soon as I have tentative leave dates, I put it in my workplace’s shared team calendar. This is often quite far in advance, but I add them to claim those dates.
Once the leave dates are finalized, I send a calendar invite in Outlook to the people I work with directly on a daily basis. This does not have to be everyone on your team. To figure out who needs an invite, think about who would immediately notice your absence. That is who needs to know.
After finalizing dates, I also update the shared team calendar, if needed, to show the dates are no longer tentative.
Once lodging is finalized, complete any required travel forms, if that is required for your place of employment.
In the month preceding any extended leave period, I start mentioning that it is coming up in staff meetings and one-on-one conversations involving those with whom I work closely. For shorter leave—anything less than a week—I just remind my team in the staff meeting the week prior.
While my exact pattern varies depending on whether I take leave for just a couple days versus a couple weeks, my quick recommendations are:
Add leave to your team calendar.
Send an Outlook invite with your leave to your supervisor and immediate team members.
Remind everyone about your leave in staff meetings before the leave.
If pertinent to your workplace, complete any required travel forms.
If you do this, nobody will be surprised about your leave. The more communicative you are about your leave, the less likely your employer will complain about your absence. It is easy to plan around something scheduled in advance, so plan in advance and communicate those plans to make sure you can enjoy your plans without stress.
Identify Coverage Early
Most individuals at work will take one of the two most common approaches when taking leave:
Ask individuals the week before their leave begins to cover their biggest tasks.
Designate one or two individuals in their out-of-office email to contact with “anything urgent.”
These approaches are both terrible for different reasons.
First, if you are asking your organized coworker to cover your biggest tasks next week, they probably already scheduled some of their week without considering this additional responsibility. While they will probably say yes to the coverage, this will cause them stress. You do not want to be the coworker that causes those around you stress.
Instead, ask coworkers to cover for you well in advance. I like to ask about coverage a month in advance since the person will likely know what big projects will require their time, but they will have the flexibility in their schedule to cover additional tasks from me. Once someone agrees to coverage for you, send them a calendar invite so they can easily remember your upcoming leave.
Designating one or two individuals in your out-of-office message as the only warning will likely surprise your coworker and potentially send requests that do not pertain to their area of expertise to their inbox. Navigating requests that you do not know how to address is daunting, so do not do this to someone. Even if you warn someone that they will be on your out-of-office message, they will probably get some requests that clog up their inbox and provide stress.
Here is what to do instead of these two approaches:
Ask your coworkers to cover the biggest specific parts of your job well in advance. A month is a good amount of time.
Send the coworkers who agree to cover for you calendar invites.
Let anyone who contacts you often know who their best point of contact is directly prior to your absence.
In your out-of-office message, indicate who folks should contact about specific topics in accordance with which coworkers you asked to cover those specific topics.
Include a link to an outline that answers additional questions folks may have that require your specific expertise. (More on that below!)
Giving specific people specific coverage responsibilities is a lot less daunting than asking them to cover your entire job. Dividing your main responsibilities among a group of people makes the workload manageable for each person and makes them feel more confident that they can cover your absence.
Schedule Your Big Projects Around Your Leave
To make it easier for your coworkers to cover your workload, reduce the potential workload for your time away to the best of your ability. If you are planning leave in advance, you can generally move the most important project deadlines to accommodate your leave. I deal with large international programs that cost millions of dollars individually and billions of dollars cumulatively, with many stakeholders from various countries. I am able to flex projects around my leave, and I took 43 days of leave last year. If you say you cannot do this, I bet you have not completely tried.
I look at a project’s likely timeline and figure out which big milestones or deadlines may hit while I am on vacation months in advance. I also immediately assess which ones are likely to be delayed until I am back from vacation without my interference and do not worry about those. If a deadline falls in the final week of your leave, and that deadline regularly gets pushed back, accept the pattern and know you can just address that deadline upon your return.
For projects that have unavoidable deadlines during your leave, get them done early. I recognize that sounds easier than it often is in reality. If the project is entirely yours, this is simple. If the project requires input from others, there are a couple ways to go about this.
If your team is splitting up responsibilities for a project that will span the period of your leave, pick responsibilities that can be done before and after your leave so your absence does not disrupt progress. You can determine what responsibilities are best by practicing some backwards planning and determining what phase of the project is likely to occur while you are gone.
If the project instead has multiple processes with different stakeholders, you may have a bit less control regarding when your area of expertise is needed. I completely understand: I provide a final financial check on millions of dollars of calculations before they are notified to Congress. That is a more inflexible responsibility. If I have upcoming leave, I guide this process to early completion by helping my coworkers in their roles in the process that precede my final check. This means helping them organize some financial records in advance so they can calculate numbers more quickly, and I can check their numbers before flying away on vacation.
There are two main practices that make taking longer periods of leave easy. First, flagging problematic dates well in advance typically makes it easy to avoid any conflicts on large projects. With enough notice, you can plan around almost anything. Second, offering to help in order to expedite processes is well-received. Individuals will not take kindly to you requesting earlier deadlines to accommodate your leave. However, if you offer to take some work off their plate in order to speed work up, they will often be receptive. I plan early and am willing to pick up a little work to make my ideal timeline a reality.
Draft an Easily Accessible Explanation of Your Area of Expertise
For those areas in which you are truly your team’s subject-matter expert, it may be difficult to assign someone to cover your responsibilities. This is especially true if you generally answer questions pertaining to a particular subject and simply will not be there to answer them.
I fill this role since my current job involves data and knowledge management. To accommodate my leave schedule without leaving my coworkers hanging, I created an “FAQs” document with the most common questions I receive on a weekly basis to help folks while I am on leave. While this will not cover everything, it addresses the majority of questions.
This FAQs document also directs my coworkers to the individuals that can provide them the best additional help, should they require additional assistance. These are typically the folks I asked for coverage for specific tasks. In a couple cases, they are other folks who have certain technical skills, in which case I just let the individual know that folks could come to them with questions regarding a specific topic.
My out-of-office email includes a link to this FAQs document so that anyone who emails me a question can click the link to help themself with their question. It gives my coworkers the autonomy to address their questions while I am on leave.
Schedule Your Auto Response and Ignore Work
After planning well in advance for your leave, communicating your leave to your team, arranging coverage for your most important tasks, scheduling the biggest projects around your schedule, and preparing a resource to address questions that come to you, it is time to put up your out-of-office message and enjoy your leave! That out-of-office message contains information about which individuals should be contacted for specific topics and an FAQs document with other questions that usually come to you as a subject-matter expert. If anything else is both important enough and urgent enough to require your expertise with all this preparation, your team should have two people with that area of expertise. Either your employer has figured that out and the other person will cover anything that arises, or your employer learned that they are short-staffed. Enjoy your leave.
The second your out-of-office message is up, you should not respond to a single thing. No emails, no calls, no Teams or Slack messages. You are out of the office, so get away from workplace communications. This is actually beneficial for you and your employer. You need to completely unplug to avoid burnout and enhance creativity in your work. Your brain cannot explore all problem-solving possibilities within the workplace without changes in its environment to stimulate creativity.
Take responsibility in advance to set up an easy leave experience. Shut off communications and head to the airport, train, or car. It has been 12 days since I embarked on a vacation, and I have no idea what is happening at my place of work. My biggest worry is what the weather in Mallorca will be tomorrow.
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