Managers think employees should take a break from work—but they don’t promote the ones who do

Workers who take small steps to enforce work-life balance—like setting an out-of-office message on weekends or not answering emails on vacation—are often considered less committed and promotable, even when they’re encouraged to take those actions.

Researchers behind a new study looking at the phenomenon are calling this “the detachment paradox.”

“We were only looking at stuff that happens when the worker is not supposed to work, such as evenings, weekends, and vacations,” says Elisa Solinas, an assistant professor of marketing at IE University in Spain and one of the paper’s coauthors. “What we still see is that the more the worker detaches, the more harshly they get evaluated.”

Managers both value and punish time off

The researchers split managers into two groups and gave each the same fictitious story about a hypothetical employee, only for one group the protagonist took a small action to detach from work during their off hours.

Managers perceived the employee who enforced some relatively minor work-life boundaries as more focused, less stressed out, and less likely to experience burnout. However, they also perceived that employee as less dedicated to work.

“The same people who said that [the workers] are going to be more productive also said that they were going to be less promotable,” says coauthor Eva Buechel, an assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “So even the people who say this is really important and even encourage work-life balance penalize them [for detaching].”

The researchers also came up with nearly identical results when they replaced the hypothetical workers with the managers’ real team members in those fictitious scenarios. 

Finally, researchers asked participants to describe members of their staff, including their ethnicity, age, tenure, job performance, collegiality, commitment, and whether they enforce work-life boundaries.

In the end, workers who took even small actions to detach from work during their designated time off were broadly seen as less committed and less promotable by their managers.  

“There’s significant literature on how people are evaluated differently based on things like age, ethnicity, and gender, and we didn’t really find any of that,” Buechel says. “I can comfortably say this [detachment] penalty has equal, if not more significance than those other worker-related biases.”

Give me a break

With work-related stress and burnout rates on the rise, employees need more time to rest and recover, but research suggests they’re getting less of it.  

According to a recent survey of 2,000 American workers conducted by book summary app Headway, two-thirds of workers struggle to switch off on vacation, and more than half have experienced conflicts with loved ones over their inability to unplug while away.

“Just 4% of workers are left alone on vacation; the rest get bombarded with emails, messages, and calls,” says Thalia-Maria Tourikis, a health coach and burnout prevention and recovery expert for Headway. “Workers are encouraged to take time off, then pestered with emails and messages the moment they do, to the point of guilt, anxiety, insomnia, and burnout.”

Thanks to technology, there are few physical barriers between employees and their increasingly digital workplaces. As a result, Tourikis says, many struggle to mentally detach from work, even when they’re far from the office.

“Taking time off shouldn’t feel like a sin,” she says. “If we want to be healthier and happier, we have to stop glorifying constant availability and start respecting annual leave.”

Small breaks can make a big difference

Vacations have traditionally been considered an employee indulgence that came at the expense of their employers, but new research suggests the benefits are mutual, and more significant than previously understood. 

“The prevailing assumption was vacation offers small benefits for well-being, and they fade quickly when you get back to work,” says Ryan Grant, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Georgia who recently coauthored a meta-analysis on vacations and employee well-being. “We found the benefits were pretty huge.”

Grant explains that the energizing effects of time off are actually 85% greater than previously suggested, and those effects persisted much longer, fading gradually over an average of about 43 days.  

According to the study, the most significant factor in determining the size and longevity of that post-vacation well-being boost was the ability to detach from work while  away. 

“It was the only recovery activity that had a strong positive association with well-being both during and after the vacation,” Grant says. “That suggests the more you psychologically detach during vacation—the less you check your email, communicate with coworkers, and just think about work generally—the better your vacation is going to be, and the larger your well-being benefits are going to be after.”

Detachment offers a win-win for employees and managers

But this isn’t just about enjoying that week in the sun or on the slopes. When workers can fully detach from work, their employers often benefit in the form of higher employee morale, resilience, and productivity, as well as lower healthcare costs, absenteeism, and turnover rates.

“[Managers] are trying to improve the organization’s bottom line and improve employee performance, but not allowing people the time to detach and recover directly opposes that goal,” Grant says. “They’re actually doing things that run directly counter to what they’re trying to accomplish.”

While the occasional late-night email or Saturday phone call may seem inconsequential in the moment, Grant says such actions leave workers in constant fear of having their downtime interrupted, making it harder to fully recharge while away from work. 

“In the short term, you’re like, ‘Well, I need this thing done today, so I’m going to email my subordinate and say I want them to do this thing tonight,’” he says. “But if you look at things in the longer term, the more you’re not allowing people to detach on a daily basis, the more the negative effects on their health and performance are going to increase over time.”