As the summer creeps toward a close, your employees may be scrambling to take a vacation before their kids go back to school, or before the end-of-year push for sales builds to a frenzy. Pretty much every company offers vacation days to their employees, and pretty much every employee never takes all of them. Perhaps you should encourage them to.

Yes, it may seem like there’s never a good time to be short of people, but hopefully you designed your workforce plan to account for holidays, vacation, and other time away. You’re probably aware of all the benefits for your employees of taking time off, and those often translate into higher performance and lower attrition rates for you. But there’s another benefit to having people take time off: you can learn what happens when they are gone.
 

You Can Learn a Lot

An article in The Economist offers these interesting thoughts:

Indeed, just as employees need a break from the workplace, companies sometimes need a break from their employees. After a trading scandal at Société Générale, a French bank, in 2008, Britain’s then regulator, the Financial Services Authority, recommended that all traders take a two-week break at some point in the year. The aim was to ensure that any unusual dealing patterns would be discovered while the miscreant was away from their desk.

Senior managers can also benefit from seeing what happens when their juniors head to the beach. Does office morale improve as soon as a mid-level manager disappears? If so, this suggests that he or she is not running the department well. Does an underling impress when standing in for their boss? In that case, they may be overdue a promotion.

You can learn a great deal from someone’s absence. It can tell you a lot about what’s happening when they are present.

Seeing what happens when people go on vacation tells you a lot about the work they are doing when they are in the office. If a supervisor leaves and their team falls apart, that suggests they may not be delegating much or developing their team members. Conversely, if their team performs as usual, that may tell you their supervisor has created a well-trained group. (By the way, lots of people hesitate to take their vacations because they don’t want it to appear they aren’t needed — but if you have a supervisor whose absence doesn’t cause a problem, that’s actually a good sign they have been an effective leader!)
 

Vacation Can Offer Good Practice

You might also use vacation time to give potential future leaders some practice. When someone in a leadership position is gone, don’t just have them put an out-of-office message on their email account. Have them designate someone to take their place, with a clear understanding of their authority and responsibility. This could be a chance for an employee to show off their leadership abilities in a relatively low-risk environment.

This all only works when someone is not working remotely, of course. When people take time off, ensure they really take time off. Having a supervisor who’s on vacation but also working intermittently can be disruptive for their team, and also reduces your information-gathering. When people go on vacation, tell them not to check in with the office. If your company is about to go bankrupt, you’ll call them; they don’t need to call you.