More than half of workers aren’t taking the PTO they’re entitled to

Are your Finance staffers taking enough time off to keep them fresh and at the top of their game?  

Here’s a disturbing statistic: More than half of American workers participating in a recent survey left vacation days unused in 2015.

That’s the word from The State of American Vacation 2016, a June 2016 report by Project: Time Off. The study was commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association.

Fifty-five percent of workers surveyed said they’d foregone paid time off last year. In 2013, only 42% left vacation days unused, the report said.

The irony: Workers earned an average of 21.9 vacation days for 2015 — a full day more than the year before. That didn’t mean they took them, however.

You’ve well aware that no time off often leads to burnout, stress and lower productivity.

So what’s causing employees to forego their paid time off? Workers’ most common answers are that they’ll come back to a mountain of catch-up work or that they don’t think anyone else can do their job.

But the report points out another, more insidious reason: A lot of managers don’t encourage their people to take much-needed R&R. Nearly six in 10 workers (58%) said they didn’t feel support from their boss — and 80% said they’d take more time off if they felt that support.

This infographic takes a deeper dive into today’s State of Employee Vacations: