G2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022
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“But I’m the boss.”
True, some positions come with
responsibilities that you can’t
just hit “pause” on. Again, the
solution comes down to building
an environment where people
are cross-trained and have some
autonomy. Green’s top tip for a
director who can’t get the office
to stop contacting them during
vacations was this: Deputize
someone to be your gatekeeper
who understands your priorities,
will defend your boundaries and
knows how to reach you in a
true emergency.
You may feel you’re
abandoning your obligations.
You’re actually honoring your
obligation to lead by example. A
leader who never detaches from
work sends the message,
intended or not, that no one else
should either.
[email protected]projects will be in good hands
while you’re gone. Or you may
be working with a client who
insists on working only with
you. It might look like job
security, but it’s not doing your
employer or your client any
favors to not have a backup
plan. Even if you’re the only
one who can do the job
perfectly, you can’t maintain
perfection without recharging.
Set your substitutes up to
succeed. Even if there’s no time
for formal cross-training,
document what you’re working
on with clear instructions and
troubleshooting tips.
Discreetly brief your
colleagues about a
codependent client’s quirks
and triggers. They will look
capable, your client will be
mollified and you’ll have less
to clean up when you get back.contact is in your absence. If
someone insists on “missing”
that boundary, forward the
messages to your delegate and
stay out of it.You’re afraid you’ll be
replaced or resented.
Fear, whether due to a
treacherous work environment,
jealous co-workers or your
personal insecurity, does not
help performance. Working or
worrying through your R&R will
not make you a better teammate,
and it will protect your job only
until the next time you take a
break — or break down. Detach
and detox so you can come back
refreshed and ready to lighten
the load for others.“No one can handle this but
me!”
You might not trust that yoursignature to give a heads-up on
your pending absence, and
remind colleagues of your
limited availability when
discussing upcoming deadlines.
Start copying the people who
will be taking over for you on
relevant emails. Turn on your
out-of-office message a day or
two early as a “last call” warning
to others to clear up urgent
matters before your work
window closes.No one — including you —
respects your boundaries.
Every “quick question” you
answer during your time off
teaches people they don’t have
to take your boundaries
seriously.
Your out-of-office auto-
responder should state clearly
that you will be unavailable after
[date], and who the next point oftechnology that lets us work
anywhere, anytime makes it
hard to disconnect even when
we’re supposed to.
That’s bad for us. Burnout is a
leading occupational hazard
globally. Brigid Schulte has a
new podcast series titled
“American Karoshi: Moving
From a Work Culture of
Burnout, Precarity & Stress to a
Future of Worker Health & Well-
Being in the 21st Century.”
Schulte notes that stress and
overwork in the labor force is
the fifth leading cause of death
in the United States.
It’s bad for business, too. A
workplace that falls apart when
one person is offline is not a
functional workplace. An
employer that is concerned
about quality and productivity
doesn’t want decisions being
made by someone who is
physically and mentally
checked-out.
Below are some of the most
common obstacles, and
solutions, to keeping the O in
our PTO:Work inertia keeps you
rolling past quitting time.
You’ve set your out-of-office
auto-response email and voice-
mail greeting and are just about
to sign off — but then a co-
worker pings you, like Peter
Falk’s Columbo: “Oh — just one
more thing... .”
So you reply. What’s one more
message? But then that reminds
you of another thing you meant
to do, and then your phone rings... and an hour later, you’re no
closer to the exit.
Here’s the dirty little secret:
Those boulders you’re pushing
won’t stop while you’re on
vacation. You need to set up off-
ramps to redirect and slow them
enough so they don’t come
crashing back on you when you
return.
At least a week in advance,
add a note to your email
After “Hot Vax
Summer” was
interrupted by the
dawn of the delta
variant, and the
winter holidays
were
overshadowed by
omicron, this
year’s spring
travel season
promises to be
busier than ever. (BA.2? Bah.)
Americans seem determined to
make up for lost vacation time
and really get away from it all.
But really getting away from
work is a challenge for many
U.S. employees. Workplace
adviser Alison Green, creator of
AskAManager.org, shared on
Twitter a comment from a
reader who said the only way to
keep their office from contacting
them on vacation was to lie
about camping off the grid. That
comment kicked off a thread of
workers discussing how they
regularly take — or claim to take
— vacations where it’s
impossible, difficult or extremely
expensive for work to contact
them, such as cruise ships and
international excursions.
Why lie? some asked. Why not
just refuse to answer the phone
or respond to emails?
Then came stories of the
lengths to which employers have
gone to stay in touch: issuing
satellite phones; contacting
employees’ relatives on social
media; and tracking down
vacationing workers via
bartenders, hotel staff, and (my
favorite, if true) a park ranger on
a burro in the Grand Canyon.
Why are Americans so bad at
this?
Unlike every other
industrialized nation, the United
States has no mandatory paid
vacation or holiday leave.
Workers who have paid leave
often don’t take it. And even
when we take leave, many of us
can’t leave work behind. The
T o relax on v acation, p repare to unplug from computer — and your c olleagues
Work
Advice
KARLA L.
MILLER
BY JULIANNE MCSHANEAfter Yahaira Castro gave
birth 15 years ago, she went back
to her job in higher education
while her husband stayed home
with their new baby. After all, her
job offered better health ben-
efits, she said.
But while her return to work
felt like a logical decision, it
proved more emotionally diffi-
cult than she had expected. “I
don’t think I accounted for how
hard it would be when I went
back to work,” said Castro, 47,
who lives in Jersey City.
Working remotely during the
pandemic, she said, allowed her
to spend more time with her
husband and now-teenager —
and she felt that she was making
up for lost time.
Castro started going back into
the office twice a week last fall,
she said. But when she learned
that she and other staffers would
eventually be expected to return
to work in-person more often
over time, Castro “decided that I
couldn’t go back” to office life,
she said. In February, she quit
her job.
Soon after, she added a new
entry to her LinkedIn profile:
“career break.”
“After more than 16 years in a
higher education setting, I’m ex-
ploring new opportunities to
work remotely or hybrid to bal-
ance my family responsibilities,”
Castro wrote underneath the en-
try.
“Career break” is a feature the
platform introduced last month
with the goal of “recognizing that
your time away from work is just
as important, if not more so, than
traditional work experiences,”
according to Camilla Han-He,
senior product manager on
LinkedIn’s profile and identity
products team.
With the feature, LinkedIn
users can classify their time away
from paid work as one of 13
“types” of career breaks — in-
cluding bereavement, career
transition, caregiving, full-time
parenting and health and well-
being — and add details about
what led to the career break and
what they’ve done during the
break.
LinkedIn claims the new fea-
ture could be a boon for women,
pointing to data the company
collected from a survey of nearly
23,000 workers and more than
4,000 hiring managers that
found that nearly two-thirds of
employees had taken a break at
some point in their professional
career, and that 68 percent of
women surveyed said they
“wanted more ways to positively
represent their career breaks by
highlighting skills learned and
experiences they had during a
work pause.”
To Castro and other LinkedIn
users and experts, the new fea-
ture is a promising first step
toward normalizing time away
from paid work and recognizing
how those experiences can prove
relevant once people return to
paid work.
But the experts also caution
that the burden remains on em-
ployers to reevaluate the quali-
ties and experiences they consid-
er most important in employees
— by valuing caregiving as the
skilled labor that it is.
“I think the message needs to
be: Employers need to step up
and create pathways for people
to return to the workforce,” said
Tami Forman, the founding chief
executive of Path Forward, a New
York City-based nonprofit or-
ganization that supports care-
givers seeking to restart their
paid careers. “There is still a lot
of bias around what makes some-
one an ideal worker. ... We have
to recognize that part of this is a
stigma about caregiving.”
Part of how that stigma mani-
fests is through what researchers
term the “motherhood penalty,”
which can result in mothers
being passed over for jobs, being
paid lower salaries and facing
other biases in the workplace.
Castro saw that stigma even as
a young woman, she said. “The
message that I got for years was,
‘You can’t take a career break,’ ”
she said. “It’s such a damaging
message to people that you have
to always be on — that’s not life.”
But mothers are not the only
workers who face penalties for
taking time out of the paid
workforce.
A 2018 study published by the
American Sociological Associa-
tion found that only 5.4 percent
of stay-at-home fathers and
4.9 percent of stay-at-home
mothers received callbacks after
sending in résumés for potential
jobs, compared with about 9 per-
cent of unemployed applicants
and about 15 percent of em-
ployed applicants overall.
And a 2020 study published in
the research journal Demogra-
phy found that workers with the
most employment gaps experi-ence up to 40 percent lower
wages later in life, compared
with workers without those gaps.
It found that women across ra-
cial groups, Black men, people
with less education and people
living in poverty by age 22 were
most likely to have non-steady
employment paths during their
lives.
The stigma against career
breaks was part of why Valdas
Sirutis, a 35-year-old former in-
vestment adviser in Vilnius, Lith-
uania, initially hesitated about
putting his career break on his
LinkedIn profile.
He is using his time off to
spend time with his newborn
daughter, in addition to volun-
teering and thinking about his
next career moves, he said.
But, ultimately, he concluded
that “this is who I am, and this is
the part of life that I’m going
through right now, and why be
ashamed of it?” he said. “If a
company really believes in me
and my skill sets, the fact that I
took off ... [a few] months is not
going to be a hurdle in them
hiring me.”
Since the start of the pandem-
ic, many workers have similarly
renegotiated their relationships
to work, seeking career changes
and demanding better pay and
perks from employers. Many
women dropped out of the work-
force to manage child care andremote learning after mass clo-
sures of schools and day-care
centers.
There are still 872,000 fewer
women in the labor force than in
February 2020, according to a
recent analysis by the National
Women’s Law Center. Women
with disabilities, women ages 20
to 24, Black women and Latinas
face the highest overall rates of
unemployment, according to the
NWLC analysis.
For parents who return to paid
work, it’s not always a default to
consider the ways that their
caregiving experiences can prove
relevant to their jobs, according
to Anna McKay, the founder of
Parents Pivot, an online platform
that provides coaching to par-
ents seeking to return to paid
work.
In her coaching, she uses an
acronym — DEPTH — to remind
parents of how their caregiving
experiences equip them with
qualities that can be assets in the
paid workplace. Those include
drive and determination, energy,
prior professional and life ex-
perience, thought-provoking
questions, and innovation and
heart.
“People who have paused for
caregiving responsibilities really
have that ability to ... be agile for
companies,” McKay said.
Non-parents also report
strengthening some of thosequalities on their career breaks
by practicing another kind of
caregiving: self-care.
Eric Cooper, a 25-year-old
project manager based in Bos-
ton, took a five-month-long ca-
reer break last year — which he
has since added to his LinkedIn
profile — to focus on his mental
health after becoming burned
out from working self-imposed
long hours and years of frequent
job changes, he said.
“I was not able to perform in
my job,” he said. “I was so sick
and so exhausted, so tired. ... I
couldn’t so much as send an
email without having an anxiety
attack.”
But taking time off, Cooper
said, “truly taught me how to rest
and reset” — which has since
allowed him to work more effec-
tively in his new role at a finan-
cial company, he added: “I’m
changed, I’m grown, I’m healthy.
... I’m killing it.”
For New York City resident
Rebecca Wessell, 32, her current
career break — which she began
in February after leaving her job
as head of operations for an app
— consists of focusing “on my
health, hobbies, and rest,” ac-
cording to her LinkedIn page.
She sees adding details of her
career break to her profile as
“destigmatizing it for myself, and
hopefully for other people as
well,” she said.
But she’s also wary of the new
feature’s limits: “I like that they
formalized it — that formaliza-
tion gives it recognition — but
there’s still a lot of structural
problems in the U.S. to solve
before it’s an option that’s mean-
ingful and viable for a lot of
people,” Wessell said. “Employer
stigma, health care, paid leave —
all of those things make it diffi-
cult for [a career break] to be
attainable for a lot of people.”
Han-He, the LinkedIn senior
product manager, agrees that
there’s a need “to start recogniz-
ing that life experiences are part
of our work experiences,” she
said. “In a lot of cases, it’s your
‘off-résumé’ experiences that get
at the heart of your passions and
your strengths.”
Castro is nurturing some of
her passions: She’s working on
her writing and taking a certifi-
cate program in instructional
design.
And she says she has no re-
grets about making her career
break public. “Who I am now is
the true version of me,” Castro
said. “All of the things I’m doing
now are really important to me,
so I figured I’d rather present the
truest version of me than not.”LinkedIn’s ‘career break’ may help normalize caregiving
A new feature on the platform is meant to
destigmatize absences from the workforceWASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION/ISTOCK“The message that
I got for years was,
‘ You can’t take a
career break.’ It’s
such a damaging
message to people
that you have to
always be on
— that’s not life.”
Yahaira Castro,
higher-education professional
w ho left her job in February