Woes of a Misguided Semantic

The concept of annual leave is just passe in this era.

The original idea of leave is for the worker to have a rest and not be involved in the transactional tasks for that period. This will translate to a reduced amount of output for the company. Trade off is deemed necessary for the company as ample breaks between day to day job is identified to make the employee happier at work and thus making him more productive and overall lowering the attrition rate. Obviously the net benefit of granting an employee leave is much more positive than making him work everyday.

In the modern day, output of a company cannot be reduced as employees go on leave. Demand does not dip just because Christmas is round the corner and outputs must be consistent to ensure that the supply is constant. So if someone goes on leave, the easiest thing for a company to ensure that output remains constant is to have someone else cover the job of the person going on leave. What's worse in the recent years-with mechanization and automation replacing human labour-job profiles are moving from transactional roles to planning roles. Planning roles are not as time sensitive as transactional ones. If you are going on leave, the work will wait for you to come back and not forgetting that overall outputs cannot be decreased, more plans and projects will pile up over the period that you are gone. Net, if you are taking leave, you are either screwing your colleagues by giving them more work, or screwing yourself, cos you have now less time to finish up your work.

Taking leave is no longer a tool for work life balance. It's more like delayed hardship.

But heck it anyway. Had a great day on Friday when I did not have to work or think about it. Let's worry about it when I replicate my e mail later this evening.