THE AMERICAN WORKFORCE gets notoriously few holiday days – and when they do, they’re bad at actually switching off.
According to a recent study conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of the American Psychological Association, 44% of employed adults surveyed said they they check work messages at least once a day while on holidays.
Thanks to Arianna Huffington’s newest opt-in holiday email policy, this could be a thing of the past for Huffington Post employees.
“At HuffPost we’ve always made it very clear that no one is expected to check work email and respond after hours, over the weekend, or while they’re on vacation,” Huffington told Business Insider.
But how often do we see people (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) go on vacation and put up an out-of-office message, but still respond to incoming emails — often seconds after the sender receives an out-of-office email! Why? Because we are addicted, and because once we see an email, we feel compelled to answer it.
Huffington said she was inspired by the German company Daimler, which created a holiday email tool that gave employees the choice to have all their work-related emails deleted automatically while they are away.
“Since we have an incredible tech team at HuffPost, we decided to create our own tool, and now our employees have the option of having all their emails automatically deleted or archived while they’re away, so they can truly unplug and recharge during their time off,” Huffington said.
According to Huffington, email senders would receive an auto response asking them to resend their message when the employee returns to work or to contact someone else if the message is urgent.
In an email sent to the Huffington Post staff two weeks ago, the editor-in-chief of the digital news outlet detailed how staff could implement the new tool. Here’s the email:
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