By: Ima Linzag
These days, lifestyle and work-life balance has been a growing conversation. People lifestyle bloggers and influencers have been a huge trend on Instagram and Youtube with followers searching for inspiration to live their best lives, sometimes even keeping up with their lives to live vicariously through them and the aspects of their life they share.
While the conversation of life balance has been on the rise, it seems that action to follow-through is slow to pick up the pace. Over half of the American workforce do not use up their vacation days, for “fear of looking replaceable.” Collectively, there was a total of 705 million vacation days that went unused in 2017, which translates into $62.2 billion in benefits. Though it is understandable that taking advantage of every vacation opportunity may reflect negatively on your career, the result of such thinking actually does the opposite. Non-vacationers end up not performing as highly as their counterparts, which result in lowering chances of promotion by 8% and decreasing the chances of a raise by 5%.
In addition to the effects that the lack of time off takes on your personal career, it also affects an entire industry and the economy of the United States. Unused vacation days actually cost the hospitality and tourism industry in the US a whopping 1.9 million jobs and $255 billion. So keep in mind that the next time you are considering a vacation, you would not only positively affect the work-life balance with your own career, but also the job and economy of the country as well.
- Ima Linzag
