Encouraging Leave Without Guilt
Published: 30/06/2025
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We will explore the topic of guilt associated with taking time off work, its origins and harm to businesses. The key focus, however, is building a culture where workers can take annual leave without guilt.
With work taking over the majority of an average person’s life, the concept of allocated paid annual leave is usually viewed in a favourable light. This gives workers an opportunity to unwind and rest without having to worry about financial losses. Not to mention, a minimum holiday entitlement is a right that’s protected by the law, meaning employees cannot be reprimanded or fired over using it. However, despite it all, many are still hesitant to utilise their paid leave, as it is often soured by a feeling of guilt.
Needless to say, this is not the right mindset. Time off work is a legal right for a reason, meant to protect people’s physical and mental health from burnout and other issues associated with overworking. In this article, we will discuss what causes guilt associated with taking time off work and how to make it disappear.
There are many factors causing workers to feel guilty about taking time off work. Most of the time, it comes from the feeling of inconveniencing others, be it an internalised thought or a message conveyed from the management or peers.
A large factor in that is the now passed fad of the ‘hustle culture’, where one’s success would be measured in their availability and productivity around the clock. However, while it’s now recognised to be a harmful approach, the mindset that was formed is difficult to change and remains prevalent in many companies.
A pang of guilt accompanying holiday requests may not seem like a big deal, but we assure you, it is. In fact, it affects your business in ways you wouldn’t suspect, especially long-term. Eradicating guilt associated with resting could be the one step currently holding you back from unlocking your full potential.
At first glance, the less time people take off work, the more they should be getting done. While this is logical in theory, the reality works differently simply because humans are conditioned to get tired. And, the better they perform, the quicker the fatigue sets in. Very often, people will persevere even when both their body and brain are tired, which then leads to the opposite results - loss of productivity due to an increased error rate. To truly keep the performance at its peak consistently, the balance between work and rest is vital. In other words, while it doesn’t fit into a theoretical equation, human nature itself establishes a firm link between rest and productivity, which is a must to adhere to if you’re pursuing optimal results. There is also another hurdle to overcome - different individuals have different peak productivity times, often depending on their body clock and outside commitments. The traditional 9-to-5 is, in reality, a very constricting setup.
The solution is simple - the introduction of flexibility, as well as nurturing a culture in which employees are willing to take time off work when they either need or want to. This empowers them to adjust their time in accordance with the standards they need to uphold, fosters communication within and overall builds a healthier office culture. The market offers a variety of tools supporting a flexible approach, ranging from autonomous shift scheduling to holiday management platforms.
An unhealthy mindset regarding work often influences unhealthy attendance patterns. They usually come in two extremes. Presenteeism stands for the practice of never taking time off, as we’ve already discussed - not even when physically ill, which leads to fatigue and errors. The other side of the coin is absenteeism: taking too much time off, even when unauthorised, such as claiming false sick leave or simply not showing up without a reason
Both are harmful to businesses and often are long-term consequences of the toxic relationship with one’s work. The problem is the time by which these malpractices become clear, they’ve been festering for a while and have caused ample damage. They’re hard to spot unless there’s a centralised attendance tracking system in place, as both usually follow patterns. However, having a clear outlook on one’s attendance within a period of time highlights them nearly instantly, enabling you to take action as soon as the issue is as much as suspected.
The problem with removing guilt from being part of time off is how deeply it's ingrained in the workplace culture and our individual mindsets. To address the problem effectively, we first need to understand its root cause. So, let’s explore the most common sources of holiday guilt and how they can be addressed.
In the era of being accessible anywhere and any time, we are also riddled with the expectation to be equally available. Is your work email connected to your phone? If so, how guilty are you of both checking and answering it outside business hours? Chances are pretty guilty. However, just because you’re easily accessible even when on the go, it doesn’t mean you should be ‘always on’. The first step is drawing the line by limiting your workers’ availability to their business hours.
You can do so by programming your company’s email and IMs to stop giving your workers notifications after a certain hour. They can unmute them manually when the occasional overtime happens, but the next day, the notifications would block themselves again at the same time. In other words, one thing preventing leave without guilt is confusing accessibility with availability. Small changes like enforced stopping of notifications can do wonders in altering the mindset.
Even if you, as an employer, don’t pressure your employees into the ‘hustle culture’ and maximum productivity at all times, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist within your company. The mindset of showing your loyalty to the workplace through not taking time off is ingrained so deeply that the pressure comes from either peers or the individual’s own value system. The first step to coping with it is recognising the patterns. Namely, noticing if people are hesitant to take time off work even when they need to.
Obvious signs go to turning up feeling unwell, comments in the passing about having off-work commitments that don’t get fulfilled in favour of attendance, and open prioritisation of work over anything. While this may sound like favourable to the company, this is harmful mindset that breeds burnout and a hostile work environment, all of which affect the business negatively. Remember, just because pressure doesn’t come from you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Simply eradicating guilt isn’t enough - it should go along with the efforts of creating a culture in which leave isn’t a source of shame but something that is encouraged. A positive outlook on leave will naturally bleed into healthier and more intuitive adjustments of work-life balance. Here are some tips on how to propagate it.
While digital tools are essential for streamlining day-to-day processes and overall enhancement of your operations, they also aid in building a leave-positive culture. For example, using automation, you can set reminders in the form of either pop-ups or emails, encouraging the workers to take time off after they haven’t booked any within a specific time frame.
The easiest way to create a leave-positive culture is through offering a diverse range of flexible options. Hybrid working, flexitime, mental health days - those would be some examples to list. Using technology such as holiday management systems makes it easy to keep track of these multiple moving parts, too. And while they’d otherwise be challenging to manage, a centralised view makes it smooth and easy. Not to mention, designated systems also let you track leave uptake, easily identifying signs of presenteeism or absenteeism at their early stages. Finally, it’s crucial to lead by example. If you yourself never take time off, stay after the hours and are accessible at all hours of the day, it’s natural that your employees may think that’s the standard they need to uphold. Instead, create a clear policy with defined expectations that are applicable to everyone in the company - yourself and other leaders included.
There is no reason for people to feel guilty when taking time off work, especially when it is their legal right. This doesn’t mean, however, that many companies, both consciously and not, still keep the connection between the two strong. Often, they don’t realise this works against them. Lack of healthy work-life balance leads to harmful extremes like absenteeism and presenteeism, and, despite the common belief, tanks productivity rather than enhancing it. In other words, it’s in your best interest to nurture a culture in which guilt over time off is a thing.
It can be complicated, as the leading issue is the mindset. Modern technology makes it hard for people to separate accessibility from availability, and even if there’s no pressure coming from you as the leader, it is still prevalent in many areas of the business. One’s individual values included. While re-writing the collective brain is a hard task, implementing small changes over time makes it very viable and certainly worth investing in. Not to mention, there are many solutions available on the market that will speed the process up by adding little bits of convenience to your day-to-day processes.
Are you ready to build a guilt-free environment? Start changing the mindset with Timesheet Portal.