Four in ten Romanian employees are working on holiday, study says

Less over half of the Romanian employees (57%) had 10 days of vacation at the most in the past year, while 20% had no day off. Four in ten Romanians say they are also working while on holiday, says the latest study conducted by eJobs recruitment portal.

Only 17% respondents said they had taken all the available vacation days in a year, while 36% revealed they had less days off compared to previous years.

However, forecast for this summer are more optimistic, considering that 73.9% of the employees surveyed have planned 5 to 20 days of vacation, while 13.3% will have only maximum five days off and 12.7% will stay at the office all summer long.

As for the budget allotted to vacation, 60% of the respondents said they had saved EUR 500 the most, and 28% admitted they will complete the sum up to EUR 1,000. Less than 15% of the Romanian employees are ready to spend EUR 1,000-EUR 2,000 or even more.

„Four in ten Romanian employees say they use to work in they free time, with 14.5% spending at least two hours a day, during their holiday, to work. We are talking here about a wrong perception among the employees regarding the level of involvement that employers are expecting from them. For, more and more companies have started to encourage and even to impose employees to end their work duties once the working hours are over,” said Bogdan Badea, CEO eJobs Romania.

Yet, despite this, a significant number of employees remain connected to what’s happening at the office even if they are on holiday.

Moreover, a quarter of respondents disclosed that, when they have a shorter holiday, they would pick a travel destination closer to home in terms of time zone, so that they could be contacted by their colleagues any time.

„Even more surprisingly is that 42.3% of the participants, meaning almost half of them, answered <yes> when asked if they had to interrupt their vacation and return at the office earlier than scheduled to solve work-relates issues,” added the CEO eJobs Romania.

The study also revealed that the e-mail rules even on holiday, as only 9% of the respondents stated they are not checking their emails while on vacation.

The study has bee conducted on 1,300 respondents, aged from 18 to 56, during April-May 2018. 56.7% of them were employees with no management positions.

Meanwhile, while Romanian employees seem to be a little bit workaholic, some companies in other corners of the world consider implementing the four-day week at the office to improve the well being of the employees and thus to increase  the productivity of the company.

For instance, a New Zealand company trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five and the success of the study has been so obvious that there are high chances for it to be really implemented within the company.

Read more here.