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Get the most from your 2020 annual leave

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Holiday

Research from tombola shows that 44% of Brits don’t use up all their holiday allowance.  The main reason?  “Too busy” say 38%.

Other standout stats from tombola’s study

  • 24% of us take a break that lasts between 6 and 10 days in one go and 20% take 3 days or less.
  • 23% of us are working at least 1 unpaid week each year, losing an average of £529 per week. (ONS data)

With that in mind tombola have gathered a handy list to help people get the most of their annual leave in 2020.

How To Get The Most Annual Leave in 2020

One of the best ways to maximise your leave is to book time off around statutory holidays.

Get 16 Days Holiday in the Spring by Booking 8 days off at Easter

  • Monday 6th April
  • Tuesday 7th April
  • Wednesday 8th April
  • Thursday 9th April

Then a second set of days.

  • Tuesday 14th April
  • Wednesday 15th April
  • Thursday 16th April
  • Friday 17th April

Book 7 days off and Unwrap 16 at Christmas

Christmas 2020 is a long way off, but a bit of forward planning will have you the envy of your colleagues.

Next year, book these dates for holiday success.

  • Monday 21st December
  • Tuesday 22nd December
  • Wednesday 23rd December
  • Thursday 24th December

And then book this second set of days to cover between Christmas and New Year.

  • Tuesday 29th December
  • Wednesday 30th December
  • Thursday 31st December

Some people like to take an extra day (the 2nd January) to ease their way back into work, but as the 2nd this year falls on a Saturday, if you’re a Mon-Fri worker then you won’t go back to the office until 4th January 2021.

That’s 16 consecutive days off for just 7 annual leave days.

Harvard economist Juliet Schor says:

The pace of work has increased quite dramatically. We are working much faster today than we were in the past. And that contributes to our sense of being overworked and frenzied and harried and stressed out and burned out by our jobs.

 

Warrior Women gather at Lloyd’s

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Warrior Women

Lloyd’s provided a stunning backdrop for our full-to-capacity Warrior Women at War leadership event held in partnership with ABF The Soldiers’ Charity on Wednesday 25 September.

The theme was to compare and contrast Army leadership with that in the corporate world and to discover what, if anything, each could learn from the other.

The Keynote, delivered by Major General Susan Ridge, set the tone for the evening and outlined her experience, as a lawyer, within the Army.  “Whilst businesses had shareholders,” she said “the Army needed to satisfy the demands of multiple stakeholders.”

She also highlighted that in the Army it was always about “us” and not about “me”, that the ethos was one that welcomed challenge, where leadership required judgement and humility, knowing when to give people their head and when to give help, supervision and training.

Warrior Women image
Panellists Philippa Lorimer MBE, Claire Bowler and Annette Andrews

In response to a question about whether the corporate world could learn from the Army’s values (Courage, Discipline, Respect for Others, Integrity, Loyalty and Selfless Commitment) Panellist, Commandant Philippa Lorimer MBE, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (PRVC) reflected that one of the big differences between her experience in the Army and her work in private sector defence sales was the lack of “honest” communication. She said that it had taken her time to adjustment to a world where what you said didn’t necessarily happen and you knew it wasn’t going to happen. 

Annette Andrews, HR Director, Lloyd’s spoke of her experience having moved from country to country as a child and how that helped her when she worked overseas and managed teams in other countries.  It had enabled her to quickly adjust to new situations, to “read” people and understand other cultures.

Claire Bowler, Partner, DWF who has three young children, aged 2, 4, and 6 spoke about how flexible and agile working had helped her to progress within her career.  “Within a 40-45 year career, it’s OK to take your foot off the pedal now and again,” she advised.  She also encouraged women to be strategic about how they used their time when managing a high level career and family and to be selective about when to be present at work. 

During the Q&A session that followed, there was much discussion about flexible working – its importance and how to ask for it (base on facts, on outputs rather than emotion) and the need for mentors, sponsors and role models.

Gwen Rhys, CEO Women in the City reminded everyone that sometimes they needed to be their own role model, citing Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State who said:

Search for role models you can look up to and people who take an interest in your career. But here’s an important warning: you don’t have to have mentors or role models who look like you. Had I been waiting for a Black, female, Soviet specialist mentor, I would still be waiting. Most of my mentors have been old white men, because they were the ones who dominated my field.

Gwen added that many women felt there weren’t role models in their business that they could look up to an emulate and suggested that rather than trying to find “the one”, women should make a composite role model of the “best” traits, characteristics, behaviours of several women and men.

The post-event networking was lively, with lots of ideas and suggestions being exchanged.  One idea was to set up Mentoring Groups, rather like Tutorial Groups, to encourage male mentors, who may be reluctant to mentor women 1-2-1, to participate.

In partnership with Sponsored by
abf

Join our mailing list to find out about future events.

Warrior Women at Work, join us on 25 September

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image warrior women

REGISTER NOW TO ATTEND

 

Warrior Women at Work is a unique, interactive Women’s Leadership event designed by Women in the City in partnership with ABF The Soldiers’ Charity. The evening will bring together senior female leaders from a variety of backgrounds to share, discuss, compare and contrast their leadership challenges.

Our Keynote Speaker will be Major General Susan Ridge, the first female to hold the rank of major general in the British Army. A solicitor, she served as Director General of the Army Legal Services Branch from September 2015 to July 2019.

Susan will be joined by a panel made up of:

Date: 25 September 2019
Location: The Old Library, Lloyd’s, One Lime Street, EC3M 7HA
Time: 18.30 – 20.30
Format:
18.30 Mix & Mingle Reception
19.00 Welcome and Introductions
Keynote Speaker and Panel Interview
Audience Discussion
Q&A
19.45 Networking
20.30 Close

This event is open to women and men. Refreshments will be served.

REGISTER NOW TO ATTEND

The evening is brought to you in partnership with:

abf ABF The Soldiers’ Charity was formed in 1944, at the height of World War Two. Its purpose has not changed since that day: to ensure that all soldiers, veterans and their immediate families can live a life of independence and dignity.
While there is a British Army, there will be The Soldiers’ Charity.

And is sponsored by:

 

Managers: do you recognise the signs of burnout?

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Careers expert Zena Everett is an executive coach, author and an in-demand speaker on career management and productivity. Here she talks about how to spot and stop burnout in your teams – and yourself.

Don’t wait for a sickness note or resignation for proof of burnout in your teams. Here’s some warning signs to look out for and some prevention strategies.

Burnout is defined as a ‘state of vital exhaustion’. How do you know if you are genuinely exhausted with work rather than depressed? A depressed person will take their black dog with them wherever they go. Burnout, on the other hand, is confined to work. Get away from your desk (and your boss) and up a mountain, on a beach, or wherever you go to decompress, and your energy and mood will be restored.
To state the obvious, people should NOT burn out, take a break, return to work and repeat the pattern (although I know some who do). That’s bonkers from any angle: career, psychological, physical or family.

Your job as a manager is to ensure that your team members are happy, engaged and productive (all three feed into the other). Burned-out colleagues are none of these. What are the warning behaviours? Here’s two canaries in the coalmine I look for when coaching:

Burnout Sign #1: Reduced productivity.

Your high performing, perfectionist, people-pleasing, nothing-is-ever-good-enough-for-me, piece of expensive Talent ceases to deliver. They work even longer hours but the standard of their tasks tails off. Talk to them about it. Say that you have noticed the changes and ask what they think is going on. It could be that they are just bored and need more responsibilities. Or they could be overwhelmed by their workload and their own relentless drive to excel. Those are predictors of burnout. Coach them to manage the demands of their role and the pressure they put on themselves.

Burnout Sign #2: Cynicism.

This varies from an increasingly apathetic approach to the job, when people fall prey to office and digital distractions, to downright pessimism about the impact of their work. You’ll hear previously positive people make snidey comments about the customers, other team members, other departments, or senior management. ‘What’s the point anyway, nothing changes around here,’ ‘I don’t mind teaching, it’s just the parents and the children that spoil it’, ‘not him again, what does he want this time?’ etc. It’s sort of funny in the moment, but it’s not actually. Negativity and disengagement will drive more motivated team members away. It’s certainly not enabling a collaborative culture that screams service, success and energy.

What can you do to prevent burnout happening and restore resilience? Step up to the plate and actively help your people to do their best work in a healthier way.
Prevention Strategies

Restore the boundaries.

Employees are happiest and most motivated when they make daily, incremental progress towards their goals.* That’s all it takes! Allow them to get their meaningful work done – with clear role descriptions, targets, performance metrics, deadlines, training and all the resources they need.

Then get out of their way.

When I meet stressed-out people they are often overloaded with pointless projects, routine administration, complicated reporting systems, badly-thought out management initiatives and lengthy meeting schedules. All of these are obstacles to real work. Be brave. Re-evaluate the output you expect from people and clarify how they can achieve it. Then cut out everything else that takes up their time. They’ll thank you for asking some hard questions and challenging fatty work cultures that inhibit productivity. ‘Why are we doing this? Is there a better, more efficient way of achieving the same result?’

Walk the talk.

You are a role model for high and healthy performance. If you are rushing from one meeting to another, snapping at people, over-promising and under-delivering and working stupid hours, then you’ve no time to step back, listen, think strategically and nip problems in the bud before they escalate.

Delegate, manage upwards, push back, re-negotiate and say No.

All of these are crucial yet basic leadership skills. Don’t send out of hours emails (save them in your draft folder or use the timed sending facility if you really must write them), or finesse tasks that don’t need finessing (that power-point deck is just fine). I hear of so many managers who CREATE stress.

  • Get proper training on the granular details of managing work-flow.
  • Only hold meetings that are absolutely necessary, keep to an agenda and don’t let anyone waffle.
  • Be on time.
  • Look like you can cope with more responsibility, not that you are about to combust.

Disconnect and build real connections.

No one can be ON all the time. Do less but think more: you’ll be more valuable that way. You rarely get your best ideas in the office.

  • Encourage your people to take their holidays.
  • Exercise. Breathe.
  • Find a hobby or a challenge outside work that nourishes you.
  • Take a real lunch break and eat with your team.
  • Talk, don’t email.

Someone said at one of my recent Crazy Busy™ sessions that the only creative thing their Creative Director did was create email chains.

Reward results, not presenteeism.

Flexible working is a no-brainer. Trust people with the freedom to do their work in the most appropriate place and don’t be petty about checking up on them. There is no correlation between long hours cultures and productivity, quite the opposite. A sense of control over where and how we do our best work is a crucial aspect to motivation.

Build co-worker support systems.

Eating together, talking about how to improve processes, doing pre- and post-mortems, building in planning time, asking for support and advice. I’m not sure that hackneyed team-bonding initiatives like away days are as effective as regular, shorter team pow-wows when you can really communicate, allow everyone’s voice to be heard and get solutions from the people at the front line. Problems don’t get solved by paint-balling.

*Conclusion of a reassuring three-year study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School on how to create forward momentum with clear goals, autonomy and a genuinely respectful culture. It confirms what your management instincts have been trying to tell you: HR interventions that work are lean, honest and relatively obvious. Read her book with Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using small wins to ignite job, engagement and creativity at work.

Next Steps

I hope that’s helpful and I’d love your feedback and experiences. As ever, please feel free to share with anyone you think would benefit.

Pick up the phone if I can help build resilience and coping strategies with my executive coaching or if you need a lively, practical speaker on career management or productivity topics at your next conference.

ZENA EVERETT
Phone: +44 20 3287 9505 | Mobile: +44 (0) 7968 424650
Email: zena@zenaeverett.com

ZenaEverettLogo

 

Your session was great – informative, interactive, fun and engaging, can’t ask for more! ICAEW SME Conference Organiser

Here’s my short animation on how to stop our brains getting so frazzled

 

Click HERE for details of sessions I can run in your business

(This is a WiC promotion on behalf of Zena Everett)

Blah equality, Blah gender, Blah workplace Blah …

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Enough talk. We’ve heard it all before. Let’s just do it!

These words, a tweet from @LaraOyedele popped into my timeline in response to an article in Diversity Woman Magazine which revealed that, according to research by Bank of America Merill Lynch,  “Gender equality can lead companies to make more money.”

This revelation is by no means ground-breaking. Our Knowledge Bank is full of research documents saying the same thing. Yet

Gender pay gap set to last for 36 years

Recent research by Easymoney suggests that the pay gap between top earners is unlikely to close until 2055. The research found that 79% of the 860,000 people earning over £100k pa are men. This has fallen only marginally since 2011, when 83% of the top earners were men.

Academics Geraldine Healy, Queen Mary University of London and Mostak Ahamed, University of Sussex have taken an in-depth look at the Financial Services Sector and identified that women, on average, earn 27.2% less than men an hour, whilst the bonus gap is nearly 50% (and 79% at Barclays).

Moreover, the lack of progress of women in Financial Services  is a global phenomenon. IMF chief, Christine Lagarde said at Davos: “The numbers are just appalling … you have 20% of board members and 2% of CEOs who are women.”

2019 Pay Gap reporting reveals poor progress

This year’s Pay Gap figures indicate that far from the pay gap narrowing in the past year, it’s widened with four in ten private companies reporting wider gaps than last year. Surely it’s time for companies to publish Action Plans alongside data and narrative.

The pace of change is slow – let’s change that!

At a recent Lunch, I sat with 3 other women. By pure coincidence we were aged 75, 65, 55 and 45. Our conversation turned to the progress of women in the workplace. We concluded that (1) regrettably there has been much less progress than any of us anticipated and (2) none of us thought at the age of 25 that we’d be saying this 20, 30, 40, 50 years later.

Yes, it’s time to be a bit more Lara – LET’S JUST DO IT!