Mind about burnout in workplace

It’s a common game, chucking rocks at us about our human rights, but let’s all hold a minute’s silence for the poor Americans right now, with their lack of entitlement under US labour law (spelled labor obviously) to any paid vacation.

They have none - no law, no statute, no minimum: Americans are not entitled to paid leave. Worse still, as US states (New York prominent among them) have begun discussing making paid leave obligatory, small businesses are clamouring about how they would cover paid holidays, only they just cannot afford to.

But in Kenya, employers do – so maybe they are richer than their American counterparts.

For here, it’s law: every Kenyan employee is entitled to 21 days paid leave a year.

Many employers deliver more: 24 days a year is the average, meaning that employees get two days in every 22 working days a month as paid leave.

That makes room for parents to get to school events, or hospital appointments, or court, or funerals, or all the things that are part of life and do not stop because you have a job.

But our law goes further than that. Every Kenyan is entitled to up two weeks paid vacation in a single run, in legislation that goes beyond covering family administration and has built in the right to something else entirely: an actual holiday!

There are a lot of reasons why holidays make sense, in refreshing the mind and the spirit. Indeed, many employees get those two, consecutive weeks’ of holiday at Christmas and New Year, keeping family bonds alive that would otherwise fade, as they travel upcountry. Some get weeks snipped out of their 21 days of entitlements at other times of year.

Under Kenyan law, even part-time workers get paid holidays, pro rata, which means, for instance, if you work half time, you get half of 21 days paid leave, being 10.5 days a year.

Cease to exist

Yet, for very many staff, a large part of all these holidays and entitlements get lost. Because if you don’t take your leave – never book it, never go and enjoy it – eventually it is forfeited. For every year’s entitlement to leave must be used up in the 12 months following the year in which it is accrued or it simply ceases to exist. Quite simply, the law is that employees use it or lose it.

Before that cut-off, employees can ask for payment for any accumulated balance when they leave their jobs: another right. And another right, too, that a large proportion of staff never exercise. But it is an employers’ choice whether they pay for unused leave a year after it should have been taken.

They can offer to. They don’t have to. So as all that leave entitlement gets thrown away, what is the cost to all from that forfeited rest and recuperation?

Of course, the point about any right is that it isn’t mandatory, it isn’t an obligation, but an entitlement. Yet, in the case of paid leave, research has shown that the impact on anyone of working without a break is seriously damaging.

Productivity falls. Staff who don’t take leave end up working less, not more, because they start to suffer from mental and physical ‘burn out’.

They become tired and inefficient, their errors escalate. They start to exhibit mood changes too, much as humans do with sleep deprivation, becoming more sensitive and reactive, and less tolerant and positive.

All told, the cost of no paid leave is not no cost. No business is going to thrive on driving its staff to burn out. And no career is going to soar on burn-out either. So let’s honour our rights in Kenya. Psychologists say the first signs of burn-out come in someone thinking they just have too much work on.

They start to skimp on sleep, social activities, on visits to the gym and time with family, pushing their work boundaries ever wider, and moving into a cycle of relentless work that only ever ends up delivering a monumental reduction in the quality and pace of work they can manage. But we don’t need to. Because in Kenya we are entitled to paid leave.