Preparing for vacation? Don't forget to bring your work home

If you're typical of many American workers, your pre-vacation routine follows a pretty similar path.

You set up an automated email reply that you'll be out of the office for a few days. Then, you reprogram your voice mail with a similar message promising to check your voice mail periodically. And, finally, you spend some time making sure all of the important work files on your office desktop have been uploaded to a cloud service like Dropbox.

Why? Because you, like more and more American workers headed off on vacation, are likely to spend at least part of your "down time" up.

A new survey of 12,000 workers in 85 countries has found that 64 percent of U.S. business people will work between Christmas and New Year's, but 40 percent believe not much is likely to get done (58 percent of bosses, in fact, think staff spend the week getting caught up on unfinished tasks).

The survey, from Regus, a global supplier of flexible workplaces, said workers in small firms are more likely to work than those in large businesses, and said just over half of the respondent who said they'd be working actually plan on going into the office. The rest, it said, will work remotely.            

Those remote workers are even more at risk of burnout and more in need of vacation, experts say.

Intranet Benchmarking founder Paul Miller said a digital workplace can be addicting.

"Companies are actually facing the opposite problem of the one they thought they'd have, which is that people would essentially not work hard enough," he said. "They actually overwork. You've seen it all around - people are working on holiday, working in the evening, working at the weekends. People are working much longer hours and seeing this blurring of work-life as being a positive thing, where I actually don't think it is."

For more:
- see this Regus survey
- see this GigaOm article

Related article:
Mobility can be a drag on workers