Technology Blurs Line Between Work, Leisure Workplace Pressures Follow Workers On Vacation

The group had gone to Hilton Head, S.C., for a relaxing beach vacation, but Kathryn Murray St. John got an ominous feeling as soon as her friends began unloading their Jeep.

“I watched three laptops come out of the back,” she said.

St. John, a senior vice president with a Boston communications firm, had left her own portable computer at home. She hoped the week’s vacation with her husband, their 5-month-old daughter, and three old friends - all consultants - would be a time to rest and unwind.

But one friend was working by Sunday. And by Monday, the putative vacation house was humming with the sounds of modern cottage industry: computing and faxing and conference calls.

Then St. John’s own office called to consult on a problem; she ended up borrowing a laptop to craft a strategy memo that then had to be faxed and FedEx’ed. That ate most of Monday. On Friday, she spent several hours on a conference call, helping plan a business presentation.

“It changed the dynamics of the vacation incredibly,” St. John said. “You couldn’t walk through the beach house without hearing somebody working, which made other people worry about what wasn’t getting done.”

Call it the tyranny of technology. Once hailed as the great liberator of the American work force, technology has become an insidious thief that purloins Americans’ all-too-scarce vacation time, replacing relaxation with the exigencies of the workplace.

Answering machines and pagers and cellular phones and laptops and notebooks and powerbooks and voice mail and e-mail and fax machines - all mean that when Americans go on vacation, an electronic office is frequently in the trunk, ready to morph a holiday at the beach into the virtual reality of a day at work.

“The boundaries between work and vacation have become more permeable, primarily because of technology,” said Brad Googins, director of Boston University’s Center on Work and Family. “Technology has made it so easy to communicate with work that it has also made it almost impossible to get away from it.”

An October 1994 survey done for Hilton Hotels Corp. found that 19 percent of the 1,025 Americans surveyed called the office during vacation, 13 percent took work along on vacation, and 27 percent acknowledged being nervous that “something would go wrong” at work while they were away. Anecdotal evidence suggests the trend toward working vacations is more pervasive among harried white-collar workers.

“More and more I hear about, and see, people taking their PCs, which have electronic mail capability and fax capability, to wherever they go, even to the beach,” said Eileen Canty, an organizational psychologist and principal at William M. Mercer Inc., a Manhattan-based human-resources consulting firm.

Canty says the quick tempo of the business world, the increased workload as a result of corporate downsizing, and a prevailing culture in some corporations that equates taking all of one’s vacation with a lack of commitment combined to make people feel that out of sight can’t be out of mind - or out of touch.

The rapid current of the technological revolution is eroding vacations that already are among the shortest in the industrialized world; while our competitors have enough leisure time to throw their cares to the wind, America’s stingier policies ensure that for most of the year, our noses remain pressed firmly to the grindstone.

The typical Western European enjoys at least a month of vacation each year. And compared with harried Americans, they really go away. Anyone who has toured France in August knows the feel of a nation deep in a restorative rest.

Canadian author Bruce O’Hara, whose books - “Put Work in Its Place” and “Working Harder Isn’t Working” - make the case for a shorter working year, says Europeans recognize that people need vacation to relax, recharge and focus on their families.

“They have never quite let go of older traditions of leisure,” said O’Hara. “The history both Canada and the U.S. have is of a pioneer nation where there was always work to be done.”

One recent study shows that American vacation time, which is decided by individual firms, ranks far below that offered in Western European countries, where vacation policy is usually government-mandated.

And in an era when companies are making do with less, leaving fewer employees doing more, the problem isn’t just getting away. It’s coming back to confront a desk full of work that has piled up in one’s absence.

BU’s Googins, who recently surveyed a firm of about 75 people about work issues, said none felt they could afford the luxury of taking their two weeks of vacation in one chunk.

Recalled Googins: “They said, ‘We would be so buried by the time we came back from work we would never be able to get things together again.”’