Want Better Employees? Send Them on Vacation.

Burnout damages performance, culture and retention. Getting employees away from work may be one of the simplest ways to reverse it.

Burnout rarely stays with one employee.

Exhausted employees disengage, collaborate less effectively and become more likely to leave. Their behavior also affects everyone around them. Enthusiasm, cooperation and effort spread through social networks—but so do cynicism, stress and withdrawal. Enough burned-out employees can turn an otherwise healthy workplace into one where simply getting through the day becomes the norm.

Employers spend billions trying to solve this problem with wellness programs, engagement initiatives and retention bonuses.

Get employees out of the office and send them somewhere.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Surprising Mental-Health Benefits of Getting Away,” reviews research showing that travel provides benefits beyond relaxation. Getting away from familiar surroundings provides novelty, challenge, physical activity and opportunities for mastery that build resilience and support emotional fitness.

For employers, the important question is not whether vacations make employees happier.

It is whether employees return better able to thrive at work.

Vacations Are Not Lost Productivity

The traditional economics of a vacation appears straightforward. An employee who takes a week off produces nothing for the company during that week.

That calculation misses what happens afterward.

Research has found improvements in well-being and performance-related outcomes following vacations. Employees return with greater engagement and lower burnout, although some of these benefits gradually fade after returning to work.

This makes vacation more like maintenance than lost production.

Machines require downtime. Human brains do too.

Detachment from work appears particularly important. A large study of 3,024 U.S. physicians published in JAMA found that taking more vacation days was associated with lower burnout, while working during vacation was associated with greater burnout. Physicians who spent 30 minutes or more per vacation day doing patient-related work had substantially higher odds of burnout. The general lesson for employers is straightforward: providing vacation is not enough. Employees need to be able to disconnect.

A vacation with 700 unanswered emails accumulating in the background is not much of a vacation.

Vacations May Also Keep Employees From Quitting

The strongest business argument may be retention.

A 2026 longitudinal study of paid time off and employee retention examined more than 32,000 observations collected over 18 years. Employees receiving only one to five paid days off annually showed little difference in voluntary resignation. But employees receiving 6–10 days were significantly less likely to quit, with the strongest relationship among employees receiving 11 or more paid days off.

Other research points in the same direction. Access to paid vacation or sick leave has been associated with substantially lower turnover.

This changes the economics considerably.

Replacing an experienced employee is expensive. Gallup estimates that replacing an individual employee costs 50% to 200% of annual salary. Recruiting takes time. Positions remain vacant. New hires require training. Institutional knowledge disappears when someone walks out the door. And turnover itself can damage the morale of employees who remain.

Against those costs, paid vacation begins to look inexpensive.

The Staycation Problem

The research highlighted by the Wall Street Journal raises another intriguing possibility.

Simply not working is different than traveling.

Travel introduces novelty. New environments require attention, learning, navigation and adaptation. Hiking somewhere unfamiliar, exploring a new city, learning a skill or experiencing an extraordinary place engages the brain differently than spending a week following essentially the same routine at home.

As I have written about previously, extraordinary experiences that generate awe interrupt the brain's typical activation patterns and induce changes in neural processing that can lead to transformation, while unexpected travel experiences emerge from the combination of place, experience and people. Getting away creates opportunities for both.

Employers interested in the restorative benefits of vacation should therefore do more than provide PTO.

They should encourage employees to actually go somewhere and disconnect from work.

That means creating a culture in which taking vacation is normal rather than subtly punished. Leaders need to take vacations themselves. Employees should not be expected to answer emails while away. Work should be reassigned rather than allowed to accumulate.

An unused vacation benefit produces no return.

From Burnout to Thriving

There is one remaining problem for employers.

How do they know if any of this is working?

Annual engagement surveys are too infrequent to identify an employee sliding toward burnout. Asking employees whether they are "well" also provides limited information about whether they are functioning at their best.

The more useful question is whether employees are thriving.

Thriving goes beyond the absence of stress or burnout. It captures whether people have the psychological and social resources to engage with others, recover from challenges and function effectively in their daily lives.

That is why Immersion created SIX, a free app that measures thriving neurologically and continuously.  SIX uses these data to provide personalized insights to help people improve their ability to thrive and perform at their best.

Employers do not need to guess whether their people are thriving. Employees can measure it using anonymized SIX data.

The ROI of Getting Away

Employers routinely invest in training, engagement programs, wellness benefits and retention initiatives. Yet vacation sits in a different accounting category: time employees are paid while not producing anything.

That distinction increasingly looks artificial.

Vacation reduces burnout. It restores engagement. It is associated with improved performance-related outcomes and lower voluntary turnover. And travel may provide additional benefits by exposing the brain to novelty, challenge and experiences that break the routines of daily life.

The implication for employers is simple:

Stop treating vacation as compensation for working hard. Treat it as part of how people continue to do great work.

Then measure whether it is working.

You can measure your thriving for free with the SIX app from Immersion at your6.com.

Measuring thriving using SIX proves the ROI of vacations.  

FAQs

1. Can taking vacation actually reduce employee burnout?

Research suggests that taking more vacation time is associated with lower burnout, while continuing to work during vacation is associated with greater burnout. The ability to truly disconnect from work appears to be an important part of the benefit.

2. Can paid time off improve employee retention?

Research has linked greater access to paid time off with lower voluntary turnover. This can make vacation an important business investment when compared with the significant cost of replacing experienced employees.

3. Is traveling more beneficial than taking time off at home?

Simply taking time away from work can provide benefits, but travel may offer something additional. New environments introduce novelty, challenge, learning and opportunities for new experiences that can engage the brain differently than remaining in familiar routines.