Majority of staff check emails on holiday, even if bosses don’t care if they keep in touch

The majority of UK employees check their work emails while on holiday despite the fact that their employers do not want or expect them to keep in touch, new YouGov research has revealed. It seems the majority (60 percent) of those who use email for work check their inboxes while on holiday. One in four (25 percent) check ‘very often’, one in five (19 percent) check ‘sometimes’, and one in six (16 percent) check ‘rarely’. Just four in ten (40 percent) say they never look at their emails. This is despite the fact that eight in ten workers (80 percent) would prefer to ‘completely switch off’ when they’re on holiday, rather than stay on top of what’s going on in the office. The exception is those who check their emails ‘very often’. Half of this group (47 percent) say they’d rather stay on top of what’s going on at work, with the other half (50 percent) happy to stay out of work issues while on vacation. The research suggests however that fewer than one in six think their managers care whether they stay in touch or not.

Among workers with a manager, just one in twenty (5 percent) think their boss would ‘definitely’ expect them to check their emails, while a further one in ten (10 percent) saying they ‘probably’ would.

By comparison, over eight in ten (82 percent) say their managers either probably or definitely would not expect them to be in touch. This suggests that the pressure to check in – even among those who say they’d rather be completely switched off – could be self-inflicted.

The research also found that three quarters (75 percent) of who ‘sometimes’ check their inbox while on holiday would rather completely switch off, one in five (20 percent) say they want to stay on top of what is going on.