Don’t leave home without it! Europe's senior-level professionals pack work for their holidays
Expectations come to light whilst mixing work with holidays: More men want recognition vs. compensation, half the women want both
Munich, 9 August 2011 – A more common traveling companion: Europe's senior-level managers and executives are bringing work with them on holidays. A recent survey* by the executive career service Experteer (http://www.experteer.co.uk) showed the majority of respondents travel on holidays with laptop, smartphone, and/or mobile phone.
When asked about the extent they engage in job-related activities, differences appeared amongst Europeans: Whilst almost 60% of the British, the Spanish, French, Swiss French, and Italians check their work e-mail at least every other day, more Germans do so "only in urgent cases" or “never.” The Dutch prefer clearer separation between work and play: more than one-third never check e-mail whilst on holidays and one-fifth access it only when urgent.
Expectations whilst working on holidays?
Are there underlying expectations senior-level professionals have whilst working on holidays? Yes, in a nutshell: 57% of men expect their extra work to be recognised and 47% want their time compensated. Among women, about half want both.
A few days to mentally get away?
Two-thirds of Europe’s leading professionals do not miss work whilst on holidays, with the strongest sentiment amongst the French and the Spanish. However, that leaves one-third with their minds still contentedly back in the office.
Like the majority of their fellow Europeans, almost three-quarters of British seniorlevel managers and executives need the initial few days of their holidays to unwind from their job demands. Part of it is due to the continuing engagement with work emails, but almost 60% are not particularly interested in contacting their office to check on employees and projects.
More than half of Germans complete their holidays without the stress of finishing important job tasks. This is not the case for other Europeans: almost three-quarters of French senior-level professionals must do so and almost half the British.
Nonetheless, the majority of British senior-level managers and executives will be taking one to two weeks off this summer, so there will be some time to unwind from their jobs.
*About the survey: During a two week period in July 2011, Experteer surveyed 5,069 of its registered candidates, seniorlevel managers and executives residing in Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Spain.
About Experteer
Experteer, the executive online career service in the UK and across Europe, features more than 90,000 executive job opportunities with salary benchmarks starting from £50,000 and a network of 10,000 pre-approved headhunters. This premium service is aimed at senior-level professionals who are planning their next career move or monitoring the job market and their own market value. To generate high-quality jobs for members, an independent team of analysts constantly searches the market, classifies the different positions, and assigns them salary benchmarks. These are matched by the Experteer Career Matching Technology with the qualifications and career goals of its 2.8 million members. This gives members an overview of suitable positions - even beyond their own industry, function, or leadership level. In addition, Experteer offers discrete access to its exclusive headhunter network.
Headquartered in Munich, Germany, Experteer was founded in July 2005 by Holtzbrinck Ventures GmbH, a subsidiary of the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group. Further information can be found at www.experteer.co.uk or at the service's domain name for each country in which it operates: .com/.de/.ch/.at/.fr/.it/.be/.es.
