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Hello Forbes Careers readers,

For many workers—especially those in flexible, work-from-home jobs—Thanksgiving is the holiday that swallows a week. 

Thursday and Friday may feel like real days off, but if you’re working, it’s hard to get anything done earlier in the week with so many people away. The inverse is also true: Take vacation days, and enough people are making the mad dash to year’s end that you’re likely to get interruptions from colleagues. Amid all the cooking, shopping and family stress, you end up feeling either unproductive or unrested. Or both.

That’s why some companies are setting more company-wide days off, offering people extra time away beyond the usual holidays. Etsy, for instance, will have its fifth “Breaksgiving” day of 2021 on Wednesday—company-wide, no-work holidays where everyone in the company is supposed to hit ‘pause’ at the same time—as a way of urging people to truly rest. The extra holidays, which Etsy began offering last year, are on top of employees’ regular paid time off, floating holidays, and “unlimited” sick or mental health days, a spokeswoman said. 

Other companies, such as LinkedIn, HootSuite and Bumble, also effectively closed down for a week across their companies this year to try and make sure the additional time away actually had an impact. 

The thinking: If companies just give out extra days of vacation without coordinating the time off, Slack messages will still buzz and colleagues’ emails will still intrude. Some have even speculated that coordinated shut downs could be the future of paid time off, or being “off off,” as one consultant told Axios.

Carol Sladek, who leads work-life consulting for Aon, told me recently that “employers are really trying to put a much stronger focus on how they shape their time off,” with some adding floating holidays but a growing number coordinating any extra holidays they bestow so the time off has more impact. “We are seeing employers say there’s a big benefit to [shutting things down for everyone at the same time, and considering] maybe we should think about adding a few days between Christmas and New Year’s? Having everybody not work at the same time is far more restful.”

Coordinating time off could be especially important for managers—whose burnout is getting worse, according to data released last week by Gallup. Not only might it help fight their burnout, but it could make them think twice about bothering people on their team who may be off on different days.

Of course, for workers who have less control over their schedules—or who don’t work flexible office jobs—protecting time off is equally important. That may be one reason so many people are cheering Target CEO Brian Cornell’s announcement that the retail giant would make Thanksgiving day closures permanent. On social media, people applauded the company for “stepping up” and making the “right move” by committing to not have their employees work on the holiday. “This may be a small blessing from the pandemic,” wrote one Twitter user. 

However you’re spending the week—whether it’s working, cooking, traveling or spending time with family, I hope it’s either truly productive if you’re working—or truly restful if you’re not.

Cheers,

Jena

On Our Agenda

What we’re watching this week

This holiday week, we’ll set aside the usual rundown of economic indicators to watch, news to absorb and earnings to parse for a single word to remember: Gratitude. With Thanksgiving on Thursday, keep in mind that being grateful isn’t just good for your health, as research has shown—it could also be good for your career. Executives like Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah Winfrey and others have all said keeping a gratitude journal has helped them. Meanwhile, studies have found that gratitude is linked with perseverance, less stress and more motivation to work hard.

Take Five

Five essential stories about work, careers and leadership from around the web

Flying this week? Be nice to flight attendants, whose jobs are now more dangerous than ever. Unruly passengers have led the FAA to investigate more than 900 behavior incidents—and that’s before the busy holiday travel season, The 19th reports. In a normal year, that number is fewer than 200.

A senior BlackRock executive and Harvard Business School professor talked to more than a dozen high-achieving Black executives and ran focus groups with young Black employees to better understand what organizations are getting wrong. Bottom line, as they detailed in Harvard Business Review: They want to feel safe, seen and supported at work, the authors found. 

Women disproportionately choose to work from home, but that could work against their career prospects, even as organizations say they’re shifting to a “work-anywhere” ethos. “You are mommy-tracked to the billionth degree,” one expert told Emily Peck in Politico.

The New York Times calls it the “worst of both worlds”—Zooming from the office—and the “mushy middle ground” that’s taking place now in a piece that explores what companies such as LinkedIn, Asana and Zillow are learning about hybrid work. 

Fewer Americans see work as the meaning of life, Protocol reports, after a Pew Research study found that the share of adults who mention their occupation or career as a source of meaning has dropped from 24% to 17% since 2017. The pandemic seems a likely factor.

Book Club

The latest reads on work, leadership and careers

With Thanksgiving on Thursday, it’s not a big week for publishing new business books. Yet it is nearing the end of the year—prime time for “best of” lists—and roundups on the best careers and leadership reads are no exception. A few worth noting: The management journal Strategy + Business highlights books that include longtime guru Tom Peters’s Excellence Now and professor Rob Cross’s Beyond Collaboration Overload; a list by the Financial Times and McKinsey picks The Aristocracy of Talent and Empire of Pain, among others; and Amazon’s list includes Adam Grant’s Think Again and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi’s My Life in Full (also my favorite of the year). Happy reading!

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