Say hello to the “hush trip”, the latest addition to the growing lexicon at the intersection of job and travel
As we have talked about in this newsletter in the past, remote work has fundamentally changed the way people travel, with business trips now evolving into “bleisure” trips, and with more people able to keep tabs on work while they are traveling.
For the most part, all of these things happen out in the open. But what about when they don’t? Enter the “hush trip”.
A hush trip, writes Cloey Callahan, “refers to when remote workers don’t inform their boss that they are going to a new destination ― even if it’s a tropical island or a known tourist spot.”
Early in the pandemic, taking a hush trip was a risky venture — it even cost Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips his cabinet post after he took a Caribbean vacation in late 2020.
But as remote work has stabilized, the hush trip has become so normalized that one survey by RVShare found that 56 per cent of workers who took a trip in the last two years are likely to take a hush trip this year.
“As I’ve gotten more comfortable with remote work and working wherever I have strong Wi-Fi, I would just work there,” said RVShare’s communications director Maddie Bourgerie. “It makes travelling a bit easier.”
It naturally has bosses and HR professionals a bit on edge, with concerns that employees are slacking off. But that’s not necessarily the case. “It’s not necessarily that employees are fibbing, it’s more appropriate to say employees are taking advantage of a remote work environment,” said Jessica Kriegel, an executive at Culture Partners. “But if they are fibbing, it is because they don’t have the psychological safety with their boss to be straightforward.”
It may confer some advantages, too, Kriegel added. A hush trip might give you some of the psychological benefits of a vacation without leaving your team short ― and might allow you to save your PTO for a vacation when you really need to unplug.
Like so many new features of remote work, experts suggest that the answer is not to clamp down on it, but to build policies that accommodate it to determine when a worker does need to fill their boss in, and when they don’t. Make clear what is okay, and what might cause issues, suggested Kayla Glanville, CEO of Upaway. “[Hush trips can work], until it doesn’t, until you get to a point where you weren’t clear on expectations on both ends,” she said. “Clear is kind.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.