What workers need to actually take a break this summer

By Kevin J. Delaney

Featured in today's newsletter:

Surprise: More employers plan to increase entry-level hiring than cut it
Tactics to get people to take the time off they need this summer
The case for having tricky conversations outside

AI and Work Radar

Between May 2024 and May 2025, employment dropped .2% for a group of occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics has deemed AI-exposed, while overall employment grew .8%, according to Bloomberg. Employment for AI-exposed roles such as customer service representative and wholesale and manufacturing sales representative dropped considerably over that period.
Some 46% of employers that have at least explored using AI say they expect to increase entry-level hiring this year, compared to 17% who expect to decrease it, according to a new Strada Education Foundation survey. MetLife, for example, hired roughly 30% more interns and new graduates last year, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Retail and warehouse workers at Amazon and Walmart report being concerned about their company automating HR decisions, according to a survey by United for Respect, a nonprofit that advocates for retail workers. A leader of the nonprofit told Fast Company that workers reported “a feeling of loss of human interaction in the workplace.”
California governor Gavin Newsom this week issued an executive order directing state agencies to prepare for the possibility of workforce disruption from AI. Agencies will be asked to track how AI is affecting the labor market and “evaluate and support opportunities to expand and enhance worker ownership models,” among other steps.

Focus on Addressing Burnout this Summer

Only half of American workers plan to travel this summer, the lowest level in the last six years, according to Deloitte’s 2026 Summer Travel Survey. With rising inflation eating away at travel funds, and the pressure to stay focused as company leaders emphasize performance and cut jobs, more workers could stay at their desks through the summer season.

“Work is always on,” observes Allison Gabriel, a professor of management and director of Purdue University’s Center for Working Well. “There is always something that seems to be urgent.” As “996” and “grindcore” work cultures pick up in tech startups and AI agents run around the clock in more workplaces, the risk of burnout could rise, even as we reach Memorial Day weekend’s unofficial start of summer.

“Mentally, we hold summer as a space where we get to solve a lot of our burnout,” says Gabriel. “Doing that puts a lot of pressure on summer to be incredibly restorative.” That pressure is especially true this summer. Mentions of “burnout” have surged on Glassdoor, rising 65% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026. Nearly half of managers say they are working harder than they did a year ago, according to a survey from Gartner.

Yet survey after survey shows that most American workers fail to make full use of their allotted paid time off (PTO), and many continue to work even while on vacation. This year, the US Travel Association predicts that many travelers will shift to taking shorter and cheaper trips, opting to stick closer to home and book fewer nights of lodging.

As “Maycember” comes to a close, and the busy month of end-of-year celebrations, recitals, and graduations gives way to summer, we gathered best practices for encouraging your team to step away from work, make PTO days as restorative as possible, and build habits to make work more sustainable year-round.

Make vacation mandatory. Consider setting guidance on a minimum number of PTO days employees should take, especially in workplaces without a set maximum. Studies show that workers with unlimited vacation time, which some companies introduce to save on accrued time off liabilities paid to departing employees, often take fewer days of PTO.

Company-wide holidays and week-long closures can also empower employees to log off more fully. When all of your coworkers are also away from their laptops, there’s less pressure to monitor email inboxes. Adobe, for example, plans two week-long breaks per year when everyone is off, usually around Independence Day and Christmas.

Help pay for paid time off. Offering paid time off is one thing. Helping pay the vacation bill itself is another, especially as rising prices make planning trips trickier. Notion, for example, awards employees with a custom Rimowa suitcase and $5,000 travel voucher when they reach their five-year work anniversary, while Cotopaxi’s benefits package includes stipends of up to $5,000 for “bucket list trips” at 18 months and 5 years of service.

Help workers protect their time off. “People who are really good at maximizing vacations erect really strong boundaries,” says Gabriel. “They won’t bring their work-issued cell phones [on vacation]. They will leave their computers at home.” Encourage those who work on their personal devices to delete work-related apps or log out of their work accounts. Another way to make logging off easier is by creating guides to make the transition to and from vacation as easy as possible, suggesting handoffs that should happen or sample out of office (OOO) messages. Share these templates and norms across your organization, and ask leaders to model best practices when they take PTO.

Encourage out-of-the-box vacations. One major factor that contributes to burnout is the feeling that every day is the same. “It’s like Groundhog Day,” says Gabriel. “You’re on Zoom. You’re on your email. You’re working on reports. You get to the weekend, you crash…and then you’re going back to work and doing the same thing.” To make time away from work more restorative, Gabriel recommends experiences that bring a sense of novelty, whether that’s learning a new skill or exploring a new place, even for a weekend day trip.

Share “recovery beacons” to celebrate rest. Recovery beacons are tactics that encourage workers to share more openly about how they take breaks. For example, the weekly team meeting might include a short PTO spotlight highlighting a manager’s recent vacation—a way for leaders to model taking time off—or senior leaders might create a Slack channel to share pictures from PTO after returning to work.

Gabriel encourages using recovery beacons to normalize taking breaks during the flow of work as well, whether that’s using a Slack status that you’re out on a walk, asking a check-in question related to after-work hobbies, or setting reminders in a shared messaging channel to take movement breaks.

These beacons break up a “vicious cycle” where people push themselves to their limit during the workday and squeeze in whatever rest and recovery they can into their evenings. That doesn’t work for many people,says Gabriel, especially those with caregiving responsibilities at home. “We need to view work itself—those hours—as a place where people can have some time for themselves and to recover.”

Use summer to reset work practices. “It's just not enough to assume that summer is going to mitigate or minimize the heavy workload that a lot of people are experiencing,” says Gabriel, encouraging leaders to use the changing seasons to normalize rest. For example, encourage employees to look at their 2027 calendar and space out PTO throughout the year. Remind your team of any policies around core meeting hours. Plan a meeting reset for the beginning of summer to cut down on unnecessary calendar holds and create more windows of focus time.

The goal, says Gabriel, is to make work more sustainable in the long run. Doing so might just make next “Maycember” more bearable.

For more resources for how your team can work better throughout the summer, including scripts, templates, and recommendations, check out the Charter Pro Summer Work Guide.

What Else You Need to Know

Worker anxiety is on the rise as CEOs use increasingly blunt language to emphasize productivity and the balance of power continues to shift toward employers, some of whom have been pairing the rhetoric with cuts to office perks, a renewed focus on performance metrics, and job cuts.

Bloomberg reports that among companies in the S&P 500 Index, executives used the phrase “performance culture” 633 times last year on earnings calls and in corporate documents, up from about 460, on average, across the previous four years.
With thousands of layoffs at tech companies including Amazon, Block, Meta, and Oracle, some tech workers are seeking support on Blind, the professional social media platform. Mentions of job insecurity among tech workers have spiked on the platform relative to posts about job success, according to Blind’s data.
“This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” one longtime Meta employee who was laid off in the most recent round of job cuts told The San Francisco Standard. The employee described widespread fear of AI displacement and looming layoffs at the Meta offices.
In the wake of job cuts, some tech companies are reorganizing teams into “AI-native pods,” with smaller, cross-functional groups of workers augmented by AI agents.

Future of Work Speed Round

The EEOC sued a Chick-fil-A franchisee for religious discrimination. The case concerns a former Chick-fil-A manager who requested time off from work on Saturdays, when her Christian denomination observes the sabbath. The EEOC alleges the fast food company, which closes all locations each Sunday, said it could only honor the request if she took a demotion and then fired the worker when she declined.
US employers pay union-avoidance firms an estimated $1.7 billion per year to detect and deter unionization, plan for and break strikes, and conduct anti-union campaigns, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, and LaborLab, a nonprofit watchdog organization.
The number of children on waiting lists for federal child-care assistance nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025, according to a report from the National Women’s Law Center. Some 81% of parents say they think “constantly” about potential child-care disruptions, and nearly half say child-care challenges make it harder to focus at work, according to a survey from child-care provider KinderCare.
Women held 29.9% of Russell 3000 company board seats in the first quarter of 2026, slipping below 30% for the first time since 2024, according to a report from 50/50 Women on Boards. Women’s representation on corporate boards had reached a high of 30.4% in the first quarter of 2025. Women of color now hold 7.3% of board seats, down from 7.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Here are the best tips and insights for managing yourself and your team:

Have difficult conversations outside. Consider stepping out of the office to have contentious conversations. When walking side-by-side or sitting on a park bench, there’s less pressure to look directly at one another, which can feel more confrontational. Looking at your surroundings can also give you a chance to mentally reset and refocus if the conversation becomes too intense.
Bring scenario planning into career conversations. With so much uncertainty in the economy, managers should consider framing career development as preparing for several different scenarios rather than one linear path. A leader might help an employee prepare for their next promotion while developing adjacent skills in case the company changes their strategy.
Share an executive briefing with your new manager. Before a new supervisor starts, write a briefing that gives them a rundown of the state of the team. Include both quantitative data about key metrics and priorities and qualitative information about the group’s collective strengths, weaknesses, and culture.

Coda

Is the ‘future of truth’ AI slop? In The Future of Truth, author Steven Rosenbaum explores how AI has reshaped our understanding of truth. The problem? When the book came out earlier this month, eagle-eyed readers spotted several incorrect quotes, which Rosenbaum has acknowledged are AI hallucinations.

One of the fabricated quotes is attributed to tech journalist Kara Swisher. “Never said that,” Swisher told The New York Times. “I also sound like I have a stick up my butt, according to ChatGPT.”