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4 Things Pharma Marketing Can Learn from Other Industries

September 2nd, 2010 · Opinion, Trends

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2233713 4 Things Pharma Marketing Can Learn from Other Industries

By Guy Mastrion (@gmastrion)

Across all industries, people are using new technologies, tactics and communication mediums to connect with customers and accelerate business momentum. What qualities do other industries possess that can be beneficial to pharma?

Retail – Think Outside the Store

Retail has broken free from brick-and-mortar establishments and catalog shopping to include social media, online and mobile communications to attract customers and motivate them to buy. These trends are applicable to pharma, too. If you’re stuck on launching in-office tent cards and the same old promotions, chances are, you’ll get the same results you’ve always gotten. Instead, create some excitement by interacting with patients and health care professionals using new interactive mediums and get them engaged in your product or services.

Conducting an in-store event at the neighborhood CVS offering customers free blood pressure or cholesterol screening? Consider creating an opt-in mobile phone campaign that alerts individuals to these happenings. Build excitement by pulsing out valuable information and while you’re at it, supply them with a coupon on their mobile device. Who doesn’t love convenience AND a good bargain?

Food & Beverage Industry – Supplying the Full Spectrum of Consumer Needs

Lo-cal, low-carb, gluten-free, made with natural ingredients or loaded with extra cheese – whatever you fancy, chances are you can find a product to whet your whistle from one of your favourite brands. Food and beverage vendors appeal to the senses – whether that’s taste, touch, smell or packaging – and whatever the latest trend is, they provide a full spectrum of options when appealing to their consumer.

Likewise, pharma should forge deeper relationships with its target customers, encompassing the full spectrum of care. Marketing a diabetes drug? Go beyond product details and empower consumers with knowledge about diet and lifestyle so they get the most benefit from your relationship while achieving optimal health.

Leisure and Hospitality Industry – Experience-based Differentiation

Experience matters, especially in today’s economy and in an environment where choices abound. Leisure and hospitality companies that harness the art of delivering an outstanding experience are able to soar beyond customer’s expectations, differentiate their brand, raise awareness and build customer loyalty. Attention to detail and the right technology from always-on access to guest reservation systems to equipping public spaces and guest rooms with the latest electronics are some of the ways these companies are making people feel good while delivering on the promise of exceptional experience.

For pharma companies, it’s important to communicate with health care professionals and invest in strengthening those bonds, but it’s also critical to connect with patients – the end customer – and provide the right customer experience. Our knowledge-based society gives patients more power to educate themselves, request prescriptions and have a greater say in their own health care. Whether it’s a sales rep meeting with a physician or a consumer at-shelf choosing between one OTC drug or another, give them a reason to understand why your product is the choice most likely to suit their needs and deliver the best experience possible.

Financial Services Industry – Have an Eye on the Future and Educate the Workforce

The financial services industry is always in a state of continuous change, facing new regulations and changing compliance requirements. While a constant state of flux is de rigueur, financial services firms also require an infrastructure of knowledge-worker talent. Typically, financial downturns are the time when companies get lax on training and development of their workforce. However, those financial services firms with an eye on the future realize this is not a time to rest on their laurels; successful organizations empower their people to amass new skills.

As pharma companies innovate for the present and the future, they need to continue to invest in educating their workforce. Similar to financial services, the pharmaceutical industry offers a steadily evolving business landscape as manufacturing processes chance, new drugs are discovered and lower-cost generic drugs enter the market.  To take advantage of new opportunities and to grow and thrive, companies need to recruit qualified individuals and get them to stay. By investing in their workforce, defining career paths and providing coaching so employees develop new skills and competencies, pharmaceutical companies can keep an eye on the future and succeed amidst change.

By learning from other industries, pharma companies can increase the impact of their marketing efforts, stimulate innovation, and discover new ways to provide care. The wealth of lessons abounds – what are you doing with it?

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AstraZeneca’s Brilinta

September 1st, 2010 · News, Opinion

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AstraZeneca’s Brilinta

By Dan Bobear (@dbobear)

Now that AstraZeneca’s experimental blood thinner Brilinta has been given the green light by an advisory committee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, they need to prepare for the next hurdle they face: usurping category leader, Plavix, which is slated for generic availability sometime next year.

Most critical: changing physician prescribing behavior.

The lessons coming out of the Brilinta approval process are a key for marketers. Like the study that showed Brilinta’s less favorable results in the U.S., compared to the entire 18,000+ international population of patients studied, what works in one place may not work in another.

What should AstraZeneca (and every marketer) be thinking about?

Location-based promotional activity – You can have the right message but in the wrong place. With the effectiveness in U.S. participants in question, the company needs to address that concern, giving patients and physicians confidence in the drug as an appropriate course of treatment. Traditional marketing vehicles, social media, conference exhibits and direct mail pieces combined with insight gathered through the CRM system will ensure the right message is delivered to the right audience at the right time.

Creating a positive brand image – This article references a poll that showed that 75 percent of physicians were prescribing Plavix for a year or more. For Brilinta to successfully penetrate the market, they will likely need to break physician behavior of prescribing a medication out of habit. Reaching an increasing number of doctors with no-call policies, as well as a consumer audience, will require a multi-channel approach, especially when a low-cost generic option is available. Where to focus?  For doctors, the brand needs to communicate the safety and efficacy of the drug. Patients also need to understand the advantages they will gain through treatment.

Interacting directly with patients – Patients who request a drug, provided they are a candidate for it, are likely to get it. Direct-to-consumer messaging is no longer limited to print and broadcast advertising and educational resources. Today’s patients head online and research treatment options across a variety of sources. Community forums enable patients to get information from other users, medical professionals, and company-sponsored materials. While changing physician prescribing behavior is an imperative, it’s also important to create demand among appropriate patients.

Incorporating social media – Discussion groups, You Tube videos, Twitter, and blogs as well as improved search engine optimization can increase brand awareness and create a positive connection with the target community. Facebook has become an extremely important referral source to drive people to a company’s website. There are brand pages, disease awareness groups and fans or followers that can carry the message to a larger audience. AstraZeneca has taken a deliberate but dedicated approach to social media, but to shift the opinion of doctors and patients, they will need to produce social content that is a little less sterile and a lot more engaging.

The September 16 decision looks favorable. How do you see this changing the competitive landscape? What do you think Brilinta needs to achieve peak sales?

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5th Annual eyeforpharma eCommunications and Online Marketing Summit

August 31st, 2010 · News

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This year, it’s all about the customer at the 5th annual eyeforpharma eCommunications and Online Marketing Summit!

Come join the many interesting and inspiring people from the healthcare industry November 8 and 9, 2010 at Boston’s Hyatt Harborside and learn what the most forward-thinking leaders in the industry are doing. The action-packed schedule includes opportunities to discover a broad range of perspectives from industry leaders and real-world success stories in addition to fantastic networking opportunities.

The two-day event will feature case studies on how to launch a branded app or what SEO strategy to adopt for the best ROI. The schedule is brimming with dynamic presentations from more than 20 speakers on future trends, integrating online and offline strategies, getting more mileage from your website and more. Exchange ideas and thoughts on the complexity of digital marketing solutions for the pharma industry with peers and industry luminaries from pharma, biotech, medical devices and other regulated industries.

The conference kicks off on Monday, November 8 and session titles include:

  • Get clarity in the chaos: An overall perspective
  • What makes your customer tick? Storytelling as a key weapon in your arsenal
  • Embrace open communication and engagement with customers in a regulated industry: a banking perspective
  • The evolution of physician behavior: Implications for new digital physician access models
  • Cover all your bases: Integrate online and offline tactics
  • Mobile: A wonderland for your brand
  • Direct To Consumer 2.0: How to zig when everyone else is sagging
  • Social Media in Corporate Communications vs. Brand Communications
  • eSampling: Bright future or false dawn?

…and more!

This year’s dynamic speakers will offer a range of perspectives and an overarching look at what can be achieved with any budget in any part of the industry. Speakers include:

  • David Stern, Executive Vice President, EMD Serono
  • Walter Christensen, Senior Vice President, Neurometrix
  • Cynthia North, Consumer Marketing, Director, Bayer
  • Shwen Gwee, Digital Strategy and Social Media Lead, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
  • Christine Coyne, Senior Director, Adult Endocrinology, Endo Pharma
  • Paul Butcher, Director of Communications, Citi
  • Preeti Pinto, Executive Director, Promotional Regulatory Affairs, AstraZeneca
  • Harold Johns, Manager, Global Web Solutions, Worldwide Commercial Pharmaceutical IT, Johnson & Johnson
  • Cynthia North, Consumer Marketing Director, Bayer
  • Paul Kang, Director/Team Leader, Pfizer

For a full list of speakers, click here.

Pixels & Pills will be on-site covering the event and bringing you the news you can use – be sure to stop by and say hello! Readers of our blog can also get $400 off the registration fee with exclusive P&P discount code “PIX+PIL”!

This is a pharma event you don’t want to miss! For more information, visit http://www.eyeforpharma.com/ecomm.

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Are You Succeeding? Are You Sure?

August 30th, 2010 · Knowledge, Opinion

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1954394 Are You Succeeding? Are You Sure?

By Jason Brandt (@Jasondmg3)

GlaxoSmithKline has decided to change the way they pay bonuses to their sales representatives, tying the amount of the bonuses to the rep’s efficacy at customer service, not just the sales figures of the doctors they’re responsible for seeing. (Read more about it here.)

Are you thinking this way too?

“What are you talking about?” you’re thinking, “I don’t have a sales force to motivate – actually, I don’t run any kind of customer-facing team at all.”

Doesn’t matter.

GSK is changing their structure so that they can be seen by their customers less as salespeople and more as educators. They know that’s what their clientele really wants. Customers don’t want to spend their valuable time being cajoled into using a product; they want to spend that time acquiring useful information that can help them do their own jobs better.

That’s a sentence that’s true for all of customers and clients, no matter who or where they are.

Here’s an exercise.

Step 1: What are you trying to sell? Write the answer to that question down. Then put a big #2 in front of it.

Step 2: What would help your customers do their jobs better? Make as long of a list as you can. Put a big #1 over it. And then spend all the time that it takes figuring out how you can be responsible for giving them as many of those things as possible.

You’re going to say that you can’t do many of those things, that nobody can do many of those things, that many of those things are outside your capabilities, that some of those things are directly counterproductive to your success. But there’s one answer for all of those arguments, and it is: fewer than you think.

Step 3: Set up a giant brainstorm with all of your people. Not the kind that you’ve probably become used to throughout your career. In these sessions, everyone has agreed upon the business goals and objectives, and the goal is to come up ways that you can – let’s call a spade a spade – trick or placate or otherwise get people to behave the way you want so that you can meet those objectives.

Never, never have one of those sessions again. Figure out who you want to affect. Then figure out what would make their lives better. Then, and yes this is the hard part, figure out how to do that for them.

Here’s an example.

If your end users are patients with diabetes, they want to not have diabetes, you might flippantly say. And you can’t magically cure them – of course, no, you can’t. But in not wanting to have diabetes, what those patients probably really want is to be able to live like anyone else. And to do that they’d like to be able to understand and predict their disease better. And to do that they could really use a new method of entering in all of their variables and the results, one that’s friendly, not time-consuming, not confusing, easily portable, discreet, and effective at combining everything in one place.

So if you sell meters or pumps or strips or insulin – why aren’t you making yourself the company that gives them that solution, along with your other products to help them manage their disease?

Consider how you can make the decision of whether you’re succeeding or failing include more measurement of how much you’ve improved your customers’ lives.

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Clarity in Pharma Writing

August 27th, 2010 · News, Opinion

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1852951 Clarity in Pharma Writing

By Kimberly Reyes (@CommDuCoeur)

Even if you are the most graphic of all designers, even if you are the most chemical of all researchers, you write at work.  You write reports, you write PowerPoint slides, you write emails, you write Post-It notes. You write staff reviews.  You write, and you tell the world about yourself every time you do it.

But is what you write illuminating and informative – or is it more likely to require a Rosetta Stone, a dictionary, and a mind reader?

Some people seem to think that the more words they use, the smarter they look.  In our experience, these people are either six months out of college and used to padding word counts – or they’re senior executives nobody has the nerve to edit anymore.  But in either case, it doesn’t work.  When you talk to sound smart, you end up proving the opposite.  When you talk to make yourself understood as quickly and easily as possible – that’s when you’re getting somewhere.

As a creative writer myself, the same problem pops up often in peer review groups: some people write for themselves, not their audiences.  Across all industries, these people are usually incredibly smart, and work on very specific and complicated projects.  These people, due to their brains and projects, are often expected to explain what they’ve done and why it matters.  And that’s where they shoot themselves in the foot, because their writing doesn’t serve their valuable, interesting work.

But particularly in medicine, making yourself understood does more than help your career – it saves lives.

A new federal program is working to improve that – both improving the literacy of the public, and the communication abilities of healthcare professionals.  The Health Literacy Action Plan hopes to raise healthcare standards, lower costs and inform everyone.

Why does it matter so much?  Well, as chair of the department of health policy of George Washington University Medical Center, Sara Rosenbaum is quoted as saying in the above-linked Wall Street Journal article, “People who have only limited ability to understand their choices in health care are more likely to have serious health problems and more likely to have their treatment delayed, which leads to higher costs.”

Clarity is, in healthcare, very literally a matter of life and death.

However, in an interesting new development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s OpenNotes project is experimenting with giving 25,000 patients direct access to their physicians’ notes about their visits.  Is this the next logical step toward more clear patient-professional communication?  It may be, but it will certainly require a shift in thinking.  Many physicians think of their notes as proprietary, private, and easily misunderstood by less specialized readers – even the subjects discussed in the notes themselves.

Consider how you can improve the clarity of your communications with your colleagues, with your clients, with your business prospects.

Moreover, consider how a project like the OpenNotes project would work in your own business.  What parts of your business do you keep behind the scenes?  Why?  What would happen if you opened them up?

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The Application of Offline Skills for Social Media Success

August 26th, 2010 · Opinion

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The Application of Offline Skills for Social Media Success

By Todd LaRoche (@toddlaroche)

Whether you’re just dabbling in social media or if blogging, posting, friending and following are already old hat, your people skills can make or break your social media success. In the boardroom or on discussion boards and social media sites, proper business etiquette can be a key differentiator that delivers a competitive advantage.

As more people use social media to build their careers, promote their business and strengthen their reputation, being mindful of offline social skills and applying them to your online presence can protect your personal and professional brand. If your objective is to use social media to interact and develop relationships, these considerations will help you be a more effective and influential community member.

Enter gracefully. Whether you’re joining a discussion group on LinkedIn or following your prospects on Twitter, avoid coming in gangbusters. Take the time to eavesdrop on the conversation before diving right in. Also, while it’s ok to promote your knowledge, avoid blatantly promoting your company, blog or products unless you have an already established relationship or if the information is relevant to the current conversation. To boost credibility, consider promoting other people, too. Social media is a great tool for engagement, but conversations require two-way participation.

Take time to know your audience. If you want to communicate effectively, measure your audiences’ interests and provide information that has value. As you get to know your followers, give back to show them you’re listening to their contributions. If you read a great blog post, either leave a comment or pass it along using StumbleUpon, Delicious or via a shout out on Twitter.

Inform customers, prospects, colleagues and others about your interests. Use your “about us” section or profile to communicate who you are interested in connecting with. A critical mistake many organizations make is putting too much emphasis on their number of followers or friends. While it’s great to attract lots of eyeballs, attracting your key audience is more likely to yield the business results you want.

Quarreling is not ok. What happens online stays online. That’s why it’s important to consider your actions and ensure your participation paints you in the most positive light. It’s ok to address negative feedback, but don’t get into flame wars or use profanity. Criticism should be thoughtful and constructive. When monitoring your own community or reputation, avoid insults and snark and have a strategy for how you’ll respond to naysayers.

Understand who is following or friending you. Did your mother ever warn you that you’d be judged by the company you keep? The same is true of your social circle. Check out the people who want to follow you or be your friend and make sure that they will be a positive influence on your online reputation.

Edit yourself. Too much information (TMI) is never a good thing. Channel your internal editor and avoid over-posting mundane information. Providing some personal details adds dimension to your online persona, but constant griping or sharing that you had pastrami on rye for the third time in a week may cause you to lose followers or irritate those that stick around.

Tell enough about yourself to pique other’s interest. Are you a thought leader? A member of a particular community or industry? Located in a particular geographic region? Providing enough information lets people know who you are, what interests you have in common and why they should pay attention to what you have to say. Make sure your profile is complete on each of the social networks that you participate in and include a picture to humanize the relationship. After all, social media is supposed to be about social interaction.

Transparency is essential. Companies that demonstrate transparent communication are seen as credible, trustworthy and are more likely to build more meaningful relationships. Disclose your connection to your organization when participating on social platforms, create authentic messages, follow industry guidelines and be sure to get the tone right when communicating with others.

Engaging people requires a personality. The simple truth of social media is that people interact with people, not companies. It’s prudent to define your corporate positioning and brand image, but don’t forsake the importance of being personable. Be friendly and show the human side of your company.

Online relationships can translate to real world success. By following social etiquette rules regardless of where you operate, you’ll build better relationships and strengthen your reputation.

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Thinking Doctors? Think Smartphones.

August 25th, 2010 · Opinion

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Doctor iPhonePhoto courtesy of Fast Company

By Sven Larsen (@zemoga)

A recent survey investigated physicians’ use of smartphones, and how it fits in to their detailing preferences. Here are some of the top findings:

  1. The majority of doctors own smartphones.
  2. While just about all of them still permit detailing rep visits, the numbers are dropping.
  3. And almost a fifth now use their smartphones for e-detailing. That’s age-independent: they’re doing it whether you’re talking about an older physician or a younger one.

You can see the Pharmalot coverage of the survey here and the original press release here, but I know you’re busy, so I’ll cut to the chase of what this all means.

Here’s the point. If doctors purchase your product, and you aren’t developing smartphone apps to sell it to them, you’re failing.

It’s as simple as that.

The handheld communications device most stereotypically associated with physicians is the pager. It’s still common, especially with hospital-based physicians, but increasingly, it’s becoming a historical image. Your doctor is spending his or her time with a Blackberry, a Droid or an iPhone, not a plastic matchbook with ten LED numbers on the edge.

Physicians have adopted smartphone technology. We have to stop talking about that in the future tense, or as if it’s an eventual possibility. We have to stop doing doctors a disservice and treating them as if they haven’t had the time or the brainpower to pick up on what the rest of us have.

You need to think about the possibilities. These are the statistics as they stand now – with the paucity of physician-specific information available to them. Sit and imagine all of your physician outreach translated to smartphone apps. How much more would physicians use their phones then, with your new offerings adding that much more utility to their experience?

In another article on the survey findings, the founder of the surveying company noted that, “For a lot of doctors, they have the smartphone, but it’s not integrated with anything.”

This is a major drawback. It is also a massive opportunity.

How can physicians’ smartphones be better integrated? Let’s brainstorm for a moment.

    Why can’t they write prescriptions on them?
    Why can’t they communicate securely with patients through them?
    Why can’t they call up complete charts on them?
    Why can’t they order tests with them?
    Why can’t they have apps for the PDR, the Merck Manual, and Taber’s?

Some of these are possible. Some aren’t possible yet. But we’re teetering on the edge of an ocean of possibilities – and if you can be the one to provide these options, to make physicians’ smartphones that much smarter – just imagine how indispensable you’ll become.

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Social Media for Connecting with Patients

August 24th, 2010 · Opinion

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1626668 Social Media for Connecting with Patients

By Andy Smith

Social media is the new mainstream. A new report from Nielsen Co. finds that Americans are devoting almost a quarter of their Internet time on social networking sites and blogs, a 43 percent increase compared to one year ago. In the UK, social media has overtaken every other online activity.

Pharmaceutical companies still rely on traditional media and means of disseminating information – magazine, television and radio advertising and displays in the doctor’s office or waiting room – but they shouldn’t overlook the value of social networks for connecting with patients and strengthening brand awareness. In fact, by limiting participation on social networks to blasts about new medicines or company news, pharma companies are missing out on an opportunity to better serve patients.

Social media’s interactive nature provides patients with the opportunity to become engaged in their own health care, whether that’s requesting a particular drug or treatment therapy during a physician visit or carrying product messages back to their own social network. Pharma companies that engage the end consumer – the patient – can extend their message through a cadre of brand ambassadors.

How can pharma companies increase their social participation? John Mack identified these uses of Twitter for pharma companies, including:

  • Drug/device safety alerts (eg, drug recalls, medical device malfunctions, emerging safety issues)
  • Prescription management, including pharmacy refill reminders
  • Daily health tips from authoritative sources
  • Publishing disease-specific tips
  • Clinical trial awareness & recruitment
  • Enhancing health-related support groups (e.g. buddy-systems for depression)
  • Providing around-the-clock disease management
  • Patient-sharing of health-related experiences
  • Issuing dietary/lifestyle tips

While the Food and Drug Administration recently issued a warning to a drug-maker against using Facebook to promote a medication, its beef was that the promotion was incomplete, only promoting the benefits and not the risks. The lesson is that transparency is essential. Beyond promoting a particular medicine, pharma should use Facebook to:

  • Build relationships and spark discussions – not as a linear platform for conveying information
  • Provide valuable, informative information – not just promotional content
  • Spark one-to-one dialogue, and encourage patients to participate by sharing their own experiences
  • Avoid avoidance; monitor what people are saying and should things go awry, offer clear messages and alternative avenues for getting information
  • Work in tangent with other social networking platforms. Want a YouTube video to go viral? It’ll never happen without a coordinated Facebook campaign

Pharma companies shouldn’t be afraid of social media – it’s a valuable medium for carrying key messages, building relationships and increasing product loyalty. But that’s what it is – a medium. What doesn’t change is the core work of examining the marketing strategy, crafting transparent and clear messages, and engaging social media to add value and build relationships.

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Assimilation in Tech Development

August 23rd, 2010 · Opinion

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2177451 Assimilation in Tech Development

By Russ Ward (@russcward)

Imitation is the best form of flattery. You’ve heard that cliche, right? We’re going to talk about that a little bit today. But it’s actually about more than imitation – we’re going to talk about assimilation, and how you need to be doing it.

When the word “assimilation” is used, all too often it has negative connotations – ideas of losing individuality. But it can also mean learning and improving.

When a new service or piece of software is created, it won’t be perfect. There will be features that don’t work exactly right, or that don’t do exactly what users wish they would. And more often that not, small new features, plug-ins or services pop up to get those jobs done. This process is natural, but what sets the best apart is what they do when their platform’s shortcomings are made visible.

The best platforms look at what assistive services are doing, and then, when they update, try to make them part of their own offering. If users are going to a separate service to fix the problems or the holes, they learn from that.

We’ve seen this in a couple of instances recently. As Dan Licht discussed in our August 2nd Tech Forecast blog bost, the newest version of HTML, HTML5, is incorporating many of the features that made Flash a useful tool.

Similarly, Twitter has been testing internal functions to post photos, videos, and shortened URLs.

In both cases, they saw that people had been picking up where they left off, and rather than leaving the perfection of their platform to other people and other companies, they went back to the drawing board to improve their original offering themselves.

Is that going to make HTML5 the last word forever in online code? Is that going to make Twitter the best communications service that will ever be invented? Of course not. But it’s making a good product better.

Too often, people (and I think I’m right in saying that it’s often us tech people) get mired in fatalist thinking. There’s no point improving what we have; other people have caught our mistakes and fixed them already. And even if we did make those changes, we still wouldn’t be perfect – someone would still come along with something better, so why bother?

The funny thing is, but while those arguments are heard pretty often on the tech side, the actual scientists in pharma aren’t too likely to be saying anything like that. Scientists are used to testing slightly different versions – studying a molecule, tweaking it in the hope of improving its benefit. Scientists appreciate incremental benefit, and they’re not too choosy to work from other people’s results. Science would be at a standstill if researchers didn’t work from each other’s findings.

So: why tweak your work to incorporate improvements that someone else has made? Because learning is progressive. Because perfection is a myth. Because you have something good enough to improve. So you need to look at your work again and wonder:

If I have something good enough that other people are improving it, why aren’t I?

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Vacation Series: Remembering to Take Vacation

August 20th, 2010 · Knowledge, Opinion

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2029033 Vacation Series: Remembering to Take Vacation

By Jason Brandt (@Jasondmg3)

All week long, we’ve been talking about things to do while your clients (not to mention half the office) is away on vacation.  Whether it’s clearing your workspace or clearing your head, there’s a way to make the most of the downtime while still remaining productive.

Today, you’re not going to like this post.

Today, I’m going to be a pain in the ass.

Today, instead of just giving you practical ideas for what to do with the time you find when most of your colleagues and clients are out, I’m going to get in your face and demand to know WHY you’re in the office.

“Oh, but there’s so much to do… someone needs to stay here while everyone else is out… I couldn’t afford a big vacation this year so there’s no point taking the time…”

No good. When you don’t take a vacation, several things happen.

  1. You work for free. Your salary assumes that you are working every weekday minus holidays and the PTO days that you’re allotted. Unless you’re paid overtime, when you work on those days instead of using them as allotted, you’re not getting paid for those days.
  2. You lose perspective. You can’t think outside the box IF YOU NEVER LET YOURSELF OUTSIDE THE BOX. And by “box” I mean “cubicle”. Get out and remember that the world exists during the day: the sun is shining, people are walking around, and it’s nice to be one of them from time to time.
  3. You lose energy. Routine can be pleasant and efficient, but if followed too long, it will just drive you down. You need a change of pace to perk yourself up.
  4. You shortchange your team. If you’re always there getting everything done, what experience is everyone else getting? How are they learning if you’re always there? How are you teaching them to be adaptive?

You came here for some ideas for what to do, so here’s today’s assignment:

  1. Count. Determine exactly how many vacation days you have left this year.
  2. Plan. Make a plan for what to do with those days off. And it doesn’t have to cost money. Take a few long weekends. Schedule a visit to nearby family. Plan a day picking apples or going hiking. Schedule a day to surprise the kids by keeping them home for a special treat. Treat yourself with a museum visit. A movie marathon. A spa day. Time to really devote yourself to your hobby. Hell, plan a day to stay in your pajamas.
  3. Assign. Submit the request or announcement and make it official.
  4. Sit back. Enjoy looking forward to some very deserved time off, and marvel as you discover that you are not, in fact, indispensable.

If you need help – or even more convincing – check out “How to Take a Vacation” and “The Importance of Taking a Vacation During Stressful Economic Times.”

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