The following appeared in a memorandum from the human resources department of Diversified Manufacturing:“Managers at our central office report that their employees tend to be most productive in the days immediately preceding a vacation. To help counteract

The argument that the productivity can be increased by limiting the continuous vacation time to a maximum of one week is too short-sighted and misses important aspects that may have an impact on the employee productivity. The memorandum advocates the proposal of dividing the yearly leave into small pieces by showing the supposed fact that employees tend to be more productive in the days immediately preceding a vacation. However the memorandum misses important aspects to substantiate its argumentation.

First of all, the supposed fact on which the proposal bases is not thoroughly analyzed. A reason why employees work more productive in the days immediately preceding a vacation may be that they want to finish up some work before a long vacation. Limiting the continuous vacation time to a maximum of one week, however, might diminish employees' motivation to finish up work before vacation because employees would know that they would be back in a week, which is not a long period for a vacation in common sense. The memorandum lacks a thorough root cause analysis and therefore the proposal made might lead to productivity decrease.

On the other hand, a limit of continuous vacation time to a maximum of one week might have long-term negative effects which are not considered by the memorandum. For many people it is necessary to have more than one week continuously off in order to relax. So if employees are permitted to have maximum one week of continuous vacation they might not be able to relax which would lead to long-term productivity decrease. That is why the proposal made is too-short sighted and does not consider long-term affects the proposal might have.

In order to substantiate the argumentation and find the right way to increase the productivity, the human resources department should do a thorough root cause analysis in order to understand exactly why employees tend to work more productive in the days immediately before a vacation. Only after understanding the main reasons for productivity increase the human resources department should propose actions to increase productivity.

In summary, human resources department fails to analyse a supposed fact thoroughly and makes a short-sighted proposal basing on a not well-analyzed fact and disregards many other important aspects about employee productivity.