Ottawa human resources professionals are turning their attention to a workplace question that's easy to overlook until it becomes a problem: how employees actually use their vacation time.
According to a report from the Ottawa Business Journal, HR executives are increasingly flagging two opposite trends among staff. On one end are the "holiday hoarders," employees who bank unused vacation days year after year rather than taking the time off they're entitled to. On the other are the "PTO-maxxers," workers who use every available day off as quickly as the calendar allows, sometimes front-loading their year with time away from the office.
Both patterns, HR leaders say, are worth a closer look, and both point to the same underlying issue: many organizations haven't revisited their vacation and paid-time-off policies in years, even as workplace expectations around flexibility and burnout prevention have shifted.
Why This Matters for Ottawa Workplaces
Ottawa's economy leans heavily on sectors where this tension shows up clearly, federal government departments, tech firms in Kanata North, and a growing base of professional services companies downtown. In workplaces with generous accrual systems, unused vacation can turn into a liability on the books and a burnout risk for employees who never step away. Meanwhile, in workplaces where staff clear out their PTO balance early, teams can be left short-staffed later in the year when coverage is harder to arrange.
For Ottawa employers, particularly small and mid-sized businesses without a dedicated HR department, the report is a reminder that vacation policy isn't something to set once and forget. A policy written a decade ago may not reflect how hybrid work, four-day workweek pilots, or generational shifts in attitudes toward time off have changed employee behaviour.
What HR Executives Are Recommending
HR professionals quoted in the piece point to a few starting points for employers looking to revisit their approach: setting clearer expectations around minimum vacation usage, reviewing accrual caps and rollover limits, and making sure managers are actually encouraging staff to take the time they've earned rather than treating unused vacation as a badge of dedication.
For Ottawa's workforce, much of it employed by large institutions with long-standing benefits structures, these conversations can be slow to translate into policy change. But as more companies compete for talent in a tight labour market, offering (and actually supporting the use of) competitive time-off benefits is becoming a differentiator, not just a line item in the employee handbook.
Employers who haven't looked at their vacation policy recently may want to treat this as a nudge. Whether staff are hoarding days or burning through them all at once, both extremes suggest the policy itself, not just the employees, might need adjusting.
Source: Ottawa Business Journal
