Negotiating vacations: the conflict that never takes a break

How we share rest says a lot about how we manage power. And summer highlights it all.

The shift schedule is not an administrative document, but a miniature battlefield. They never tell you that, of course. What they tell you is that "we have to coordinate," that "the team needs to organize itself," that "we all have to manage it together." And you smile, note down your preferences, and wait. But you know perfectly well that not everyone carries the same weight in that negotiation.

There are those who ask first and always get the best slot. There are those who can never take August because “it’s the busiest month,” and it’s curious how that work always falls on the same person. There are those who don’t ask directly but, suddenly, their vacations are already approved without anyone having talked about it. Power doesn’t disappear when talking about rest. It hides behind the calendar.

And power here is not just the boss. It’s who has been there the longest. It’s who has a closer informal relationship with the decision-maker. It’s who has learned they can ask and who has learned it’s better not to. Formal hierarchies appear in organizational charts, informal ones appear in the vacation calendar.

When negotiation is not transparent, what is generated is not coordination: it is silent resentment. And silent resentment is the hardest to surface and the hardest to heal.

There are teams where talking about vacations is easy. Where preferences are openly expressed, where criteria are clear, where if someone has given way one year, they know they will have priority the next. Those teams haven’t found a magic formula. They have simply built an environment where people can express themselves without fear and agreements are made explicit.

There are teams where talking about vacations is like tightening a rope. Where everyone knows not everything can be said, where there are informal hierarchies that don’t appear in organizational charts, where some preferences count more than others for reasons no one will ever explain out loud.

The difference between these two scenarios is not the level of trust among colleagues. It is whether the rules of the game—all of them, written and unwritten—are clear enough and fair enough for everyone to play with the same cards.

When a team is unable to talk about vacations without tension, the question is not "why are people so picky." The question is: who has normalized the silence?

Summer is a good time to review this. Before arriving in September burdened with fatigue—work, unresolved negotiations, accumulated tiredness—it is worth asking: how have we managed each person’s rest? Have we done it in a way that everyone has felt heard?

If the answer is “it depends on who,” you already have material for the first conversation in September.