When Your Best People Won’t Take Time Off

After 15 years in HR, Mikki Forbes, Co-Founder and COO of Forbes Consulting, LLC, now partners with executives as a Fractional HR leader to design people systems that work — systems that reduce turnover, strengthen leadership pipelines, and align everyday behavior with business goals.

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Most PTO conversations inside a leadership team are about the employee who takes too much: the sick day that stretches into a long weekend, the Fridays that disappear every summer. That’s a real pattern, but it’s a manageable one. The more expensive problem runs the other way, when your best people won’t take the time off they’ve earned, and the cost compounds quietly for years before anyone notices.

Ask a high performer why they skipped their vacation and the answer is rarely “I don’t need it.” It’s closer to guilt. They’ve decided no one else can run the client relationship. They picture the inbox at 300 unread and decide the recovery isn’t worth the re-entry. And somewhere along the way, many of them absorbed the idea that stepping back reads as stepping down.

When Monster polled workers about time off, 24% said they’d rather quit than take the PTO they’d earned, mostly because of the anxiety about what would be waiting when they got back. And FlexJobs’ 2025 Work & PTO Pressure Report found that 23% of U.S. workers didn’t take a single vacation day last year, most of them despite having paid days sitting unused on the books.

There’s a term going around for what happens to your most dependable people. Kickresume CEO Peter Duris calls it a “competence hangover“: the more reliably someone delivers, the more the organization leans on them, until stepping away starts to feel like a risk they can’t afford. It’s a role nobody assigned them. They grew into it by being good at the job, and now the reliability that got them noticed is the thing keeping them at their desks.

HR tends to treat unused PTO as a liability line item, and it is one: PTO Exchange puts the accrued liability sitting on U.S. balance sheets at over $1 trillion. But the balance-sheet number, for all the attention it gets in budget meetings, is the smaller problem.

The bigger one is what happens to the person who never disconnects. In a 2025 LiveCareer survey, 59% of workers said they’re uncomfortable taking time off even when they have it, and that kind of sustained unease has operational consequences: slower decisions, shorter tempers, the kind of fatigue a weekend can’t fix.

Then there’s retention. Employees can be perfectly content in the role and still walk because they can’t get real time away, which means your highest performer becomes your highest flight risk the moment they realize the organization will let them run on empty indefinitely. They rarely complain on the way out, either. The first sign is usually a resume that’s suddenly up to date.

Most companies already have a PTO policy that looks fine on paper, including plenty of handbooks with generous or even unlimited PTO. The gap is cultural: a policy tells employees what they’re allowed to do, while the people around them demonstrate what will actually happen if they do it.

And culture traces back to what leadership models. If an executive answers Slack from a beach chair, the team learns that “time off” means “still reachable.” If a manager praises the person who worked through their vacation, everyone else quietly recalibrates what dedication is supposed to look like. You can’t policy your way out of a modeling problem.

This lands squarely in HR’s lane, and none of it is complicated:

• Pull PTO utilization data quarterly, not just in December. An employee sitting on 18 unused days in October should get a direct question from their manager, not a use-it-or-lose-it email two months later. (And a high performer with a climbing balance is an early retention signal, as real as a dip in engagement scores.)
• Treat single points of failure as a workforce planning problem. If one person walking out for a week creates a crisis, you have a staffing and cross-training gap, and it belongs in succession conversations. Build coverage plans before someone leaves, not after.
• Build “models healthy time off” into manager competencies and performance conversations. It’s one of the few culture levers HR can define, coach to, and measure.
• Stop rewarding the behavior you say you don’t want. If the person who never takes a day off keeps getting held up as the standard for commitment, no wellness campaign will out-message that example.
• Name time-off norms out loud in onboarding and manager training. A generous policy buried in a handbook won’t change behavior the way a manager saying “I expect you to actually disconnect” will.

None of this needs budget approval or a new initiative on the roadmap, just a willingness to read unused PTO as the retention and burnout signal it already is, instead of waiting for it to show up as a resignation.

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