US workers heading into Memorial Day weekend—the traditional start of summer—are being inundated with bad economic news. With inflation at a 40-year high and the cost of travel rising, many are rethinking their vacation plans.

A March survey of nearly 4,000 US adults by CNBC and Momentive found that 29% of those surveyed had, in the past six months, canceled a trip or vacation due to rising costs, while another 40% of respondents said they would consider canceling a trip or vacation “if higher prices persist.” But even if workers are going on fewer trips, simply taking time off and going nowhere can help prevent burnout, according to Dan Schawbel, managing partner at Workplace Intelligence.

“Regardless of whether workers choose to travel or opt for a ‘staycation,’ taking time off has been shown to reduce stress, promote work-life balance, and improve productivity,” Schawbel wrote on LinkedIn last year.

Unplug. US-based workers are notorious for not using all of their vacation time, and a March survey by Bankrate, a financial services company, found that only 30% of US workers who get paid vacation days “plan to use all of their allotted time off in 2022.”

Some organizations are taking steps to convince employees to go on vacation and enjoy themselves. Companies like Goldman Sachs have instituted minimum PTO policies, so employees are required to use at least some of the time that’s available to them. Earlier this year, Google increased its minimum annual time off by a full workweek, now at 20 days. Others try to help defray the cost of taking a vacation, CNBC reports:

• Airbnb gives employees an annual travel credit worth $2,000 to spend on Airbnb rentals
• Evernote provides $1,000 towards personal travel to every employee every year
• BambooHR provides up to $2,000 per year toward vacation expenses

Lead by example. Vicki Salemi, career expert at Monster, says that HR leaders should be proactive in helping employees use their vacation time, even if they won’t be traveling this summer. She recommends managers consider meeting “individually with people on the team as well as as a whole and telling them, ‘If your vacation plans have changed, please, you need to take a vacation.’”

Salemi also told HR Brew that managers need to reassure employees that their work will be covered, so employees don’t feel the guilt that can be associated with taking time off. “It’s important for a leader not only to say, ‘[I] want to make sure you’re still taking your time off, and by the way, when you’re taking that time off, it’s well deserved. We don’t want you to be working. We’ve got your back…We need you to relax, unwind, and enjoy.’”—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

We didn’t want to be covering layoffs again, particularly going into Memorial Day weekend. Truly, the last thing we’d like to discuss is people losing their livelihoods and benefits—it’s not exactly the fun-in-the-sun send-off we’d hope to give readers—but the market factors we discussed last week continue to hammer the industry, prompting more layoffs and hiring freezes.

In the past week, at least 16 tech companies worldwide have laid off more than 7,200 employees, according to layoffs.fyi, a site dedicated to tracking tech layoffs since March 2020. Some of the most notable include:

Klarna’s got a message for staff. Business Insider reported that the buy now, pay later service announced on Monday plans to lay off 10% of its global staff, or 700 employees, through a prerecorded video.

CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a message to staff that some time in the next several days, “impacted” employees would find a calendar invite titled “Meeting regarding your role at Klarna” landing in their inboxes.

Siemiatkowski cited the war in Ukraine, shifts in consumer sentiment, and “a steep increase in inflation, a highly volatile stock market, and a likely recession” as factors in the decision to lay employees off..

Part ways for later payday. When ClickUp, a productivity platform, and Latch, a smart-lock company, laid off employees, leadership framed the moves in a somewhat positive light.

TechCrunch reported that Latch CEO Luke Schoenfelder told staff by email that the layoffs—which will last two consecutive weeks—will “ensure Latch is on a path to sustainable growth.”

Zeb Evans, CEO of ClickUp, similarly told Protocol that the decision to lay off 7% of the company would “accelerate our timeline to profitability.” He stressed that the layoffs were not an indication of what’s to come. “We are by no means slowing down or pausing hiring, as we plan to hire 250 people this year and 300 more next year,” Evans told Protocol.

Bolt did both. The New York Times reported that the CEO of the online payments startup, Maju Kuruvilla, announced impending layoffs on Wednesday afternoon through a company-wide email. In Kuruvilla’s message, he focused on how the layoffs would enable Bolt to extend their “financial position, extend our runway, and reach profitability with the money we have already raised.” He did not disclose which departments were impacted; instead, workers discovered they were let go through a calendar invite titled “Bolt Restructuring.” Remaining Bolt employees learned the total number of layoffs, around 240, by watching coworkers be removed from company Slack channels.

What’s next? Keep reading here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: The average percentage of women on corporate boards on the Russell 1000—America’s top 1,000 publicly traded companies—increased from 23.8% to 28.2% between 2019 and 2021, according to an analysis from Just Capital. (via CNBC Make It)

Quote: “I just deleted the whole kit and caboodle…If they’re important, they’ll come back.”—Reed Omary, a radiologist in Nashville, Tennessee, on deleting “thousands of unread emails” from one of his work email inboxes, a practice that some workers say feels liberating (The Wall Street Journal)

Read: Organizing a post-pandemic hybrid workplace was always going to be a complex challenge, but the emergence of new, highly transmissible Covid variants has made the transition to hybrid work tenuous and chaotic. (The New York Times)

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