Work no longer ends when you leave the office or turn off the computer. Although there are laws in Spain that regulate the right to digital disconnection, the reality of work is still far from being effectively fulfilled.
According to a survey prepared by the work intermediary company Randstad, among more than 4,300 people of working age, only 42% of Canarians disconnect quickly after completing their formal obligations.
The remaining 58% say they need several days or even a week or more to shake off work stress and forget about their daily occupations at work.
More specifically, 42.1% of Canarians say they need several days, while 26.5% say they need at least a week to disconnect from work. This places the Canary Islands as the third autonomous community with the highest percentage of workers who have difficulty disconnecting quickly on vacation.
In Spain as a whole, the percentage of professionals who say they disconnect from work immediately when they start their vacations is 46.9%, four points higher than in the Canary Islands.
Continuing with data from Spain as a whole, 48.5% of workers say they need a week or more to disconnect from work (34.2% a week and 14.3% up to two weeks), a figure that in the case of the Canary Islands reaches 58%. Even more worrying, 4.5% confess that even after more than two weeks of rest they cannot stop thinking about work.
In addition, only one in four says they never receive work-related communications outside of their hours. The rest live with digital interruptions outside of working hours occasionally (30.6%), rarely (28.8%), frequently (11.3%), or even constantly (4.3%).
Canary Islands, among the regions where it is most difficult to disconnect in summer
Vacations do not guarantee disconnection from work either. At the national level, 46.9% of professionals say they manage to disconnect immediately. However, 34.2% need at least one week, 14.3% up to two weeks and a worrying 4.5% admit that even after that time they cannot relax mentally, that is, 53% of Spaniards need more than a week to disconnect from work.
By autonomous communities, Navarre (56%), Cantabria (54.1%) and Aragon (52.6%) lead the ranking of regions where more people manage to disconnect mentally as soon as their days off begin. They are closely followed by Castilla-La Mancha (52.2%), Castilla y León (51.7%) and Galicia (50.6%), also above the national average.
In an intermediate point are communities such as Catalonia (47.5%), Asturias (47.2%), Madrid (46.6%) or La Rioja (45.9%), where between 45 and 50% of workers say they can disconnect from the first day. In the Valencian Community, 44% achieve it, while in the Basque Country and Extremadura, the percentages are 43.8% and 43.4%, respectively.
At the opposite end of the ranking are regions where disconnecting is more difficult, as is the case of the Balearic Islands (27.6%), Andalusia (39.6%), Murcia (41.8%) and Canary Islands (42%).
