Now that Labor Day has come and gone, marking the unofficial end of summer, the tones of our inboxes are changing like the leaves on the trees. Gone are Summer Fridays, and human responses to messages will once again outnumber the automatic out-of-office replies.
While we blink through that auto-reply hangover, a common thread has emerged from those messages: telling the world you’re “OOO” has left the building. Now you’re more likely to hear that someone is “on PTO.” And no, it’s not your HR rep emailing you—it’s your coworker. What in the employee handbook is going on here?
People talked about feelings a lot more at work from 2020 to 2022 or so. A widespread mental health crisis snuck in, piggybacking on the pandemic for a catastrophic twofer, which some studies found fostered a heightened sense of humanity, camaraderie, and collaboration. It wasn’t unusual to see an email auto-responder or Slack status that warned of a slow response due to a mental health day or childcare responsibilities.
Now, however, a curious new trend is rearing its head in interoffice messaging and on social media: The need-to-know basis when colleagues aren’t on the clock, or, as you might see it phrased in that auto-reply, “on PTO.” Increasingly, workers aren’t specifying whether they’re sick, on vacation, getting married, or on parental leave, they are simply…not available. They’re not even out of the office—with so many workers operating in hybrid or remote capacities, the “office” is less a place and more a state of being, so how could you really be “out” of it? Simply stating that one is taking paid time off and leaving it at that has become more prevalent among those I polled.
Why did the pendulum swing from therapy-lingo—radical transparency, discussion of personal feelings and circumstances, a window into personal lives—to the robotic HR-speak of telling your colleagues you’re “on PTO”? The pandemic may have helped highlight humanity in the workplace, but the next natural step is those same people becoming more aware of the importance of that humanity and valuing their lives outside the workplace. A 2022 Gallup survey found that at least half of US workers do not feel actively engaged at work, with another 18% stating that they were “actively disengaged.” In the first quarter of 2024, the percentage of “actively engaged” workers, also surveyed by Gallup, hit an 11-year low of 30% and barely gained traction in Q2.
Across social media, a whole subset of gallows humor has emerged regarding the term: One TikToker jokes that before you can take PTO, you must understand that it actually stands for “prepare the others.” Another noted giddily that a coworker had updated his PTO calendar with “I just don’t want to work today, OK?” Another self-fived for taking time off for “no particular reason except having to burn some of this PTO time I have stored up.”
Alison Green, author of the popular advice blog Ask a Manager and a book of the same name, tells Vanity Fair via email that there’s a fine line between highlighting life outside of work and letting the email do its job by telling the sender without fanfare to wait for a reply.
“I have mixed feelings about people being more human in out-of-office messages generally,” she says. “On one hand, Yes, we are human and it’s good to recognize that at work, but I also don’t want people to feel they have to justify their time away. You don’t need to tell everyone that you’re away for a wedding or closing your house or sick with the flu to justify not being available! It should be enough to just explain you’re out…and to the extent that ‘on PTO’ is a vaguer way of doing that, it’s probably a good thing, at least seen through that lens.”
