Every month, human resources consultant, recruiter and founder of The HR Pro, Kate Teves, fields questions from Realtors navigating the complex human resources landscape of the real estate industry. From managing staff dynamics to understanding legal employment standards, Teves offers professional guidance to help brokerages and independent agents thrive. But in her latest advisory, she is turning her attention to a topic that goes beyond payroll and compliance, challenging one of the most deeply ingrained and romanticized aspects of the real estate profession: the badge of constant availability.
When was the last time you took a proper vacation? And by a proper vacation, Teves is not referring to the modern habit of answering emails from a beach lounger, taking client calls between family outings, or slipping a laptop into a suitcase just in case an urgent matter arises. She is talking about genuinely stepping away from day-to-day business operations and trusting that the enterprise will continue to function without your immediate oversight.
For many real estate professionals, the mere thought of completely disconnecting triggers profound anxiety. The industry is built on a relentless cycle of clients to serve, deals to close, staff to manage, and an unending list of urgent demands that create the illusion of absolute indispensability. There is always another transaction waiting to be negotiated, another market opportunity to chase, or another operational fire that demands immediate attention.
Yet, Teves challenges industry practitioners to pause and reflect on a fundamental question: At what point do we stop celebrating constant busyness and start questioning whether this operational model is actually sustainable over the long term?
Real estate has historically functioned as an industry that heavily rewards hard work, dedication and immediate availability. While those foundational qualities undeniably contribute to professional success, Teves questions whether the culture has taken those virtues a step too far. Somewhere along the evolution of the modern brokerage, being available around the clock transformed from a practical necessity into a badge of honor. In many real estate circles, taking extended time off can still carry an unspoken social penalty, quietly whispering to peers and colleagues that an agent or broker is somehow less committed to their craft.
Teves argues quite the opposite. Taking a vacation is not a sign of professional weakness, a lack of ambition, or a compromised work ethic. Rather, it is a vital, non-negotiable component of maintaining physical and mental health, preserving a broader perspective on the market, and sustaining the long-term capacity to lead a business effectively. Furthermore, she emphasizes that this principle applies just as much to brokerage employees, administrative staff and support teams as it does to team leaders and business owners.
The culture you’re creating
As a real estate team leader, brokerage owner, or independent operator, your daily habits carry an immense influence over the overarching culture of your organization. If leadership is regularly dispatching emails at midnight, working through every weekend, and openly boasting about having gone five years without taking a proper vacation, the message sent to the wider team is loud and clear.
Even when leaders offer verbal encouragement for employees to use their earned vacation time, contradictory actions often communicate an entirely different reality. Staff members quickly internalize the unspoken signals, beginning to fear that taking time away will be viewed as an inconvenience, that their absence will negatively impact their standing, or that their professional dedication will be questioned simply because they are not constantly logged in and reachable.
Teves warns that this dynamic fosters an unhealthy organizational culture. Over time, an environment that discourages true rest directly contributes to burnout, widespread disengagement, and higher rates of employee turnover.
Industry leaders must remember that employees are whole people with families, personal responsibilities, diverse interests, and rich lives existing entirely outside the professional sphere. They require dedicated periods of rest and recovery to truly enjoy the fruits of their labor. While certain individuals genuinely thrive in fast-paced, high-demand environments, operating at maximum capacity indefinitely remains an impossibility for human beings, regardless of their career enthusiasm or drive.
Vacation time and pay
Beyond the cultural implications of time off, Teves highlights the critical framework of practical employment standards that every business owner must navigate.
In Ontario, for instance, the legislative baseline dictates that most employees are legally entitled to a minimum of two weeks of vacation time following the completion of each standard vacation entitlement year. This statutory minimum increases to three weeks once an employee reaches five years of continuous service with the same organization. Alongside this time off, minimum vacation pay is generally established at four per cent or six per cent of gross wages earned, respectively.
The exact mechanics of how vacation pay is administered can vary significantly depending on the structure of the employment arrangement. For salaried personnel, vacation pay is frequently integrated directly into their regular ongoing salary disbursements while they take their paid time away. This means an additional lump sum payment is not necessarily owed on top of their standard salary, provided the underlying employment contracts and statutory entitlements are properly and transparently structured.
For hourly staff, employers are generally granted the flexibility to either accrue vacation pay over time and distribute it when leave is actually taken, or bundle the vacation pay directly into each regular paycheque, provided such practices are permitted under local regulations and thoroughly documented. These fundamental payroll administration decisions require clear, upfront communication so that employees maintain absolute clarity regarding what they have earned and what they are entitled to receive.
Independent contractors, conversely, generally operate under a different legal umbrella. They are typically responsible for managing their own time off and do not receive statutory employee vacation entitlements, assuming their classification as independent contractors is legally accurate. Their service agreements should explicitly address expected availability, performance standards, and the protocols for managing planned absences.
Yet, regardless of how a business chooses to administer vacation pay, Teves points out that the more pressing question is whether employees genuinely feel comfortable utilizing their time off, and whether the business infrastructure has been thoughtfully designed to accommodate their absence.
Teves notes that she has frequently consulted with businesses where a single employee taking a week off triggers absolute organizational chaos. In such environments, nobody else knows how to execute the absent worker’s core responsibilities, critical software passwords remain inaccessible, vital client files are scattered across personal desktops, and routine daily decisions suddenly necessitate multiple frantic phone calls to someone who is supposed to be relaxing with their family.
According to Teves, this frequent workplace scenario is not an employee issue; it is fundamentally an operational deficiency. A well-run business should incorporate sufficient organizational structure, thorough documentation, and proactive cross-training so that team members can take reasonable periods of away without the entire operation fracturing. This does not imply that every employee is completely interchangeable, nor does it mean that absences will never require thoughtful planning or temporary adjustments. It simply establishes that a healthy business should never depend entirely on one individual’s continuous, uninterrupted presence to function from day to day.
Putting your business to the test
This operational vulnerability leads directly back to the business owner. In a previous advisory column, Teves explored the critical importance of comprehensive business continuity planning, addressing the vulnerabilities a company faces if a leader is suddenly unable to operate due to illness, injury, or unexpected personal emergencies.
Taking a standard vacation serves as a low-stakes opportunity to put those exact operational principles into practice without the dark cloud of an acute crisis. It functions as a real-world stress test for a brokerage or real estate team’s foundational strength.
Business owners must ask themselves critical diagnostic questions before packing their bags. Can the team make confident decisions without constantly calling the owner for direction? Are core operational processes thoroughly documented in writing? Do employees fully understand their daily responsibilities as well as the clear boundaries of their decision-making authority? Is there a designated individual capable of managing urgent transaction issues, supporting active clients, and keeping deals moving forward while leadership is completely offline?
If the honest answer to these questions is no, Teves suggests that the underlying problem may not be a lack of time for a vacation. The deeper issue is often that the owner has inadvertently constructed a business model that cannot survive without their constant, hovering presence—a reality that demands immediate strategic attention.
The value of perspective
Finally, Teves highlights an additional benefit of stepping away that is frequently underestimated by driven professionals: the acquisition of fresh perspective.
When real estate practitioners remain deeply immersed in the daily micro-operations of their business, stepping back to view the bigger picture becomes exceptionally difficult. Days are relentlessly consumed by reacting to incoming emails, urgent transaction snags, client demands, and staffing challenges. The schedule becomes so saturated with maintaining forward momentum that business owners lose all opportunity to evaluate whether they are steering the enterprise in the right strategic direction in the first place.
Stepping away allows leaders to completely disconnect from the relentless background noise of the industry. It provides vital space to reflect on broader business models, assess what is working and what is failing, and occasionally recognize emerging market opportunities or latent problems that remained entirely invisible while the owner was caught in the thick of daily operations.
Some of the most profound strategic breakthroughs do not emerge from sitting at a desk and forcing oneself to work longer hours. Frequently, they arrive only after a professional has granted themselves explicit permission to stop thinking about work entirely for a designated period of time.
While Teves acknowledges that stepping away from a high-stakes real estate business is rarely simple—particularly for smaller teams and rapidly growing brokerages with limited human resources—she stresses that these operational bottlenecks should never be accepted as a permanent way of life.