I get really puzzled whenever I am on vacation with someone and their work phone rings more often than I get sunburned (which is fairly often!)
I tend to take it as a sign of lack of management skills in the upper echelons of the organization.
Here is a recent example from my experience: I was called in to assess an opportunity to invest in a certain company. As is normal, when reviewing the financials of the company for the first time, quite a few questions came up, which I communicated to the management. The management asked me to liaise with their accounting which was outsourced. (9 / 10 times, dealing with outsourced functions is a nightmare because the people are expected to work almost like machines, without really understanding the fundamentals of the business they are servicing. This is the management’s fault of course, not the employees’.) Upon contacting the accounting firm, I was told that only one person in the outsourcing company knew the client well-enough to comment on the financials and she was away on leave. The director of the outsourcing company found it perfectly natural that there was no one available to answer my questions. Even worse, he proposed to ask of the employee to interrupt her vacation and return to the office urgently, just for me!
It felt really strange pointing out to someone much older than me the obvious: That no serious director allows a chair to be left empty. Ever. Building backup systems is at the core of running a proper company. This is one of the fundamental reasons why companies exist, otherwise, we’d all be sole traders.
It’s not like there can’t be any exceptions of course, my work phone rings too when on vacation. But not before I get the chance to get a good tan. Or even a sunburn!