"Unlimited time off" is the new open office plan. An idea that seems liberating, but will be despised 10 years on.
These policies are BS, what they really are is the unlimited right to negotiate for vacation time. They are also frequently chosen because they mean employers don't need to cut employees a check for vacation time not taken when they leave. When I left my last job which had this policy I asked for a check for vacation not taken, and was told that one reason they chose that policy was that they wouldn't have to cut such checks.
Any reasonable employer can make exceptions to a fixed vacation policy for things like sick leave, if an employee gets layed up for a month after a car wreck they can choose to pay them despite the policy.
Either type of policy can be interpreted generously or not, but with fixed vacation policies there are at least limits on how poorly you can be treated, and you know it up front.
Actually, usually it doesn't save anyone money but the loan company that is guaranteeing the payroll/salary expenses for the year/month/terms that most companies have arranged. Big surprise: a lot of times, companies borrow their payroll and pay the loan off quarterly; in many of these cases, insurance is required, and the insurer is the source for these so-called 'industry standard practices' you seem to have noticed are going on.
Yeah, if there was a blanket "we will give you a check worth 10-20 days worth of vacation time when you leave" policy on top of this, I'd be down for it. As things stand though, you're absolutely right.
Totally agreed. Are you serious about letting people take vacation? Give 6 weeks paid vacation per year. It's not that hard: six weeks is more than "unlimited" would practically turn out to be, and it's well-defined enough that there's no guilt or anxiety about whether someone's abusing the privilege, and it's low enough that you get roughly a year's work out of the person anyway.
I used to work at a company with unlimited vacation and I definitely didn't take a lot of vacation, but what I most appreciated about it was not having to sit there and figure out how much time I was taking off. If I had to be out for an afternoon(or just part of the afternoon), I never thought about whether I was taking a half day of PTO or not, I would just let my team know and go. That's the freedom I appreciated much more than the actual amount of time I took off. I think this blog post was definitely getting at this when they were talking about going from having control over your schedule to going to kindergarten. Where I work now is pretty relaxed about needing to take a couple hours off to run an errand or working from home, but it's still definitely something I need to think about.
I've always thought that FullContact[0] has a pretty nifty way of showing that yes, they really are serious about vacation time. In addition to having an "open" vacation policy like the one described in the OP, they also have what they call "PAID, paid vacation", which is where one time a year they pay you $7500 on top of your salary to take a vacation, as long as you promise to not do any work. Haven't seen anybody else with a policy like that, but I'd love to see it become a trend.
My understanding is that RAND has a similar policy: you receive an additional bonus if you use all of your vacation in a given year. I also believe their vacation allowances (at least for researchers, since those are the folks I know there) are very generous.
I agree that strictly regimented sick/vacation time is something a lot of us suffer under. My organization goes as far as to call the combined sick/vacation pool "Earned Time". As though you have to work in order to earn the right to rest at home when you are sick or want to take a day off.
Unfortunately, there's another side of the coin. I have worked alongside a couple of groups with a "take whatever you need when you need it" vacation/sick day policy. Either by choice or by necessity, they're disgusting workaholics without exception who routinely grind for 10-12 hours a day, every day, for months, fearing the work that will accumulate if they are home sick for a day or away for vacation for any period of time. They don't get paid more for working late. When I asked, they seem to each take one 5 day vacation once per year.
The saddest part of it all is their personal lives-- the wife of the boss of that group refuses to vacation to anywhere with any kind of internet access because she knows her husband will work instead of be mentally there with her. The other employees are single and friendless outside of work.
I'd very much prefer a more relaxed and less exploitative vacation/sick day system, but I think that a large cultural change has to happen in the US first. We don't have the luxury of the philosophical position that work is an intrinsic good-- the real consequences of this position are pretty brutal, and evident everywhere. Once we accept that work is value-neutral, we can start to be more relaxed about how much we actually have to work, and when we actually work. And we might just be a bit more relaxed about staying home when we're sick, provided that we understand our work is rarely more important than our health.
I'm a big fan of vacation policies that lean this way, and have been working at a shop that has a "no vacation policy, policy" for almost four years. That said, I'd echo what I've heard a number of people [1] say about this strategy... that your new challenge is making sure that people take enough time off and don't feel guilty about it. This is the hidden upside to commoditizing PTO, no one sweats using it. It's sort of perceived as a liquidized resource. In an environment without any rules or even vocabulary around time off, it can be a little bit discomforting to take a two week trip or go through with long-weekend plans in a crunch time, etc.
That said, I vastly prefer it to the alternative.. Just want to encourage teams that go down this road to not use these vacation policies as an accidental excuse not to pay attention to and discuss time off and whether it's working out for everyone as well as you'd hope or expect!
[Edit - Just feel the need to plug harder - Seriously, go read Townsend's book. Published in 1970 and it (unfortunately) still reads incredibly forward thinking. It's basically Rework , written 35 years ago (with only respect to JF and DHH, I really enjoyed Rework as well).]
Indeed. I was talking to my lawyer about having a no vacation policy policy, and he said I would need to set a mandatory minimum vacation, and make sure employees take a certain number of days off.
His case in point example was me. He pointed out that I work all the time and never take proper vacations (I just had my first one in over two years, and even that was half devoted to a startup conference).
Please don't take this the wrong way, but until we stop humblebragging about not taking vacation the problem of equating hours to output won't go away. Not that it's even intentional, it's just the cultural norm lately to give lip service to the idea that overworking is a bad thing but I don't see evidence that most of us mean it... it's all "Gosh, I'm the worst, I never take time off."
I once spoke to a department head at a D.C. law firm known for its aggressive trial work. He mentioned he took his four weeks every year, including the whole time he was an associate. This is the kind of humble-brag I like to see. "I took my four weeks every year and still {got promoted, got funded, hit profitability, etc}."
I didn't take the comment as bragging. At least I hope it wasn't meant that way. If the boss doesn't take vacations it makes the employees feel like they shouldn't take (many) either.
Exactly. I realize that as the founder/CEO, I set an example for employees. I don't want it to be a bad example. And this is a problem in part because crazed workaholic is kind of wrapped up with the founder mindset, but it's a rotten trait for employees.
I consider my lack of vacationing to be a serious problem, something I need to change.
Frankly, one of the causes is that my wife and I don't vacation well together. We want different things from vacations. She travels a lot more than I do. And part of it is a couple of years of contracting, when I feel guilty for not getting paid if I'm not working, even though it's theoretically rolled into my rate.
Add another column to your life ledger: satisfaction. If you're not getting the time with your spouse you should, then that column would show it. Personally I value my time with family at about 2X my rack rate. So I resent work interfering with my vacation and not the other way around.
Oh, it's not that... my spouse and I simply don't like the same kinds of vacations. So mostly, we vacation separately. We're really good at doing a lot of other things together. My favorite vacations are basically road trips, and she hates long car drives. Her favorite vacations are dance workshops, and I'm not a dancer.
Absolutely this is the answer. The way this is normally handled is that vacation time accrues, then some portion of it rolls-over in the next working year. But there's a roll-over cap and expiration on those vacation hours (usually mid-summer or similar). And those rolled-over hours aren't eligible for payout if you leave.
In most places you can accumulate a tremendous amount of vacation days on your second year there, but you're pressured to use them before the expiration (or before you quit).
One place I worked also didn't recognize national holidays, they just gave you 11 extra vacation days in a separate pool. I ended up with something north of 6 weeks of vacation a year there, every year.
My previous job was at a startup with three weeks of vacation. The owner said he wanted to do unlimited vacation. But the problem is you have a divide between those who use it vs those who don't use it enough.
I've worked at a shop with 'unlimited time off'. Do you know how much time off I took in the 5 months I was there? 2 hours. That made me the slacker, as the only non-management developer to take any at all.
Focusing on 'what needs to be accomplished' is a great idea, in theory. But in practice, only management has any reasonable way to compare how much people are actually getting done. Those being managed cannot take any time off without at every step wondering 'Am I taking too much time off? Did I get everything done they wanted done?'
I have no doubt that it's possible to create a culture in which unlimited vacation time can work well, but the rule is not the solution, and the culture would work with or without it.
That's my big beef with "unlimited" time off. I think it will pressure people in taking as less time off than the rest to not look like you are slacking.
I have 5 weeks off a year, and any days I don't use expire (most of them, I can take one week to next year). I can't have them paid out, unless I have a big deadline and can prove I wasn't able to take time off. This way everybody takes up (more) than enough holidays.
As much as I loved wowing my corporate friends with the "unlimited vacation" perk of my previous job, I always struggled because there was always work to be done so I always felt some sort of pressure because using my vacation meant I was inherently saying "yeah, I know there's still work but you guys can handle it, I'm going to play." I get that this isn't a perfect mindset since that's part of being on a team and you have to expect people to share responsibility but that's how I felt and in talking to others and reading about unlimited vacation policies, I don't think I'm alone.
When I left my first job that had a generous but still limited vacation policy, I got a nice sized check paying me back for my unused vacation. I never felt like I was restricted from taking vacation and I definitely liked the money that actually ended up paying for the week off I took between jobs.
Having a flexible system is great, but what speaks louder than the corporate policy is the corporate culture. Unless you have a culture of people taking vacation days, then an unlimited vacation policy will degenerate into a tacit understanding that nobody is free to take time off.
At my previous employer, we had a four week vacation policy, and everybody took their four weeks, and the more senior people made a point of it. To a great degree, this culture has to be instilled from the top. If the guy with the corner office isn't taking his vacation days, nobody will feel comfortable doing so.
Vacation times aren't mandated in order to manage employees - they are are mandated in order to give them authority and to require their managers to manage around their employees vacation time. By providing the employees express, written authority to override their managers, they force vacation time to be addressed.
So, yes, this is kindergarten, and yes, be happy that the overall system is set up to mandate vacations. Otherwise, there will be no vacations.
The nice thing about having a set number of vacation days is that there is an expectation that you'll use them. Having "unlimited" means you're expected to use them when you've gotten your work done and there is a lull. Except in many jobs, startups in particular, there is never a lull. So any time you take off you aren't "getting stuff done" and potentially look bad. The result, in my experience, is more frequent, shorter vacations like long weekends.
The response to "we have unlimited vacation" in an interview should always be "how much did YOU take last year?". You'll almost always get an uncomfortable silence and then "oh I don't know, I didn't really keep track..."
Only ten days off per year? Damn! We have 45-54 days of paid vacation or one can have 30-36 days off + take the rest (15-18) vacation days in cash. On the other hand Finnish SW developer's salary is lower than US SW dev's.
I think there are certain workplaces which have the culture where this would work as intended but in most, it would probably end with people taking less time, and feeling bitter and resentful about it. If anything, there should be a vacation day minimum. You can give people flexibility in how much time they take off and when, but they should take at least X days off per year. That way there is a standard set that it is okay to take the time off when you need it.
Some people are uncomfortable talking about money. Others are uncomfortable talking about vacation time. I think it helps to have some sort of loose policy, because people are so different. I watched a situation where there were 3 people doing the same role. One had seniority, took a lot of time off to travel (some of this unpaid) and the other two were left dealing with the extra workload.
It's hard to have a non-policy policy because people are so different.
I do agree with the article though, because I feel like the 8 hours a day, 5 days a week "norm" for knowledge workers is kind of silly. You're probably getting 5 hours a day of really productive time. The other 3 hours they are banking/scheduling/handling the business of life or taking a mental break.
Factory shift work is probably better suited to the structure described, but that work is quickly becoming extinct.
The key point in the article is that you have to talk about it openly, and don't shame people in to not taking time off.
Sometimes (especially with client facing roles) sound judgement is the most important characteristic of an employee. If they don't get mental breaks every few months, they might show poor judgement.
The article's comparison of work vs college vacation/attendance policies is flawed from the start. The overlooked difference is that in college, you are paying the school. Of course they don't care if you come to class.
The fact that pre-college schooling has attendance rules is irrelevant; in that situation, pupils are minors and therefore the school is (in the USA at least) legally responsible for them during the school day (in loco parentis).
With work, the company is paying you in exchange for your time. You've agreed to come to work every day, and the company pays you a salary in return. A vacation policy is a negotiable benefit for the employee, just like anything else in your compensation and benefits package. If you have a no-policy vacation policy, you are basically at the whim of your employer (some handle these non-policies well, others not), but if you have a real policy, you are entitled to take those days, just like your health care, paycheck, retirement contributions, etc.
We have "unlimited" sick time, but the manager gets to decide when too much is too much. When the manager decides you used too much then it is unpaid leave. It works ok most of the time, but the company will force you to short term disability after being out a week.
I am a bigger fan of PTO. Lump all vacation, sick and holiday into one big number and let me deal with it as I see fit. That way I know everyone is getting a fair shake.
But when you're taking time off, are you truly unplugged?
I'm almost finished with the hiring cycle for an SF startup with unlimited vacation policy and where all work is remote; my current butt-in-seat job gives me 5 weeks/year off. How am I going to know if I can truly take 5 weeks/year off (or more) at the new place until I get there? I'd rather have the ability to travel but still be working most of the time than have limited time off but have to be in a fixed location constantly.
How do you guys differentiate between "per-hour" consultancies and product dev companies? For those who have worked in both environments with a "free vacation" policy, what is your experience?
EDIT: The reason I ask is I'm curious to know if the pressure to bill by the hour is as powerful as working to "build the next feature" for a product. The customer is different in each case. Does this make a difference?
If you're building a startup that you hope might get acquired, it's worthwhile to establish and document a more traditional PTO plan. When a company is acquired, the hours that you've accrued are typically credited to your balance in the acquiring company's plan, so if you have zero accrued hours at the time of acquisition, you're going to end up with a zero balance post-acquisition, too.
I looked on LinkedIn to see how many employees Mindsense has; the answer was 1-10 (perhaps that's right, perhaps it's wrong, but it's probably in the right ballpark). I'm sure their policy of "0 vacation days. 0 sick days. 0 holidays" works at that scale, where everyone is some sort of lynchpin product manager with a vested interest in the business, but the reality is that, in a larger organisation, there will inevitably be people who are not massively focused on the work at hand, and who treat their job, really, as a means to an end - a way of passing some time between the hours of 9am and 5pm in order to generate enough money to pay their bills and save up for some holidays that they actually enjoy.
For a significant portion of those people, offering that kind of flexibility would be a disaster, because they would see it as carte blanche to do as little as they could possibly get away with doing, with as many days sick or on holiday/vacation as they liked. These people aren't motivated by the work they're doing, in any meaningful sense, and they would just as well not be doing it at all if that option were presented to them.
Sure, you could say "don't hire those people", but larger organisations need lots of bodies to fill often quite dull jobs, and you can't really afford to treat those people "as adults", whatever that means.
Um, no. This is not universally required. I once answered an email about an impromptu afternoon meeting from a beach in Mexico - a quick phone call sorted out the one pressing detail, and the meeting was just rescheduled.
We work in a pretty great industry, so might as well optimize for it.
I'm all for flexible vacation / time off - that's how my department works, and it's been great. Flexible hours are highly dependent on the nature of your employees' work, though. Some jobs require you to be in the office when everyone else is in the office for calls, meetings, emails, etc. My wife's employer technically allows flexible work hours, but most people gravitate toward 9-6 because they usually need to be available to each other.
It really is interesting when you think of it that way, you have a lot of rules in school. Then college you have nothing, then onto the real world where you have a job and all of the sudden you have a lot of rules again. It would be interesting for larger companies to see if their productivity increases if they follow a structure like this or something similar, or if productivity takes a dive once you allow people more freedom.
I think the difference is that you're paying (a lot) to be in college, while you're being paid (hopefully a lot) to do your job. So it's not realistic to expect to be treated the same way in both situations.
The problem is that hiring/firing employees is expensive. Hiring only super-motivated people who need no supervision is highly unrealistic. Even really smart people often can be lazy and only do what is necessary to get by.
At my company we switched to a 0 sick day policy. Within 3 months we were back to the allotted 1 week of sick days.
It turns out we quintupled the number of sick days for the same period as the year before. Draw your own conclusion, but I say workers cannot be trusted to manage this themselves.
It might work in a shop of 5 - 20 folks but at we are and over 10 times that, it is untenable.
Then, you graduate, enter what they call “the real world” with “a real job” and you’re told exactly where to be and when. Exactly what days you will have off. How much you’re allowed to get sick. How the game of accruing time off works
It's pretty amazing to me that people tolerate the evolutionary step backward between college and the travails of an entry-level grunt in "the real world".
One really disgusting trend that's coming along is pooling sick days into vacation, which is of course never advertised when people take the job. So they think they're getting 3-4 weeks of vacation but they're actually getting less. I worked at a company that pulled that bullshit once, and because no one took sick days, the result was that everyone had a constant cold for 5 months out of the year.
These policies are BS, what they really are is the unlimited right to negotiate for vacation time. They are also frequently chosen because they mean employers don't need to cut employees a check for vacation time not taken when they leave. When I left my last job which had this policy I asked for a check for vacation not taken, and was told that one reason they chose that policy was that they wouldn't have to cut such checks.
Any reasonable employer can make exceptions to a fixed vacation policy for things like sick leave, if an employee gets layed up for a month after a car wreck they can choose to pay them despite the policy.
Either type of policy can be interpreted generously or not, but with fixed vacation policies there are at least limits on how poorly you can be treated, and you know it up front.