Interesting article about an unlimited vacation policy

[larzhope]

Hopefully this hasn't been posted already; the article is about a week old.  I know we've talked about vacation time on here before and some people have complained about an unlimited vacation policy, so I thought this was interesting.

qz.com/323337/our-unlimited-vacation-policy-fell-apart-when-employees-wouldnt-take-off-so-were-trying-something-new/

When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open vacation policy.

The cause was intended to be noble, as we didn’t want to get into the way of people taking time off as much time as they need to recharge. I myself am a big fan of disconnecting for a vacation and staying away for more than just a few days to free the mind, gain new energy and fresh insights.

Two years later, this idea turned out to be a failure, and we’re changing our vacation policy. Here’s why.

Uncertainty about how much time would be okay to take off

When everyone keeps track of their own vacation days, two things can happen. They either forget about them completely, or they’re uncertain about how much is really okay to use as vacation days.

Forgetting about them seems to be beneficial for a young startup company, at least on the surface. You want people to work as much as possible to push the product and company out of uncertain territory into profitability, right?

Wrong. What you will do is push people to the edge of burnout and unhappiness. They’ll eventually leave your company.

This almost happened in ours, we pushed someone too far. They pulled the cord eventually, and we asked them to take off as much time as they need. We’re sorry for this mistake, and we’re thankful this person is still with us.

When people are uncertain about how many days it’s okay to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.

I came across a passage in Scaling Up Excellence, an okay-ish but vague book on how to scale up a company (emphasis mine):

In Matthew May’s book The Laws of Subtraction, Markovitz describes how his team was burdened and annoyed by a convoluted HR system for managing vacation requests. He decided to ignore it and told his team “as long as they got their jobs done, I didn’t care how many vacation days they took each year.” It worked beautifully—he stopped wasting time on paperwork, his team felt respected, and they stopped gaming the system: “The number of vacation days that they took actually decreased.” Markovitz’s experiment succeeded because it created accountability. “My team’s focus shifted from figuring out how to beat the system to figuring out how to live up to the responsibility placed upon them.”

I was horrified reading this, and it dawned on me how wrong we’ve approached our internal vacation policy. This text sums up exactly what’s wrong with an open vacation policy. People take less time off, and it’s celebrated as a success of giving people more responsibility.

Uncertainty about how many days are okay to take time off can also stir inequality. It can turn into a privilege for some people who may be more aggressive in taking vacations compared to people who feel like their work and their appreciation at work would suffer from being away for too long.

People would work on their vacation days

As part of my time working for a US company, I was exposed to a weird culture. When people announced they’d go on vacation, they’d tell everyone that they’ll take their computer and phones with them, and that they will be available if anything comes up.

Earlier this year, I went on a three week vacation with my family. When we booked us a small house in France, my initial thought was: “How can I justify staying away from Berlin for so long? I know! I’m going to work while I’m there, at least for a few hours every day.”

I’ve seen this happen in our company, and not just with me. The guilt of taking time off takes over, and you “just check in” or promise to be available if anything comes up. You respond to just one email or just one GitHub issue.

This ambiguity trickles through to everyone on your team. When someone starts checking in during their vacation, it lowers the bar for others to do it, and it increases the uncertainty of whether or not you should be checking in. When you as the leader in a company take vacations like that, you unknowningly set a bad example that others will feel compelled to follow.

1

Summing up the problem with checking in while you’re on vacation, I quote from “Mission: Impossible II”:

Mission briefing: “And Mr. Hunt, next time you go on holiday let us know where. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.” Ethan Hunt: “If I let you know where I´m going, then I won’t be on holiday.”

A vacation is a time to recharge, and your job as a company leader should be to remove any ambiguity of people thinking they’re required to be available or reachable.

A company has to learn how to function when people are on vacation and unavailable, however important their role is.

After months of back and forth, I decided to do the only right thing I could think of. I took those three weeks in France off, fully and completely, without being reachable, and I told everyone about it upfront. And I encourage every single one of our employees to do the same.


The founders of the company only took little time off

In the early stages of a company, it can become all-consuming for the people with the biggest stake in it, the founders. Current technology culture celebrates people hustling hard, raising tons of funding, and in turn hustling even harder.

In short, we’ve set a bad example, and we ourselves didn’t live up to the expectation of the open vacation policy. We took off less or no time in some years, always focusing on the hustle and on the idea that us being away would hurt the company or be a reason for stuff not getting done.

What did we change?

Starting in 2015, we’ve implemented a minimum vacation policy. Rather than giving no guideline on what’s a good number of days to take off, everyone now has a required minimum of 25 (paid) vacation days per year, no matter what country they live in. When people want to take time off beyond that, that’s good, and the minimum policy still allows for that. But it sets a lower barrier of days that we expect our employees to focus on their own well-being rather than work.

This policy is not just a guideline for our employees, it’s mandatory for everyone, including the people who originally founded the company. As leaders, we need to set examples of what constitutes a healthy balance between work and life rather than give an example that life is all about the hustle.

Ensuring that everyone takes off the minimum number of days requires us to start tracking vacation days for everyone. Having numbers allows us to review everyone’s vacation days on a regular basis, ensuring that the minimum time taken off is equal and that scheduling in vacation days is actively encouraged.

As Jesse Newland said in a talk at Monitorama:

Vacation is cheaper than severance and training.

We removed ambiguity of whether or not someone should check in by having explicit guidelines on what constitutes a vacation day and what doesn’t. Our expectation is that when you’re on vacation, you do everything but stuff that’s related to Travis CI.

Instating an open vacation policy can be poison for your people’s team and happiness, as it removes the lower barrier of what’s an acceptable amount of time to be away and focus on recharging and your family, in short, your personal well-being. Your job as a company isn’t to coerce your people into taking as little time off as possible, it’s to make sure they have a good balance between work and life.

Our new minimum vacation policy is the first step to making up for our mistake, and we’ll keep a good eye on how it works out.

__________________

As someone that works in HR (and in tech), I found this super interesting, and my 18 days of vacation I currently get is looking kind of crappy

[Deleted]

I think their new policy makes a lot of sense! I wish everyone was required to take their vacation.

My last employer had a lot of vacation, especially for employees who had been there a while. I think it changed right before I started there, so anyone who worked there longer than me had 26 vacation/flex days, and if they had worked there more than 10 years they got even more (I think maybe 31 days? And if they had been there 20+ years, even more? I don't recall). Plus 10 sick days from a different bucket.

People were always losing vacation days because they didn't take it. It was also muddled because they had to accrue, so if you used all of your vacation one year you'd be starting out with nothing the following year, which kind of sucked. I probably never took ALL my days because I wanted a bank stored up (which was a nice payout when I was laid off). But I always thought it was silly how people didn't use more of what was owed. For the people with 26-31 days off a year, I'm sure it felt like unlimited vacation since nobody really had the workload to take off more time than that.

[larzhope]

@buckybells - our vacation is the same way (accrual) which means we do a delicate dance of when we vacation during the year, how much vacation we roll over (we can roll over up to a years worth of vacay), trying to make sure we have enough. Add into it that my H works at the same company as I do, but he's been here longer so he has an extra week, so he almost always loses vacation. if you don't take it, we don't pay it out, so it either rolls over, or if you have too much to roll over, it expires.

And yes, I should've done a TL;DR, my bad.

[ladyk]

At my last attorney job, we didn't have vacations days, per se. If we wanted to take time off, we could, as long as the client didn't need you or you had someone cover for you. That worked well for our main office that had 200 attorneys and each practice group had multiple paralegals and legal secretaries for each attorney or group of attorneys. For me, in my 2 attorney office, where I didn't have a paralegal, it sucked. I took the occasional friday/monday off (maybe twice a year) but in the 4.5 years I worked there, I was only able to take 2.5 weeks off: The week before my husband deployed, the week after he came back and only got 3 days off prior to my wedding. It was ridiculous. And because we had an "open" vacation policy, I wasn't able to get paid for any of those days I never took when I got laid off.

Lesson learned.

[Susie]

In other words, the two weeks I'm about to spend in Hawaii WITHOUT MY COMPUTER = setting a good example? I win January.

In seriousness though, I don't know that setting a minimum bar is necessary in smaller organizations.  It would bring back a lot of the same administrative headaches as having the max and tracking that.  But having managers take actual vacations and showing that it's normal/accepted in the office culture is really important (IMO).

[niq]

I always feel like the unlimited/untracked vacation time is a bit of a scam. Especially at large law firms. "you can take all the time you want ... as long as you hit your billable hour budget". Riiiight.

My last company went to unlimited vacation because its previous policy was awful. 2 weeks, plus you can roll over 1 week for 1 quarter with manager approval. Plus there was a lot of sick time that didn't pay out and didn't roll over. Moving to unlimited PTO let people take more time off and let the company take the accrual off their balance sheet. I still had mixed feelings.

Netflix has had very positive experiences with unlimited PTO, but it's easy to put this sort of thing in place when the company is doing well.

[LoveTrains]

I agree that I think unlimited vacation is a scam. It helps the companies bottom line because you can't accrue time (that is tracked as a liability on the books) and it becomes a race to the bottom in who can take the least amount of time unless leadership at the top fully embraces and encourages it.

[v]

Unlimited PTO is a huge scam. It makes you feel like you can't take much anyway, and then there's nothing paid out when you leave.

The plus side of billable hour requirements + non-unlimited PTO is that I got 23 days that I didn't have a chance to take in the last 18 months paid out when I recently left my firm.
But vacations have always included constant checking of blackberry, addressing stuff that comes up, etc.

And now, having worked at my new company for three days, I am taking seven paid vacation days . I'll be completely off the grid for a week of that (because I'm going somewhere where there is no phone service or Internet available), and nobody seems to care . And not just because I'm new. I planned this trip when I was at a firm, but it would have been a big fucking deal when I was actually gone.

[meltoine]

I love that H is not allowed to have his work email on his phone or personal computer. He also has to take his vacation days, otherwise his commander has to explain to wing command why he didn't. Nobody used to care, but ensuring that people take their vacation days is part of the suicide prevention initiative that was implemented a few years ago.

[meltoine]

Also, my last office job had an unlimited vacation policy. It worked out fine because it was outside the US, so people took a different attitude towards it. It was nice to not have to worry about taking days off for OB appts or a Friday/Monday for a weekend trip. I could see how it'd be a disaster in the US though.

[cheezer]

The whole you can take as many vacation days as you want as long as you get your work done is so BS. Because the work is never done.

I am doing a much better job now that I'm getting a teeny bit of seniority and have earned trust. I took off a week and a half around Thanksgiving. I checked my email every day (multiple times a day actually) but only answered 2. I trained the people below me to take over for me and the person above took on some of my tasks as well.

We have implemented a policy at our firm to make sure our youngest level employees take at least some of their 3 weeks of vacation. They were frequently not taking any at all.

[UnderProtest]

Yeah, my husband has unlimited vacation time. He took the week of Christmas off and then went back before New Years. No one else was working except the stupid Americans.

[Balki.Bartokomous]

Unlimited PTO is total bullshit.

We converted to that two years ago and it was completely an accounting play. Completely. The poor people who had worked so hard & foregone vacation for years suddenly had to take a ton of time off during a very busy time or else forfeit the $ once we converted. Of course HR was all "rah-rah" about it but whatever.

I love the minimum vacation policy. One of the reasons I want to leave my current role is because a few CWs wear their 12 hour days & lack of vacation as a badge of honor. Not only that, but they sign up other people for projects that prevent them from taking PTO. That minimum policy would really help curb stuff like that.

[mcsangel2]

God, I hope a minimum vacation policy catches on in the US.

[noodleoo]

This article is awesome! I agree with both points 1) unlimited/untracked vacation sucks and is a huge scam and 2) it is really important to let employees disengage from work when on vacation!!! My company expects people to check email and be available if needed while on vacation and it pisses me off. It is not vacation if you are still supposed to be working.

[curbsideprophet]

I like the idea of requiring a minimum number of days off. I wonder what their maternity leave policy is?

[WinterWine]

I could not agree more with this article. Our policy at my current work is less than stellar. 2 weeks off simply is not enough to rest and recharge. I firmly believe that I'm more efficient and a better employee when I have more time off to recharge.

I've never heard of a minimum policy, but really think that could help our system. I really don't know how the U.S. has it so backwards. Personally, if I have to do ANY work or checking emails on a vacation day, I do not count it. That does not = vacation. I guess my manager has never cared, and hopefully that will continue with my next mgr.