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Starting in 2019 I rolled out my first unlimited vacation policy at a growing start-up, joining the ranks of many well known tech companies and industry trend setters. No more balance tracking or “use it or lose it” mentality. We left a practice of a set number of vacation and sick days accrued per year because we felt it no longer fit the needs of our teams. Many businesses have started going this route especially in tech. Many organizations are acting on the belief that people are your most valuable resource and want to provide benefits and perks that match their culture and truly support their hard working teams.
The philosophy of the organization I supported at the time was that we hired smart, driven people and they should have both the flexibility and the responsibility to coordinate their lives outside of work without worrying about the burden of managing time off balances. We wanted to empower people to prioritize taking time off to recharge. We all navigate integrating our work and our lives and unlimited PTO formalizes an approach to work that makes that balancing act more accessible, realistic and obtainable.
We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.” Arianna Huffington
With any policy there needs to be clear expectations and modeling from leadership to encourage adoption. Taking time off, posting your away status in Slack and in email out of office messages are powerful signals to staff on what your company's policies look like in action. One of the downfalls of unlimited PTO policies is often that staff don't know how much time is truly ok to take, I recommend setting a baseline expectation that everyone take at least two weeks off a year. Encourage managers to have conversations with their teams to work together to accommodate a schedule that allows everyone to take time off to refresh and recharge. On the flip side, managers should have conversations with any staff members that haven't taken time off to encourage them to plan days off to recharge. Some organizations actually incentivize taking a full week off at a time by offering travel stipends or gift cards. The cost of managing team members suffering from burnout or ultimately leaving your organization far outweighs the investment of perks to help cultivate a healthy culture of disconnecting, self-care and balance.
Most flexible leave plans cover vacations and staycations, sick time, bereavement and civic activities like jury duty and taking time off to vote. Parental leave and extended medical leaves represent a separate benefit but everything else that comes up in life that you want and/or need to take time off of work for is covered and uncapped. It doesn’t mean that every request will be possible but the goal is to create a program that you can be proud of, that is fair and simple and provides a meaningful benefit to employees. After all, we are all adults and our benefits should reflect that!
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