What if your employer told you that you could take all the paid vacation time you wanted?
It might sound like a dream, but it’s becoming reality for some workers, with big industry giants like Netflix and LinkedIn switching from traditional policies with a limited number of annual days off to unlimited vacation time. Instead of getting a specific number of paid days off each year, under these policies employees are told they can take off as much time as they want to, as long as their work gets done. Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t want an unlimited number of paid days off?
[See: 17 Signs You Might Be a Workaholic.]
As it turns out, though, these polices aren’t always as fantastic in practice as they sound in theory. In fact, sometimes they even result in people taking less vacation time than they were taking before their company made the switch.
When people aren’t given clear guidance about how much time off is okay to take (the traditional “you get X days off per year” that most of us are used to), many workers feel uncertain about how much time is really okay. As a result, some end up taking less time off than they used to, because they don’t want to be perceived as lazy or as taking advantage of the policy. It can feel easier to use vacation days when you have a specific number of them allotted to you. It can be harder when it’s left entirely up to your own judgment, and you may feel you need to justify the time in a way that you wouldn’t if you had a clear allowance given to you.
Then, factor in that many jobs never have slow periods, so it can feel that there’s never a good time to get away, and you start to see why many workers have ended up disillusioned by unlimited vacation time. In fact, last year Kickstarter ended its unlimited vacation policy, after finding that employees were taking less time off than they had under the previous policy that had provided a fixed number of days.
[See: 7 Companies With Perks That Will Totally Make You Jealous.]
Additionally, if it’s not carefully managed, unlimited vacation can produce demoralizing inequities on staff. Conscientious employees aren’t likely to take advantage of their access to unlimited time off, but less-motivated employees — the slackers who already aren’t pulling their weight — can be far more inclined to take off as much time as they can get away with, leaving their harder-working colleagues to pick up the slack.
There’s another downside, too: Unlimited vacation policies usually mean an end to vacation payouts when you leave your job. Companies that provide set numbers of vacation days each year will often pay out any accrued, unused vacation time when an employee leaves (in some states, companies are required by law to do this). But guess what happens with an unlimited vacation policy where there’s no set amount of vacation awarded? You don’t accrue vacation time, and thus there’s nothing to pay out when you leave. That’s good for your company because it wipes away the financial liability they would otherwise be carrying, but you might not be too happy about it.
But even with all of these disadvantages, none of this means that unlimited vacation policies aren’t the way to go. To the contrary, when carefully managed, they can be an enormously appealing benefit that helps to attract and retain great employees. The key, though, is that employers who want to try out unlimited vacation need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how they implement it. They need to communicate clearly with employees and managers about how the policy should work in practice, be explicit about how people can judge when time off is appropriate to take, and ensure that people don’t feel penalized for using the benefit responsibly. They also need managers who are committed to ensuring that employees take real time off, and who are committed to addressing it when someone is abusing the policy, too.
[See: Be Thankful for These 6 Workplace Rights.]
Treating people like responsible professionals who can manage their own workloads is a good thing. It just takes good, competent, involved management — which happens to be the case with most things at work.
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Unlimited Vacation Sounds Great — Here’s the Problem With It originally appeared on usnews.com
