Unlimited Days Off

Marketplace recently ran a story on workplaces that offer unlimited vacation days, focusing on employees at ZocDoc:

“Team members can take time off whenever they need it or whenever they want to,” says Netta Samroengraja, CFO and chief people officer. “We feel like we have a much more motivated work force and they’re absolutely much more productive as well while they’re here.”

Of course a company with a “chief people officer” would offer unlimited vacation days. I jest, but I’ve worked at places that offered no paid days off (service jobs), a defined number of paid vacation days, and unlimited paid days off. In my experience at each of these places, I took about the same amount of days off to visit family, or for the holidays. This is not to say that other employees didn’t take lots of days off when they could, but perhaps it’s more of an indication that my experience with defined vacation days stifled my urge to take more days off when given the opportunity (I also didn’t take any “real” vacations until I was in my late twenties, because: money).

The Harvard Business Review wrote last month that companies like Netflix and Virgin have also adjusted their policies to offer unlimited vacation days. HBR describes why this kind of policy can fail …

Skeptics have argued that employees with unlimited vacation actually feel pressured to work more, work during their vacations, and take fewer days off altogether. For the most part, whether or not these fears become reality is a matter of culture and whether or not your culture has one crucial element: trust.

… and how some companies encourage employees to go on vacation:

In addition, many managers and senior leaders get very public about taking time off and taking it in long stretches. That way the message is clear that taking vacation won’t hurt your performance review or career prospective. Some companies, at least initially, went so far as to bribe employees to take their vacation: for example, software company Evernote pays employees a $1,000 bonus if they take a week or more vacation. Marketing company HubSpot lets salespeople reduce their monthly quota twice a year to coincide with their vacation time.

Taking a vacation often hinges on whether you’ve done all your urgent work, or can hand off anything that needs immediate attention to someone else while you’re away, and it is very, very easy to feel that you are never done with work and that you must be the one around to get something done and can’t get away (or maybe this is just me). But there’s a reason why a company like Evernote would pay an employee to take a vacation: employees who burn out don’t stay very long. We all need time to recharge.

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