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Unlimited vacation policies
Companies are moving to unlimited vacation policies. What do you think about this?
To me, pros are that employees can benefit from this, we can have a better balance in our life-style, we could see vacation as a reward: the more we are successful with our projects the more we can benefit with time off.
The main cons is having employees abusing of this, the level of trust must be high. On the other side, if being extremely generous or workhaolic you will never been on vacation.
What is your experience or expectation?
6 answers
This is a little like restaurants that ask diners to 'pay what they feel the food was worth'. People get 'shamed' into over paying. The suggestion is that employees take fewer days holiday, rather than more.
Hello Paolo,
a fascinating question. A lot of use have defined working hours and holidays, but if we are honest, it only counts how good we do our work and if we finish our tasks. This independent how much hours we work a day or if we do over-hours the weekends. Unlimited vacation empowers employees, but on the other hand pressures them, as HR may have a look how many days someone tasks, which may influence own's career.
I strongly suggest you talk to some peers who have the policy, I think you'll find the reality is not quite what you're worried may happen. Real life examples will help your thinking.
Hi Paolo,
whereas a great idea, it appears that (in the majority of cases) the employees are taking even less numbers of vacation days than before. I guess it all comes down to the culture that your company has and what the company values.
Douglas LaBier, a business psychologist and director of the Center for Progressive Development, says part of the challenge here has to do with the gap between what companies claim to want to be versus the values espoused by their actions. “As there’s a push to try to make a work culture a more supportive, team-oriented kind of culture that promotes and rewards innovation and creativity, that can clash with old top-down command and control policies. So if a culture has been more traditional, and then it says they’re going to try unlimited vacation, that can create some backlash.”
It’s not that employees are not welcoming policies like these, it’s the fact they’re not used to them and don’t know how is expected that they react or what is “acceptable”.
Some companies have already set some guidelines around the unlimited policy stating things like “unlimited days, with a minimum of 25 per year” for example, to encourage those employees with a more conventional mindset to make use of their time off without feeling guilty or fearing that their manager/ colleague will think they abuse.
Every policy has some pros and cons definitely,If you consider the pros -
> It is good for hard working employee to get some extra time to get relax.
> With this policy ,employee will work even more harder to complete the project more professionally to avail more benefits from it.
>It will definitely improve the productivity of company to a high level.
If you consider the cons -
> Again it will affect the company culture for sure. Because every one wants to avail this policy ,so sometime they won't work perfectly to make project deliverable rather than need to complete only.
> If at a time a huge team went for vacation and some critical issues came then who will take care of these issues.
Welcoming you to comment down your suggestions and thoughts below.Thank You.
I think it is a cop out from making a real policy. What if someone said I need 3 months off to travel? Would they approve? If they do how would coworkers follow this action? If they don’t then the policy is exposed for the gimmick it is.
60 months ago