What if you offered your employees unrestricted vacation time? Forget about the standard two weeks minimum a year. If employees took one week off or four weeks off a year, would it be the right thing for them or the worst thing in terms of productivity?
“Some employers promote this as liberating, saying their workplaces are so flexible that old-fashioned constraints such as assigned time off aren’t needed,” Sue Shellenbarger wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2011. “But others say the lack of guidelines fuels a tendency to work all the time.”
The downside of open vacation
Shellenbarger profiled Netflix, a company with 800 employees that has an unrestricted vacation policy. With Netflix’s streaming service active every hour of every day of the year, employees need to be available in case anything comes up. Allowing employees to take as much time off as needed seems to work for the company.
Given how many people are wired to the Internet with smartphones, laptops, and mobile desktops, it’s more common now for employees to take some or all of their work with them while on “vacation.” E-mailing or calling co-workers when you’re half a world away is possible and convenient. Taking a half hour of vacation time to take care of a pressing matter is possible and isn’t a major inconvenience.
“Only 38 percent of U.S. employees use all their allotted vacation time, says a 2010 survey of 9,000 people by travel-booking company Expedia.com; the average worker took only 14 of 18 days permitted,” Shellenbarger wrote. “And it isn’t usually managers’ fault. According to the Expedia survey, only 5 percent of Americans said their bosses weren’t supportive of their taking allotted time off.”
This sounds like a great idea, but is it the best thing for a small business? Maybe or maybe not. Can you afford to have supervisors be gone for weeks at a time when questions need to be answered swiftly? On the other hand, can your employees do their job without a lot of face time? These are valid questions to ask yourself.
The intangible value of vacation
Dedication to a job is critical, and more jobs today require employees to be available on short notice, no matter what day of the year or time of day. But dedication usually comes from happy and grateful employees. Discouraging vacation time is not the best way to keep dedicated employees for long. You want the job to get done, but you also need reliable people you can trust.
Unrestricted vacation policies may or may not catch on with more companies over time. How we connect with the world through the Internet isn’t going to drastically change, so this could be a helpful way for companies to be in the modern world of productivity and workflow.
