The company I work for recently adopted a NetFlix style "we don't track vacation" policy. It's been about nine months, and anecdotes (no data available - we don't track!) suggest total vacation time taken is less than half of last year.
I suppose that whether that's good or bad is pretty subjective.
Unless you literally mean take as much vacation as you feel is right and no matter how much you take (even 4 weeks straight), we won't ask questions, then I'd rather have a specific number.
For sick time, I think this is a great idea. I have unlimited sick time where I work, so I only take it when I'm really sick. It's like the saying that what gets measured gets done. The measure of legitimate sick time is not "do you have the time" but "are you sick," so that's what people use to judge when taking sick time. If it was "do you have the time" then as long as they had the time, people would feel fine taking sick time, even if they weren't sick.
If you tell me I can take as much vacation as I want as long as I need a vacation, then even to take a half-day, I need a justification. Every vacation day, or part of a day, becomes a risk that I'm going to look like I'm taking too much vacation.
If it was "do you have the time" then as long as they had the time, people would feel fine taking sick time, even if they weren't sick.
Or even worse, the policy at my employer - within a given year you may take up to five of your accrued sick days no questions asked (assuming you have the sick days banked), but to use any other sick time you have, you must submit a doctors note as verification. As an incentive intended to reduce absenteeism, if you take no sick days in a given year, you're given an extra "free" vacation day usable during the following year.
What this means is that if you end up taking even one sick day during a year, you've lost your bonus vacation day. So now you may as well burn down the remainder of your five unverified days by calling in sick when you really aren't.
Indeed, don't tell me vacation/sick time isn't tracked unless it really truly isn't tracked. I, and the company, found this out the hard way. While some management may try to be nice about it, there very well may be legal & contractual issues which force enumeration and tracking of sick leave.
After a lot of hand waving "don't worry about it" answers to preliminary queries about sick time logistics, I was told (after the fact) I had to take open-heart surgery as a vacation day.
My company did the same. It must be a fad among CEOs.
While on the face of it this policy looks like an improvement, it turned an entitlement into something that depends on the generosity of one's boss. Also, keep in mind that when quitting you don't get any accrued money. I highly dislike it.
A few things. First, if the policy really does change from an entitlement to an unspoken privilege granted by your immediate superior, then I doubt the policy was implemented properly. I suppose it depends on the industry, but if corporate policy says your vacations are not tracked, it stands to reason that your time off can't be requested/approved/denied. If you get your work done, your company should by happy with your performance.
Also, when you do leave a company, you don't always get the vacation days as a bonus in your paycheck. Sometimes those days just disappear. What's even worse is that some vacation days may be a part of your compensation plan, but work pressures prevent you from using them, and they expire within a year. Vacation days are hardly an entitlement.
Personally, my ideal work situation would allow me unlimited and untracked vacation days, absolute freedom to work when, where, and how I choose, and pay me ONLY based on performance (both my direct contributions and a percentage of overall company profits). I suppose this is fairly close to actual business ownership.
This is the exact reason why these policies claim there is no specific time. No allocated days legally means zero days. Companies use this "flexible vacation" policy specifically so they don't have to comply with pay out in jurisdictions such as California. It's a big scam, which is why the real question to ask and answer is how many days on average are taken, and if they include "half days" as "vacation time" in the response, they are being intentionally highly misleading. Working half days is NOT vacation. It's work.
As stated elsewhere, I doubt the payout liability is that large, considering that most employees only get to keep vacation days for a little over a year before they expire.
I disagree with your use of the word scam to describe an untracked vacation policy. An employee at any one point in time will probably have no more than 6 weeks of accrued, unexpired vacation time (assuming they get 3 weeks per year and haven't taken a vacation in 2 years and their vacation rolls over a little bit). This is only 3 pay periods, or just over 10% of their actual pay (6/52 weeks).
I would agree that in general vacation policies are a bit of a scam in that you are promised x days as part of your compensation package, but then are told when they can or can't be used, and resist if you try to use them all at once, and expire them if you hold on to them for too long... Come to think of it, defined vacation days are a bit like airline miles.
Yes the law does mandate vacation payout in some areas, but the actual vacation days also expire, meaning that your employer won't have to pay you for 20 years of accrued vacation. This is why I don't like vacation days as an accrued benefit.
Interesting. I worked at a large bank a while back and they had a use it or lose it policy. Either the law recently changed or they were out of compliance.
I don't think it is a recent change. The reason I am familiar with it is my current employer tried to pull this one--I showed them the law and they backed down thankfully.
Also, don't give up on old wages. An employee at a former employer filed a class action lawsuit (somehow I got attached), his hardwork resulted in an $8k check that found its way to my doorstep. ;)
I've seen similar situations. People wind up never knowing if it's really ok to take vacation, so they don't. If the folks in charge are the workaholic types, the answer is usually perceived to be "no", even if it's not.
Absolutely so. I've seen this policy many times and it always results in less vacation around. Not only that but in his very post linked to he makes clear that he considers a proper 6 week vacation (I take off August like most civilized people do, and I take off a bit more at other times) is unacceptable because they are tracking a metric called "pace" that proper vacations would interfere with. He then suggests that what they really prefer is that you work at least half time (possibly this is 8 hrs a day instead of 16?) remotely from wherever you are taking your "vacation". Um, that's not a vacation. Vacation is no contact whatsoever with work, otherwise you are not recharging at all. There is no such thing as vacationing half time. That is working half time, not vacationing.
I think the outcome of this type of policy, as mentioned by others, is largely a product of the culture of the place that you work.
Where I work, we're given pretty generous paid time off, with very precise definitions of how said paid time off is to be taken, accrued and if not taken in its entirety by the end of the year, how one can "roll over" some of those days into the next year. Every 5 years or so, we get an additional 5 business days.
I get 30 days of paid time off. I used 15 last year. And I've never even come close to the 30 allotted.
I'm salary, and I have really real deadlines. But I've been at my company and in my sector for a long enough time that I know when I can take time and when I cannot. I can get in 15 days by taking the first week that most public schools start off. It's usually a lull time, and being a homeschool family, vacation packages around that time are usually great deals. We have a lull time around Christmas and August due to being a B2B business, and outside of that, I know my deadlines, manage my workload and have a boss that doesn't care if I give a day or two notice when I want time off (primarily because of the former ... I self-manage my time to ensure the least impact for that time off).
All of that said, we have a PTO policy, and I know of very few people who get anywhere close to it. Nor do I know of anyone I work with that actually takes advantage of the "rollover into next year" policy because there's no point. We simply won't use them because there's too much to be done and too few people to do it and in our corporate culture it's "get it done" or enjoy unemployment. Frankly, I'd find other employment if my employer decided to do the whole "we don't track vacation" policy because in my field at my company that'd basically mean "no vacation".
Funny. I wouldn't consider working at a place where I got less than six weeks of paid vacation.
I can definitely agree to shift them around, but if they expect me to take less total time off in order to get things done, then I get another job and they get to enjoy their time of not getting anything done at all.
When I worked for a bank there was some old law that forced bank employees to take one whole week of vacation at the same time (something about having enough time to audit them if needed, from back in the day when it would take that long to audit an employee). It was actually kind of nice, because you knew that you were going to be off for a week, so you planned your summer vacation around that.
From what I understand it's not audits, exactly. It's to make scamming the company harder.
The Barings bank collapse, for example, was brought about by one guy who juggled the books and hid information over a long period. That's much easier to pull off if you are around all the time.
This is how my company works too, and I think it's a great idea, assuming that the culture isn't one where people are belittled for taking vacations. If the culture causes people to feel a complex about taking time off, people will just resent the policy. Personally, I really enjoy the flexibility it affords, and it's quite a golden handcuff when I think about leaving to find another job.
Looking at job descriptions with their little 3.5 weeks of vacation is just a bummer now. Who wants to sit around thinking about the optimal way to use that time? Just do a kick-ass job and take vacations when you want. This benefit means more to me than a considerable increase in salary would.
3.5 weeks? Sheesh, I only get 2 weeks at my current job. One week gets used up throughout the year for random errands, kids school stuff, that sort of thing. That leaves one week to actually take a vacation, and this year we just skipped it all together because about the time the kids were out of school my work got really busy.
Yeah, that's something you in the US really need to fix. The EU Working Time Directive gives Europeans the right to 5+ weeks (and in professional jobs this has been standard practice anyway).
Well, maybe. But a happy and adequately-vacationed workforce is surely going to be more productive, so the loss might be less than it seems (citation needed here, admittedly).
And I guess it might mean a few extra jobs, which surely can't be a bad thing.
By all measures I've seen, the U.S. workforce is dramatically more productive than the European workforce. I suspect the amount of time spent working is a significant factor in that.
Everything I've read indicates productivity improves when you have employees who take vacation. I really like the idea of shutting down for a few weeks per year (in addition to normal vacation time, whatever policy that is). Shutting down means nobody is looked down on for not being there.
I suppose that whether that's good or bad is pretty subjective.