No Vacation Policy
For our first 7 years, we ran Eight Bit Studios as an hourly consultancy. We had no full-time employees, everyone was 1099 and billed hourly. In a sense, everyone was responsible for their own time, if they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid. This made bookkeeping easy and utilization was self-metered. It was convenient and made sense but this system obviously lacks predictability and severely limited our ability to scale and provide benefits to our people.
When we made the switch to bring everyone over to a full-time, salaried, W2 employee, we were very conscious of the culture we created: The culture of flexibiltiy and an investment in work-life balance; The freedom to work as much as you wanted and be in charge of your own schedule.
One way we tried to preserve our culture was to offer an unlimited vacation policy, or what we lovingly refer to as “our no-vacation policy.” By combining all time off into Personal Time Off (PTO) we encourage everyone to take the time off that they need. If you have a sick relative, threw your back out, need to hustle daycare options for your kids, or if you’re going on a family vacation, just take the time. We saw this as an opportunity to trust our people, to offer a sense of freedom, and above all, reduce the amount of operational overhead in tracking vacations.
Just as we were rolling out our new benefits to our people, it had come to our attention through a few articles that there are real risks associated with a no-vacation policy. Essentially, it boils down to this: everyone will feel obliquely pressured to work and no one will take vacation. Le #crap. That was not our intention. Luckily, we had already baked in some processes that helped us get over this.
It turns out that the average U.S. worker’s vacation constitutes 5.5% of the work year. With an average of 48 working weeks a year (52 minus vacation, holidays, and sick time), people take on average 2.4 weeks off. That’s ok, I suppose. The inherent danger in an unsupported unlimited vacation policy is the risk of people feeling pressured to take LESS than 2.4 weeks off.
Each team at Eight Bit does something slightly different but I’ll share what I do. Some flavor of this is done with every team.
I run the technology team at Eight Bit Studios. Our technology team consists of mobile and web developers as well as our QA team. We have a weekly super-quick and pithy meeting where all team members bring me up to speed on what they’re working on. It’s a working meeting, you don’t have to pay attention, just tell me what’s going on. Each update ends with three questions: Are you Panicked? Are you Bored? Do you have any time off scheduled?
Panicked or Bored is our way of gauging utilization perception of each team member. We track actual utilization in other, redundant ways, but this is a simple touchpoint that allows everyone to voice their opinion of their workload. It’s very touchy/feely and occasionally people break out in song. #notreally
We originally began asking about scheduled time off because people had just been taking time off, back in the 1099 days, haphazardly, without regard to the project or their respective implementation teams we needed a way to keep the project team informed of any fluctuations in resource availability. Well, now this question served another vital purpose: It reminded everyone, matter-of-factly, to take time off and it reminds everyone that we want them to take time off. Additionally, it allows me to make sure people are taking care of themselves and scheduling time off. Twice in 2018, I had to remind some of our younger talent to take time off — the system works.
We also build major buffers around three seasonal breaks: Winter, Summer, and Fall. We close the office the week of July 4th, Thanksgiving week, and for two weeks at the end of the calendar year. This automatic buffer allows people to take time off, make travel plans, or spend more time with their family, without having to make the decision to take the time off. The office is simply closed during that time. If you’re keeping track, we’re already closing the office for 4 weeks every year.
So, how’d we do?
After two years of supporting our people through our no-vacation policy, I’m happy to report that our workers take a healthy amount of time off. Our staff takes more time off than the average American employee.
At the end of 2016, after our first full year of establishing our no-vacation policy, our people’s time off came out to 7.3%. That’s about two percentage points above the national average. Indeed, our people are not taking less time off, they’re taking more time off!
In both 2017 and 2018, we killed it! Eight Bit Studios’ time-off time made up a whopping 11% of our work year for each year!
We take our responsibility to our people very seriously and we believe that a well-rested, happy workforce produces exceptionally high quality work. We believe that people want to spend time with their family and we encourage a robust personal life. We believe our great work is a truly emblematic our people through their enthusiastic dedication to our clients and products and I think it shows.
