Unlimited vacation: an experiment in progress
The holiday season has passed and it’s time to get back to real life. The new year brings out different sentiments in different people: some come back rejuvenated and are excited to restart work, others wish for the unending break. It’s well-known that the American workforce takes much less vacation than the working population in the rest of the developed world. Some companies have turned this on its head by introducing unlimited vacation policies. You can find a lot of opinions on the matter available online to evaluate the pros and cons of unlimited vacation. As a recent beneficiary of this experiment, I know what it means to both enjoy and wither at the thought of endless vacation days.
But first, let’s take a look at how this trend is affecting other companies from startups to corporate.
Empowering employees
While the first assumption may be that the 1% of American companies offering unlimited vacation have to put measures in place to stop employees from abusing it, statistics speak otherwise. It turns out that when left on their own, most employees steer away from taking any real vacation time at all. Kickstarter decided to nix unlimited vacation policy when they found that their employees weren’t taking enough vacation days. Why? Without clear parameters, employees were unsure just how much time they were supposed to be taking off. In order to encourage employees to go on vacation, another company, Buffer, is offering a bonus of $1,000 (plus $500 to family) to use towards travel expenses. Similarly, Evernote gives a $1,000 off to anyone taking a full week off, while Hubspot refers to its policy as ‘two weeks to infinity’, making it clear that employees are expected to take at least two weeks off.
I work at rhubarb, which is an emerging venture studio that has witnessed rapid growth in the last year. We pride ourselves in having created a culture where people love the work they do and feel a greater sense of purpose and ownership towards their jobs. That being said, in late 2015, rhubarb decided to experiment with the unlimited vacation policy so we can understand if it suits our culture and working style. The flip side to a great working culture is that I just wasn’t ready to take any time off from work. So when three of my closest friends decided to get married in India, I was faced with the huge dilemma: to leave or not to leave. This combined with the fact that no one else at work had taken time off yet made matters worse. As I was researching more while writing this article, I discovered that these are the exact same reasons why less than 56% of the Americans utilize their vacation time. In such a scenario, the onus to decide how much vacation you want to take doesn’t help the least bit.
I learned there are a few precautions that help navigate the delicate balance between making the most of this policy and abusing the flexibility provided by your workplace. Here are a few ground rules:
Talk to your team as soon as possible
Share your vacation plans with your team as soon as you can so they have a chance to plan the work they’ll need to pick up in your absence. The fact that your company trusts you to manage your vacation time calls for greater responsibility. Make sure the transition is as seamless as possible on both yours and their end. Like many startup environments, my roles at rhubarb are unique to me, which means that while I am absent from work, there is no one else available to take care of these responsibilities.
I went over this in my head inconclusively several times. At last, I announced this predicament between personal and professional commitments to my whole team at our weekly retrospective. One of the great parts about working with an honest and transparent team is that I didn’t have to gloss the request/quandary with a layer of diplomacy. I presented my honest confusion to the team and got an honest answer back.
By being transparent and communicating well, it helped me decide that taking time off wasn’t such a bad thing after all. My team had my back and the collaborative culture in the company wasn’t all talk. This mutual trust and respect further fosters a positive work culture.
Tap into team bandwidth
Anticipate jobs and tasks that need to be done to achieve the output that you would have achieved had you not taken time off. Find out who among your team has the bandwidth to take up portions of these different tasks, even if displaced among different people. To make this happen, the company needs collaboration at the heart of its culture.
There were certain parts of my job that could not have thrived in my absence. Luckily, different members of my team stepped up to take over portions of this workload.
With the right environment and motivation, no employee is defined by their roles. And the good karma points from helping your coworker will come back to you when it’s your time for vacation. At a recent team meeting, we decided that if the need arises we would bring outside help to keep up momentum while one of us is gone. This means an extra cost to the company — which will need to be found from other budgets — but also results in happy, well rested and productive employees.
Set the wheels in motion where you can
The work must go on even if you are gone. Taking time off calls for you to be entrepreneurial and more organized. Foresee the usual things that happen on a day-to-day basis and set momentum for them to continue. Since none of us have crystal balls to predict what’s up next, there will always be miscellaneous things that’ll come up while you are away, and your team will have to think of creative solutions to resolve them.
That’s the nature of dynamic workplaces. Trust your team to fill the gaps. All you can do is complete the prerequisites for any piece of work that is connected to the work of other team members. If there is any kind of work that can’t be done without you, let your team know. Alleviating as much of the work as you can will set the course for the rest.
Allow yourself a proper break
As important as it is to make sure that work is getting done while you are away, it is also important that you completely check out and enjoy your vacation. That’s easier said than done, believe me. I spent many evenings logging into Slack to find out what was happening at work, followed by a feeling of guilt not being there for the team at crucial times. It took a lot of mental energy trying to weigh each day of vacation against output lost at work. As a result, I ended up canceling the last leg of my vacation, changed the tickets and flew back from India early. If you love what you do, you are probably going to experience major FOMO (fear of missing out), like I did. You have to accept that things are going to change, maybe at a rapid pace, while you are gone. But if you come back with replenished energy levels from actually experiencing your vacation, you will be able to hit the ground running and catch up quickly.
At rhubarb, we are still exploring whether unlimited vacation is the best policy for us and how it’s going to work. But as an employee, this kind of flexibility is a refreshing change from working in a big corporation. I started off my career with a well-known major consultancy where taking anytime off was frowned upon, even the allotted two weeks. Despite the fact that my role overlapped with many employees, — unlike rhubarb — my absence could not have impacted the company at the same level as it did in rhubarb. Back then, it was a one-sided relationship where the employees were expected to be fully invested in the company’s mission while the company didn’t give two hoots about the personal lives and relationships of the employees. So, you can understand why utilizing unlimited vacation for the first time at rhubarb was both delightful and scary.
Unlimited vacation may be a misnomer as it’s better defined as a self-managed, flexible vacation. It signifies that your employer trusts you to make the right decisions. This just means that you have a greater responsibility to care about the company’s well being as they care about yours. What we have definitely learned is that the output oriented culture, where there are no managers counting the hours clocked, helps the employees become more entrepreneurial and organized. We will keep experimenting until we find out otherwise.
Originally published at www.rhubarbstudios.co.
