Vacation days. They are important to your mental health, and they can give you a chance to get away from it all and unwind from the stresses of daily life.
Yet, in the United States, this perk is not used often enough. In 2018, a record 768 million vacation days went unused.
What is the country doing to respond to this? Well, some companies have started an unlimited vacation policy to help encourage employees to use more of their vacation days.
Unlimited vacation is a newer policy in the business world, and it can provide a lot of benefits for employees if used properly.
If you are a business owner or manager, you might be concerned about employees potentially abusing this system but it is really not as likely as you think.
Here are the unlimited vacation policy pros and cons.
Trust and Respect
First, one of the biggest benefits of an unlimited vacation policy is that you are giving employees a level of trust that they may not be used to having from upper management. Think about it, you are essentially telling them that you trust them to pick what days that they do not show up for work in a responsible matter.
In a lot of American companies, employees may have to scrap and claw to use a vacation day. In fact, an employee that works somewhere for less than a year only gets an average of 10 paid vacation days per year.
That is essentially two weeks off a year out of 52 weeks. It would leave very limited opportunities for people to be able to take extended vacations and vacations to further destinations such as a continent on the other side of the world.
A company offering an unlimited vacation policy is giving employees respect for these needs, and respect for their mental health by telling them that it is ok to take some time to get away from things.
Afraid of Use
Sometimes, when implementing this policy, you can run into the issue of employees being afraid to actually take these days. Whether intentional or not, some company’s employees actually ended up taking less vacation time than others would on a strict limit.
Why does this happen? There are a few reasons, with the first being that there is sometimes no guideline on how to go about it.
Since there is no expectation when there is no set number of days, this can throw some employees off, and others may try to guess the number of days that upper management would tolerate.
Also, job security can come into play. If employees do not feel secure about their job, they may be less likely to take unnecessary vacation days because they might want to have a presence with the company they are working for and that using vacation days might make the company feel that they are less useful or invested.
Without an example to follow or a stable job environment, it may take time to get employees to feel comfortable actually using these days, especially in a competitive work environment.
Communication
One important thing when it comes to this policy is establishing clear communication on how to implement it.
How does an unlimited vacation policy work? You need to properly explain this to employees and go over all of the guidelines and any restrictions that you might have on this.
A sample unlimited vacation policy may have a limited number of employees be able to take off on the same day or week at one time. You could implement a policy that you have to notify management say three weeks in advance unless it is an emergency.
Or, you could simply explain to employees that the number of days you take off does not matter as long as they meet the typical expectations of their job.
Let’s say for example that you are a salesman that has to make 20 sales per month or one for every typical workday. There could be days that you make three sales and other days that you do not make any sales.
If you decide to take some time off and spend less time at the office, as long as you can still meet that 20-sale quota, then the upper management would not care how much time you spend in the office under this policy.
As a manager or owner, you need to layout clearly what is acceptable when it comes to using your vacation time and what is not acceptable. Plus, you need to communicate your expectations of your employees with this.
Results Over Hours
Finally, as mentioned above, one of the benefits of this policy is that you are telling your employees that as long as the job that they are responsible for gets done, the amount of hours that they are sitting in an office does not matter.
If you think about it, some employees end up wasting a lot of time in the office whether it is just spacing out, sending texts to their family or friends, or mindlessly surfing the web if they have free time. This policy can reduce the amount of unnecessary time an employee has to spend in an office while making their efforts feel appreciated.
It is a win-win for everybody because it can make employees more loyal to your cause. Plus, it empowers them for their own time rather than feeling controlled over what hours they work.
Consider an Unlimited Vacation Policy
These are just some of the pros and cons of an unlimited vacation policy. It is not a perfect system but if you have good communication and show employees a level of trust and security, it should boost employee morale while still getting you your ideal results.
Do you want to know more about managing employees? Read this article for more insight.