7 ms·

This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacati

This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.

karlokeeffe 8y ago
When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. This, combined with colleagues visibly taking advantage of the time off available, helped ensure a healthy approach to unlimited time off.
- VectorLock 8y ago
  >When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.
  - nick_g 8y ago
    I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.
    - acomjean 8y ago
      Most companies only let you bank so many pto (Paid Time Off) hours and carry them over year to year. I think this came about because of accounting change where employee hours are considered a liability (Hours/Money owed for nothing in return), but I might be wrong on that. As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.
      - NullPrefix 8y ago
        >Hours/Money owed for nothing in return From the business perspectice services rendered previously is "nothing", because you can't get any more value from that
      - ghaff 8y ago
        It's been accounting rules for a very long time. It's pretty much Accounting 101. If you accrue liabilities that you're obligated to provide (either in the form of employee time off or pay-out upon departure), that's a textbook liability. Which is why employers almost always cap in some form or another; the exact mechanism is partially determined by state law. I worked for a company once that, during a bad spell, eliminated an accrual cap to encourage people to bank vacation. The result was that a not small number of people who weren't really into taking vacation just let their balances balloon. The company eventually forced people to work down their balances.
    - miranda_rights 8y ago
      People are technically already paid for their unused PTO when they leave a company with an allocated PTO/year (although this may vary between states). That was one of the reasons why I chose my current company, because I figured I'd make a little 'extra' money leaving after a year without taking any PTO. Personally, I did end up feeling a little burned out so I opted to actually start using my PTO, but it's nice to have the freedom either way.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  What does it mean that you had to take 25 days off? What would they do to you if you didn’t?
gallamine 8y ago
> they don't want to inconvenience their team This is is why it's important for team members to explicitly encourage each other to take breaks and vacations. I've often told a coworker, "stop working! Take a long weekend!".
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I've seen companies set minimum time off, which can certainly simply the problem. (At risk of the Dilbert situation: "you need to get this done by end of year, and also take two weeks of holiday".) But ultimately, I think that's a road to this sort of cultural approach. Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.) The best UPTO environment I've ever seen had managers who asked about time off in one-on-ones and pushed people who said "none" to take more. It also had a lot of acceptance for 'aimless' PTO; justifying your trip to the Andes is easy, but people take PTO more consistently if no one's expecting a better story than "sleep late and run some errands" or "play a new-release game".
  - izacus 8y ago
    > Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.) Also once teams and management get used to people taking time off, the business processes also become more resilient to people missing for a week or two and taking PTO becomes less of a problem for everyone. Suddenly someone missing for a week is just not a big deal.
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      I'd never considered this explicitly, but it's an excellent point. It occurs to me that Google somewhat famously adds artificial downtime to their services to make sure no one is relying on 24/7 uptime. I don't want to reduce people to server-equivalents, but I'll bet high vacation rates are a pretty good way of making sure no one relies too much on individual knowledge. Even from my personal experiences, lots of things get documented when the person who knows them well is heading out of town and there's a sudden scramble to formalize that knowledge.
jlarocco 8y ago
You're generalizing based on your own behavior, but not everybody behaves that way. I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off. I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. One person's gloriously well managed Unlimited PTO policy (congrats!) is another person's peer pressured non-usage. "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    > The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies. > "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such. The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Employees can be responsible for deciding that for themselves. Some people don't want that extra responsibility, and I'd agree that they probably won't like unlimited PTO policies. It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.
    - michaelt 8y ago
      The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.
nrook 8y ago
If I am on a limited PTO plan, California law guarantees me the right to cash out my unused vacation days when I leave the company. It seems to me like it would be fair for companies to offer unlimited PTO as long as employees can cash out unlimited money when they leave. But for some reason, this is not often offered.
jvagner 8y ago
As a manager at various companies in the US, it's often been a struggle to get people to take their allotted PTO. And to get people to take 2 weeks off? Very infrequently. I had to make people take their PTOs. Our European team colleagues? Not so much.
wutbrodo 8y ago
I've just started my first job with unlimited PTO, and I've never understood complaints like these. I can see how it isn't as amazing as a naive what's-on-the-tin reading would imply, but it seems to me that you can just set your bar at what a normal amount of vacation would be, plus a little bit if you feel like, since they're marketing it as "unlimited PTO". Eg, decide that three weeks is an appropriate, comparable amount, and then take three weeks off. As I mentioned upthread, I've never had a job where I didn't work when and how much I wanted, go into the office when I felt like it, etc etc. I'm subject to the same pressures you describe, but it turns out they're really easy to handle: keep a rough eye on how many hours you're working. The other day they had a rare beer release I wanted to go to in the middle of the day, on a Friday. I didn't have any meetings, so I "WFH" and worked 3-4 hours that day and spent the rest of the day drinking and getting dinner with a couple funemployed friends, including checking my email and responding to important ones for a few minutes every couple hours during the workday. I could've (and have in the past) written off those four lost hours of work as coming out of my effective productivity, but since this is a new job and I'm trying to hit the ground running, I just made it up in dribbles of an hour or two over the next week. The dirty secret when people talk about being pressured at work is that 90% of the time, your employers are relying on you to do the work of pressuring yourself. If my employer wants me to work extra and go above and beyond, I make sure that it's explicit and metaphorically "on the record". Pulling all-nighters during crunch time or forgoing vacation for a long time should be banked as something you can draw on, giving you cover for taking a longer vacation or working shorter days after crunch time. It's really up to you to set your work life balance, and the fears most people have about the consequences of doing so are largely (but not entirely) illusory. The one major caveat here that I haven't ever had to face is if you're both at an abusive company and highly replaceable (eg feel like you couldn't get a similar quality job). In this case of effectively having a better job than you'd otherwise get, the power dynamic is markedly shifted and employers can get away with a lot. The only saving grace in this situation is if your more in-demand coworkers have healthy attitudes about work/life balance, since it's hard for management to crack down on individuals in a way that's perceived as unfair.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Come back in a year and tell us how this went.
dilap 8y ago
As others have mentioned, having a company minimum is a good idea. But you can also just give it to yourself: pick a number and make sure you take that many days off. Current place I work has unlimited PTO, and I really like it. You do need to be careful not to fall into the trap of not using it, though.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I don’t understand this. Why would you not use it? There would be so many days where I just wake up and go: ‘No... not today.’ and stay in bed. Then there’s still normal vacation trips to consider. I can easily see myself using 40 days of PTO in a year.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
r_smart 8y ago
I currently have the most joyous of "unlimited PTO" policies. There's something in the handbook, which isn't that great, but I've been told that it's just there for documentation and we have no 'real' policy. YAY!
snambi 8y ago
Unlimited PTO can turn into unlimited working if your boss is really "good".
jriot 8y ago
With unlimited PTO and flexible schedule, I take way more time-off. Never will I give up my health, time-off for co-workers, they aren't family or friends, they are co-workers, who will replace you if you die tomorrow.
hockeybias 8y ago
Ditto. And I imagine there are many other companies around the world willing to work longer hours that may eat the lunch of their 'you decide' competitors.
garfieldnate 8y ago
At trivago you can decide how many days to take off in a year, but German law stipulates that you have to take at least 24 (2 per month). One of my co-workers tried to never take vacation and HR made him stay home for all of December!

karlokeeffe 8y ago

When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. This, combined with colleagues visibly taking advantage of the time off available, helped ensure a healthy approach to unlimited time off.

VectorLock 8y ago
>When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.
- nick_g 8y ago
  I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.
  - acomjean 8y ago
    Most companies only let you bank so many pto (Paid Time Off) hours and carry them over year to year. I think this came about because of accounting change where employee hours are considered a liability (Hours/Money owed for nothing in return), but I might be wrong on that. As a result employees can't just bank their vacation hours and get a big payday when they leave. It tends to only take a couple years to get up to the max, and you end up with "use it or loose it" pto.
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      >Hours/Money owed for nothing in return From the business perspectice services rendered previously is "nothing", because you can't get any more value from that
    - ghaff 8y ago
      It's been accounting rules for a very long time. It's pretty much Accounting 101. If you accrue liabilities that you're obligated to provide (either in the form of employee time off or pay-out upon departure), that's a textbook liability. Which is why employers almost always cap in some form or another; the exact mechanism is partially determined by state law. I worked for a company once that, during a bad spell, eliminated an accrual cap to encourage people to bank vacation. The result was that a not small number of people who weren't really into taking vacation just let their balances balloon. The company eventually forced people to work down their balances.
  - miranda_rights 8y ago
    People are technically already paid for their unused PTO when they leave a company with an allocated PTO/year (although this may vary between states). That was one of the reasons why I chose my current company, because I figured I'd make a little 'extra' money leaving after a year without taking any PTO. Personally, I did end up feeling a little burned out so I opted to actually start using my PTO, but it's nice to have the freedom either way.
1123581321 8y ago
What does it mean that you had to take 25 days off? What would they do to you if you didn’t?

gallamine 8y ago

> they don't want to inconvenience their team This is is why it's important for team members to explicitly encourage each other to take breaks and vacations. I've often told a coworker, "stop working! Take a long weekend!".

Bartweiss 8y ago
I've seen companies set minimum time off, which can certainly simply the problem. (At risk of the Dilbert situation: "you need to get this done by end of year, and also take two weeks of holiday".) But ultimately, I think that's a road to this sort of cultural approach. Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.) The best UPTO environment I've ever seen had managers who asked about time off in one-on-ones and pushed people who said "none" to take more. It also had a lot of acceptance for 'aimless' PTO; justifying your trip to the Andes is easy, but people take PTO more consistently if no one's expecting a better story than "sleep late and run some errands" or "play a new-release game".
- izacus 8y ago
  > Once people around you are taking time off, it becomes easy to justify taking time off. (And so, like most cultural things, you'd better have management doing it first.) Also once teams and management get used to people taking time off, the business processes also become more resilient to people missing for a week or two and taking PTO becomes less of a problem for everyone. Suddenly someone missing for a week is just not a big deal.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    I'd never considered this explicitly, but it's an excellent point. It occurs to me that Google somewhat famously adds artificial downtime to their services to make sure no one is relying on 24/7 uptime. I don't want to reduce people to server-equivalents, but I'll bet high vacation rates are a pretty good way of making sure no one relies too much on individual knowledge. Even from my personal experiences, lots of things get documented when the person who knows them well is heading out of town and there's a sudden scramble to formalize that knowledge.

jlarocco 8y ago

You're generalizing based on your own behavior, but not everybody behaves that way. I'm exactly opposite, and had no problem taking PTO when I worked at a company with an unlimited plan. Now that I have limited PTO again I hoard it and take less time off. I don't feel inconvenienced when others take PTO, and I don't expect my taking PTO to inconvenience them.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. One person's gloriously well managed Unlimited PTO policy (congrats!) is another person's peer pressured non-usage. "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such.
- jlarocco 8y ago
  > The problem is, if it's not codified in law, there is no consistency. A poorly codified policy is an implementation problem, and will be a problem for both limited and unlimited PTO policies. > "Unlimited PTO" is a marketing farce, no more, no less. If you want people to take 25 days a year off, give them 25 days of PTO and be on the hook for the liability if they leave. If you want to give them more time than that through an approval process, offer it! But don't say it's unlimited, because it isn't. And if you don't want one of your business perks to be pointed out as fraudulent, don't advertise it as such. The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Employees can be responsible for deciding that for themselves. Some people don't want that extra responsibility, and I'd agree that they probably won't like unlimited PTO policies. It would be ludicrous to outlaw unlimited PTO policies just because some people don't like them.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    The entire point is that the employer doesn't care how many days off people take each year. Of course they do. Just they call it "abusing the policy" or "not getting your work done" and don't tell you what the lines you shouldn't cross are.

nrook 8y ago

If I am on a limited PTO plan, California law guarantees me the right to cash out my unused vacation days when I leave the company. It seems to me like it would be fair for companies to offer unlimited PTO as long as employees can cash out unlimited money when they leave. But for some reason, this is not often offered.

jvagner 8y ago

As a manager at various companies in the US, it's often been a struggle to get people to take their allotted PTO. And to get people to take 2 weeks off? Very infrequently. I had to make people take their PTOs. Our European team colleagues? Not so much.

wutbrodo 8y ago

I've just started my first job with unlimited PTO, and I've never understood complaints like these. I can see how it isn't as amazing as a naive what's-on-the-tin reading would imply, but it seems to me that you can just set your bar at what a normal amount of vacation would be, plus a little bit if you feel like, since they're marketing it as "unlimited PTO". Eg, decide that three weeks is an appropriate, comparable amount, and then take three weeks off. As I mentioned upthread, I've never had a job where I didn't work when and how much I wanted, go into the office when I felt like it, etc etc. I'm subject to the same pressures you describe, but it turns out they're really easy to handle: keep a rough eye on how many hours you're working. The other day they had a rare beer release I wanted to go to in the middle of the day, on a Friday. I didn't have any meetings, so I "WFH" and worked 3-4 hours that day and spent the rest of the day drinking and getting dinner with a couple funemployed friends, including checking my email and responding to important ones for a few minutes every couple hours during the workday. I could've (and have in the past) written off those four lost hours of work as coming out of my effective productivity, but since this is a new job and I'm trying to hit the ground running, I just made it up in dribbles of an hour or two over the next week. The dirty secret when people talk about being pressured at work is that 90% of the time, your employers are relying on you to do the work of pressuring yourself. If my employer wants me to work extra and go above and beyond, I make sure that it's explicit and metaphorically "on the record". Pulling all-nighters during crunch time or forgoing vacation for a long time should be banked as something you can draw on, giving you cover for taking a longer vacation or working shorter days after crunch time. It's really up to you to set your work life balance, and the fears most people have about the consequences of doing so are largely (but not entirely) illusory. The one major caveat here that I haven't ever had to face is if you're both at an abusive company and highly replaceable (eg feel like you couldn't get a similar quality job). In this case of effectively having a better job than you'd otherwise get, the power dynamic is markedly shifted and employers can get away with a lot. The only saving grace in this situation is if your more in-demand coworkers have healthy attitudes about work/life balance, since it's hard for management to crack down on individuals in a way that's perceived as unfair.

rhizome 8y ago
Come back in a year and tell us how this went.

dilap 8y ago

As others have mentioned, having a company minimum is a good idea. But you can also just give it to yourself: pick a number and make sure you take that many days off. Current place I work has unlimited PTO, and I really like it. You do need to be careful not to fall into the trap of not using it, though.

Aeolun 8y ago
I don’t understand this. Why would you not use it? There would be so many days where I just wake up and go: ‘No... not today.’ and stay in bed. Then there’s still normal vacation trips to consider. I can easily see myself using 40 days of PTO in a year.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

r_smart 8y ago

I currently have the most joyous of "unlimited PTO" policies. There's something in the handbook, which isn't that great, but I've been told that it's just there for documentation and we have no 'real' policy. YAY!

snambi 8y ago

Unlimited PTO can turn into unlimited working if your boss is really "good".

jriot 8y ago

With unlimited PTO and flexible schedule, I take way more time-off. Never will I give up my health, time-off for co-workers, they aren't family or friends, they are co-workers, who will replace you if you die tomorrow.

hockeybias 8y ago

Ditto. And I imagine there are many other companies around the world willing to work longer hours that may eat the lunch of their 'you decide' competitors.

garfieldnate 8y ago

At trivago you can decide how many days to take off in a year, but German law stipulates that you have to take at least 24 (2 per month). One of my co-workers tried to never take vacation and HR made him stay home for all of December!