6 ms·

Three Vacation Policies

31 points by vinnyglennon 8y ago

closeparen 8y ago
In the financial sector, vacation is a fraud control. Reshuffling job duties makes it easier for others to discover your misconduct, and temporarily suspending your access makes it harder for you to cover it up.
- foobiekr 8y ago
  it would seem this would mostly only work if the vacation was imposed randomly. otherwise you have plenty of time to plan it.
  - Matticus_Rex 8y ago
    Even limiting the scope to things that can be covered up with some lead time is a benefit.
  - LogicX 8y ago
    My mother worked in banking, and was required to take a consecutive two week block of vacation. I believe the idea was that any fishy financial sruff would likely come up during such an extended time off.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jalgos_eminator 8y ago
Ok, so how would "forced time off" be the middle ground between unlimited time off and tracked time off. Isn't "forced time off" just tracked time off but they require you to take it? The only problem it solves is burned out employees, and I would argue that it doesn't even fix that problem. The reason is that you can't force people to take their minds off work, even if you force them to not physically be at work.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  It could be done as a minimum vacation policy, instead of a maximum vacation? As in, you must take this many days off, but if you need more they're available?
  - bigiain 8y ago
    I've seen it done as a "maximum accrued vacation time" policy. Once you got 30 days accrued, you had to book enough time off to reduce it to less than 30 days within the next three months. Everybody hated that too. Being forced to take time off when you didn't particularly want to, and not being able to "save up" enough vacation for a really good ling trip away... And, of course, those rules were regularly "bent" when it suited management, but rigidly enforced otherwise... (We typically accrue 20 days per year here in .au, so that pretty much means after 18 months, if you haven't taken any vacation at all yet, you need to take at least a week off in the next three months, and a week off every three months thereafter.)
  - zhdc1 8y ago
    That's how it works at my current employer. We're required to take all but X number of days per year. Supervisors are allowed to generously authorize paid work from home as well.
- stmfreak 8y ago
  Sometimes key employees need to be reminded to schedule a real get away vacation. It should be part of the Managment 101 mentioned in the article. This seems like a non problem to me.
- kochikame 8y ago
  Japan kind of has this. Golden Week in May, Obon in the summer and New Year's leave are all mandatory days off for the vast majority of employees. These are the peak leisure travel times for Japanese people, because everything is closed. As Japanese workers are famous for not using all their paid leave, and if they do it is in half days here, this is a nationally mandated way to make sure that everyone gets at least a few days off a year.
emperorcezar 8y ago
> What about the person who heard your explanation of “just get your work done” as “if you’re highly productive, this is a part-time job with full-time pay?” What about them. Maybe they are highly productive because they are "part-time"? Sounds like a good problem to have to me.
- flax 8y ago
  Agree. Are you hiring to get work done, or to warm your office chairs for a set amount of time?
  - kochikame 8y ago
    Point is, there's always something else they could be doing/improving/creating/testing/helping with
    - emperorcezar 8y ago
      Unless their brain is only working 4-6 hours a day and after that they won't make much of a contribution. I feel like my point is, if you're gonna want hourly work, pay for hourly work. Take this scenario, I'm a highly productive dev. I work 5 hours a day and I'm burnt. But my manager makes my sit my butt in a seat for 8 hours. "Fine, whatever" I say. Now crunch time comes and I'm pushing hard to 10 or more hours a day. I'm going to look back at the wasted time before in my seat with resentment. Because it's expected of me to give you more hours than my alotted 40 when the time comes, but when it's light I don't get to take that back.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Presumably you sought out and paid the premium for a highly capable employee because you wanted their above-average capabilities. If they're just going to meet the baseline and go home, the employer is wasting time and money relative to someone cheaper and easier to find. If the company hired a highly capable employee by accident, or the employee deliberately took a low-salary low-expectation position to "coast" in, then maybe this line of reasoning holds up.
sys_64738 8y ago
One of the issues with 'unlimited' vacation is that when you leave your employment you don't have any carryover anymore so the company doesn't pay you for unused vacation.
- kochikame 8y ago
  This was addressed in the article I think
- ghaff 8y ago
  I’m not sure it’s an “issue” but it’s certainly the case that in situations where employees move around on the order of 12 months or so, such policies will tend to reduce salaries a bit. I’m not against untracked time but it needs to be implemented in concert with hard minimums and a culture that is accepting of people taking time off.
- olliej 8y ago
  that's a design goal - not taking vacation is an intended (not unintended as this article claimed) byproduct. I know this because my wife worked at a "unlimited time off" company, and even though she gave them a heads up before accepting that she took a month or more vacation a year, when she did that they turned around and had an all hands about it was being abused. My opinion on unlimited time off: if I can't say "I'm taking a year long vacation" you need to give a finite limit. Nom company would agree to this because unlimited time off is deliberately to avoid liability for earned income.
ryan_j_naughton 8y ago
The RAND Corporation studied their own 2000 academic quality statisticians and researchers, and they found that even with generous vacation time (through the traditional accrued vacation days practice), most researchers were so engrossed in their work that they still didn't take their vacation. They then analyzed their people and found that those who did take their vacation performed better than those who didn't. Subsequently, they wanted to figure out how to incentivize people to take vacation, so they instituted sabbatical pay. Specifically, they pay employees a bonus to take vacation. In contrast, I work at a startup with unlimited vacation, and plenty of employees are at risk of burnout because they rarely take their vacation -- ultimately hurting the company along with themselves.
XenophileJKO 8y ago
LinkedIn does this and it is great. Christmas week and July 4th week, the majority of the company shuts down. This is addition to "unlimited" vacation. I don't tend to account for the shutdowns as coming out of my mental pool of vacation time that I like to take every year. What people don't usually realise though, is that a shutdowns is very refreshing because you are not missing decisions and meetings etc. It means you can truly disconnect for 2 weeks. When vacationing at other times, the business it leaping forward and like it or not there is a draw to keep a finger on it.
gumby 8y ago
I'm a fan of unlimited vacation because I don't have to track it on the B/S but the "people think that means they shouldn't take any" problem is real! Worse, I had a candidate whose wife was worried that was what it really meant (games industry, horrible QoL in most cases). Luckily he brought it up that way, and as this was an internal referral we had her call people she knew already in the company to verify that we weren't jerks.
- wink 8y ago
  I don't know, in theory it sounds fine, but I really don't know how much I'd take. But coordinating with family, stuff that comes up and so on.. this is the first year I've not spent 3 days from my (not unusual for Germany) 28 days from last year and have to take them before the end of March so they don't get lost... In other years I had 30 and could've easily used 10 more. TLDR: I prefer the German model of 24-33 days and you're encouraged to take them. Wouldn't hurt to increase the number, as long as they're really taken 90% of the time.
  - gumby 8y ago
    The benefit of unlimited for employees is less the long vacations, but the ad hoc needs for the off due to kid being sick, yourself being sick, etc.
    - Argorak 8y ago
      That would better be covered by unlimited sick leave. Which, for example, Germany has. Sick leave is covered to some extend (70% up to 30 days, fully afterwards) by the health insurance. There's a clear separation between sick leave and holidays, the first is a medical need, the second is for recreation. (which leads to the interesting case that you can call in sick during your holidays and get the days back) Folding sick leave and holidays together is weird IMHO, as you personally don't control the first, but do control the second.
      - gumby 8y ago
gumby 8y ago
Don't forget that regardless of your other vacation policies, people in finance should be required to take multi-week vacations each year, at different times each year.
mnm1 8y ago
If people aren't taking enough vacation, your company's culture is shit. They are afraid they will lose their jobs. Unlimited vacation is bullshit. A European might expect to take six weeks while your shitty company expects them to take two. Those differences cannot be resolved and eventually someone will get fired. It should be illegal to claim unlimited vacation unless one could literally be on vacation 100% of the time. Corporate assholes who coined this term and put such practices into existence should go fuck themselves. It's only there to look good on paper and save the company having to pay out vacation. Once again, American workers getting fucked over so their bosses can save a little money. In the long run, however, it's the business that gets fucked by burnt out, unmotivated employees. Deservedly so considering the scum who run most businesses. Those morons can't even see they are shooting themselves as well as everyone else in the foot. Such stupidity is the norm rather than the exception.
- CamTin 8y ago
  I'm in favor of treating workers better as much as anyone, but I'm dubious about claims that European-style pro-worker policies are actually better for the bottom line. The US has higher productivity than most EU states. Given broadly similar capital and infrastructure, it would seem at least some of this gap is due to people being more afraid to lose their jobs in the US than in the EU. Not only that, but couching pro-worker policies in terms of benefits for ownership obscures the issue, and implicitly makes the argument that we should only have pro-worker policies when they are also pro-ownership. That's nonsense, since there are millions and millions of workers and we ostensibly have a democracy.
  - mnm1 8y ago
    Most but not all EU states. And many other EU states are very close to US productivity while they're working less http://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/ http://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/ So threatening worker's lives and not having a single day of vacation or sick time are clearly not the reason for higher productivity. They're just there to make people's lives more miserable and continue a culture obsessed with control and enslavement. Anyway, productivity only matters to business owners. Workers couldn't give a shit. They just can't get their concerns addressed because we live in a plutocratic oligarchy which hardly qualifies as a democracy.
ThePadawan 8y ago
European perspective: Of my legally mandated 4 wks of vacation, I have to take at least one consecutive two-week chunk. Obviously, I as the employee have to put in the request for that, and it 100% depends on the company if they actually care enough about labor laws to force/enable me to do so.
- cr1895 8y ago
  Really? Which country mandates that? Or do you mean it's employer-mandated?
  - ThePadawan 8y ago
    This is Switzerland and part of the OR ("Obligationenrecht"), §329c, paragraph 1 [0] [0] https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19110009/index.html#a329c https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19110009/...
  - ystk 8y ago
    This is mandated in Article 8 of this ILO convention: http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312277#A8 http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO... http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300:P11300_INSTRUMENT_ID:312277 http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300...
  - rffn 8y ago
    The law in Germany pretty much states the same.
- dominicr 8y ago
  Similar in Norway, where there are times of the year companies basically shutdown or run on minimal staff. In Norway this is July, Italy has similar for August. But ultimately I think it's culture as much as policies. The US, and lesser extent the UK, has a culture of submitting to work over life (as do other countries, so not singling out the US or UK here). In the UK I had to nag people to take holidays and there was usually a holiday crunch at the end of the year when lots of people took time of just because they had to. Whereas, living in Norway now, the Scandinavian ethic of maintaining a good work/life balance means there's not really a problem of people not using all their holidays. Or work much overtime either.
sacado2 8y ago
Not taking paid vacation you're allowed to take is so weird. I mean, it's like not taking your whole paycheck and leaving it to your employer.
rgoulter 8y ago
How do you handle the person who’s taking a lot more time off than others? I don't understand miscommunications like this between employer and employee. I think the employer needs a more specific solution than "unlimited vacation" if the concern about fixed-allowance leave was a lack of flexibility for shit-happens situations. I'd be curious about "compensated for work done".

31 points by vinnyglennon 8y ago

In the financial sector, vacation is a fraud control. Reshuffling job duties makes it easier for others to discover your misconduct, and temporarily suspending your access makes it harder for you to cover it up.

foobiekr 8y ago
it would seem this would mostly only work if the vacation was imposed randomly. otherwise you have plenty of time to plan it.
- Matticus_Rex 8y ago
  Even limiting the scope to things that can be covered up with some lead time is a benefit.
- LogicX 8y ago
  My mother worked in banking, and was required to take a consecutive two week block of vacation. I believe the idea was that any fishy financial sruff would likely come up during such an extended time off.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jalgos_eminator 8y ago

Ok, so how would "forced time off" be the middle ground between unlimited time off and tracked time off. Isn't "forced time off" just tracked time off but they require you to take it? The only problem it solves is burned out employees, and I would argue that it doesn't even fix that problem. The reason is that you can't force people to take their minds off work, even if you force them to not physically be at work.

freeone3000 8y ago
It could be done as a minimum vacation policy, instead of a maximum vacation? As in, you must take this many days off, but if you need more they're available?
- bigiain 8y ago
  I've seen it done as a "maximum accrued vacation time" policy. Once you got 30 days accrued, you had to book enough time off to reduce it to less than 30 days within the next three months. Everybody hated that too. Being forced to take time off when you didn't particularly want to, and not being able to "save up" enough vacation for a really good ling trip away... And, of course, those rules were regularly "bent" when it suited management, but rigidly enforced otherwise... (We typically accrue 20 days per year here in .au, so that pretty much means after 18 months, if you haven't taken any vacation at all yet, you need to take at least a week off in the next three months, and a week off every three months thereafter.)
- zhdc1 8y ago
  That's how it works at my current employer. We're required to take all but X number of days per year. Supervisors are allowed to generously authorize paid work from home as well.
stmfreak 8y ago
Sometimes key employees need to be reminded to schedule a real get away vacation. It should be part of the Managment 101 mentioned in the article. This seems like a non problem to me.
kochikame 8y ago
Japan kind of has this. Golden Week in May, Obon in the summer and New Year's leave are all mandatory days off for the vast majority of employees. These are the peak leisure travel times for Japanese people, because everything is closed. As Japanese workers are famous for not using all their paid leave, and if they do it is in half days here, this is a nationally mandated way to make sure that everyone gets at least a few days off a year.

emperorcezar 8y ago

> What about the person who heard your explanation of “just get your work done” as “if you’re highly productive, this is a part-time job with full-time pay?” What about them. Maybe they are highly productive because they are "part-time"? Sounds like a good problem to have to me.

flax 8y ago
Agree. Are you hiring to get work done, or to warm your office chairs for a set amount of time?
- kochikame 8y ago
  Point is, there's always something else they could be doing/improving/creating/testing/helping with
  - emperorcezar 8y ago
    Unless their brain is only working 4-6 hours a day and after that they won't make much of a contribution. I feel like my point is, if you're gonna want hourly work, pay for hourly work. Take this scenario, I'm a highly productive dev. I work 5 hours a day and I'm burnt. But my manager makes my sit my butt in a seat for 8 hours. "Fine, whatever" I say. Now crunch time comes and I'm pushing hard to 10 or more hours a day. I'm going to look back at the wasted time before in my seat with resentment. Because it's expected of me to give you more hours than my alotted 40 when the time comes, but when it's light I don't get to take that back.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Presumably you sought out and paid the premium for a highly capable employee because you wanted their above-average capabilities. If they're just going to meet the baseline and go home, the employer is wasting time and money relative to someone cheaper and easier to find. If the company hired a highly capable employee by accident, or the employee deliberately took a low-salary low-expectation position to "coast" in, then maybe this line of reasoning holds up.

sys_64738 8y ago

One of the issues with 'unlimited' vacation is that when you leave your employment you don't have any carryover anymore so the company doesn't pay you for unused vacation.

kochikame 8y ago
This was addressed in the article I think
ghaff 8y ago
I’m not sure it’s an “issue” but it’s certainly the case that in situations where employees move around on the order of 12 months or so, such policies will tend to reduce salaries a bit. I’m not against untracked time but it needs to be implemented in concert with hard minimums and a culture that is accepting of people taking time off.
olliej 8y ago
that's a design goal - not taking vacation is an intended (not unintended as this article claimed) byproduct. I know this because my wife worked at a "unlimited time off" company, and even though she gave them a heads up before accepting that she took a month or more vacation a year, when she did that they turned around and had an all hands about it was being abused. My opinion on unlimited time off: if I can't say "I'm taking a year long vacation" you need to give a finite limit. Nom company would agree to this because unlimited time off is deliberately to avoid liability for earned income.

ryan_j_naughton 8y ago

The RAND Corporation studied their own 2000 academic quality statisticians and researchers, and they found that even with generous vacation time (through the traditional accrued vacation days practice), most researchers were so engrossed in their work that they still didn't take their vacation. They then analyzed their people and found that those who did take their vacation performed better than those who didn't. Subsequently, they wanted to figure out how to incentivize people to take vacation, so they instituted sabbatical pay. Specifically, they pay employees a bonus to take vacation. In contrast, I work at a startup with unlimited vacation, and plenty of employees are at risk of burnout because they rarely take their vacation -- ultimately hurting the company along with themselves.

XenophileJKO 8y ago

LinkedIn does this and it is great. Christmas week and July 4th week, the majority of the company shuts down. This is addition to "unlimited" vacation. I don't tend to account for the shutdowns as coming out of my mental pool of vacation time that I like to take every year. What people don't usually realise though, is that a shutdowns is very refreshing because you are not missing decisions and meetings etc. It means you can truly disconnect for 2 weeks. When vacationing at other times, the business it leaping forward and like it or not there is a draw to keep a finger on it.

gumby 8y ago

I'm a fan of unlimited vacation because I don't have to track it on the B/S but the "people think that means they shouldn't take any" problem is real! Worse, I had a candidate whose wife was worried that was what it really meant (games industry, horrible QoL in most cases). Luckily he brought it up that way, and as this was an internal referral we had her call people she knew already in the company to verify that we weren't jerks.

wink 8y ago
I don't know, in theory it sounds fine, but I really don't know how much I'd take. But coordinating with family, stuff that comes up and so on.. this is the first year I've not spent 3 days from my (not unusual for Germany) 28 days from last year and have to take them before the end of March so they don't get lost... In other years I had 30 and could've easily used 10 more. TLDR: I prefer the German model of 24-33 days and you're encouraged to take them. Wouldn't hurt to increase the number, as long as they're really taken 90% of the time.
- gumby 8y ago
  The benefit of unlimited for employees is less the long vacations, but the ad hoc needs for the off due to kid being sick, yourself being sick, etc.
  - Argorak 8y ago
    That would better be covered by unlimited sick leave. Which, for example, Germany has. Sick leave is covered to some extend (70% up to 30 days, fully afterwards) by the health insurance. There's a clear separation between sick leave and holidays, the first is a medical need, the second is for recreation. (which leads to the interesting case that you can call in sick during your holidays and get the days back) Folding sick leave and holidays together is weird IMHO, as you personally don't control the first, but do control the second.
    - gumby 8y ago

gumby 8y ago

Don't forget that regardless of your other vacation policies, people in finance should be required to take multi-week vacations each year, at different times each year.

mnm1 8y ago

If people aren't taking enough vacation, your company's culture is shit. They are afraid they will lose their jobs. Unlimited vacation is bullshit. A European might expect to take six weeks while your shitty company expects them to take two. Those differences cannot be resolved and eventually someone will get fired. It should be illegal to claim unlimited vacation unless one could literally be on vacation 100% of the time. Corporate assholes who coined this term and put such practices into existence should go fuck themselves. It's only there to look good on paper and save the company having to pay out vacation. Once again, American workers getting fucked over so their bosses can save a little money. In the long run, however, it's the business that gets fucked by burnt out, unmotivated employees. Deservedly so considering the scum who run most businesses. Those morons can't even see they are shooting themselves as well as everyone else in the foot. Such stupidity is the norm rather than the exception.

CamTin 8y ago
I'm in favor of treating workers better as much as anyone, but I'm dubious about claims that European-style pro-worker policies are actually better for the bottom line. The US has higher productivity than most EU states. Given broadly similar capital and infrastructure, it would seem at least some of this gap is due to people being more afraid to lose their jobs in the US than in the EU. Not only that, but couching pro-worker policies in terms of benefits for ownership obscures the issue, and implicitly makes the argument that we should only have pro-worker policies when they are also pro-ownership. That's nonsense, since there are millions and millions of workers and we ostensibly have a democracy.
- mnm1 8y ago
  Most but not all EU states. And many other EU states are very close to US productivity while they're working less http://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/ http://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/ So threatening worker's lives and not having a single day of vacation or sick time are clearly not the reason for higher productivity. They're just there to make people's lives more miserable and continue a culture obsessed with control and enslavement. Anyway, productivity only matters to business owners. Workers couldn't give a shit. They just can't get their concerns addressed because we live in a plutocratic oligarchy which hardly qualifies as a democracy.

ThePadawan 8y ago

European perspective: Of my legally mandated 4 wks of vacation, I have to take at least one consecutive two-week chunk. Obviously, I as the employee have to put in the request for that, and it 100% depends on the company if they actually care enough about labor laws to force/enable me to do so.

cr1895 8y ago
Really? Which country mandates that? Or do you mean it's employer-mandated?
- ThePadawan 8y ago
  This is Switzerland and part of the OR ("Obligationenrecht"), §329c, paragraph 1 [0] [0] https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19110009/index.html#a329c https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19110009/...
- ystk 8y ago
  This is mandated in Article 8 of this ILO convention: http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312277#A8 http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO... http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300:P11300_INSTRUMENT_ID:312277 http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:11300:0::NO:11300...
- rffn 8y ago
  The law in Germany pretty much states the same.
dominicr 8y ago
Similar in Norway, where there are times of the year companies basically shutdown or run on minimal staff. In Norway this is July, Italy has similar for August. But ultimately I think it's culture as much as policies. The US, and lesser extent the UK, has a culture of submitting to work over life (as do other countries, so not singling out the US or UK here). In the UK I had to nag people to take holidays and there was usually a holiday crunch at the end of the year when lots of people took time of just because they had to. Whereas, living in Norway now, the Scandinavian ethic of maintaining a good work/life balance means there's not really a problem of people not using all their holidays. Or work much overtime either.

sacado2 8y ago

Not taking paid vacation you're allowed to take is so weird. I mean, it's like not taking your whole paycheck and leaving it to your employer.

rgoulter 8y ago

How do you handle the person who’s taking a lot more time off than others? I don't understand miscommunications like this between employer and employee. I think the employer needs a more specific solution than "unlimited vacation" if the concern about fixed-allowance leave was a lack of flexibility for shit-happens situations. I'd be curious about "compensated for work done".