In my last three roles I've gone from: - Fixed allowance, which included sick time in the bucket, but you could sell time back each December Shortly after I j

In my last three roles I've gone from: - Fixed allowance, which included sick time in the bucket, but you could sell time back each December Shortly after I joined HR decided to just merge the 5 days of sick time, and whatever the vacation allotment was and tell people they have one big bucket. eg. 25 days a year. Nice idea. In reality everyone came in sick didn't want to touch that time. It was easy to watch colds and flu spread through teams then across the floor. It was brutal for productivity. No remote work at the time didn't help there either. But, at the end of each year you could sell unused days back to the company (I think it was in blocks of 5). This was a really nice feature, prevented rolling over time, and was paid out in early Dec, so a good time to get a bonus of sorts. Given I was on-call and accrued a lot of comp time, I could typically sell back 10 days and just get an extra pay check each year, while still taking vacation. - Unlimited Never felt this was a PR scam or any sort of malice, but it did make it necessary to encourage people to take time. In the end I set a minimum number of days for my teams and tracked it, encouraging people to take off time. This comes down to hugely cultural issues, and whether the leadership can make it clear that time off is necessary and expected. This is definitely my favorite situation, as long as it's genuinely there to encourage employee well being, and people are judged on delivery and impact, and not on time off. ie. if you do a good job, take off the time you want without being micromanaged for it. No, you don't get paid out though when you leave, which is a bummer. - Regular fixed with no sale, and no sick day cap. Going from unlimited to a standard fixed amount was oddly jarring, suddenly having to worry about counting days off, considering more when and how much vacation to plan for. In reality I've never really needed much extra time, but just having to consider it feels odd after years of constantly encouraging people to just take more time, and never worrying about counting days myself. Encouraging people to be out/remote when sick is a huge improvement over job 1 too. People can be remote or off, and not feel there's a negative impact on their vacation time. ---- Something I've not seen mentioned here as well is that at several finance jobs I've had I've been required to take 2 weeks mandatory leave each year. This is a compliance rule impacting people with the ability to impact books and records, or edit trading and account data. Employees are required to be out of the office and not transacting business for 2 consecutive weeks. It's a silly idea that if you're cooking the books that'll come to light if you're out for two weeks. I've seen this implemented in different ways at different firms with different limits, but it's all the same idea. Especially for junior employees with limited vacation days being mandated to take two weeks at once can feel pretty harsh and limiting.