Guin tweeted a link to the Social Media Group‘s new HR policy for vacation time: take as much as you want. Paid.
Basically they stopped tracking it back in October, and while the sense is that people are taking more paid vacation time, that’s kind of the point, since they want to have refreshed employees (and use that as a competitive advantage, I’d guess,) but so far people aren’t booking months at a go, opting instead for weekends and afternoons.
This is one of those things that reminds me of web hosting’s “unlimited” bandwidth promises (and yes, those quotes are important, ha) since as the article points out, most employees anywhere have trouble taking their full allocation of vacation time anyway (back when I worked at a company that had such things, I know I had that issue, plus overtime, but anyway…)
It’s what I hope will be a sign of an overall trend to treating employees like grownups, but I doubt it would work in every industry. Actually, it’s not the industry so much as the culture within an organization. If you’ve got a culture of clock watchers and people who make sure they get every second back if they stray 2 minutes into lunch on a call, then I could see some serious problems with open vacation. On the other hand, if your organization’s culture is one where people know they’re being compensated for their commitment to the mission, chances are they’re already doing more than their contractual share anyway.
(Photo by nigelhowe)
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