Making Unlimited Vacation Time Work
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HBR IdeaCast
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, how do you avoid the problem of an unlimited vacation policy somehow being a catalyst for people working even harder and taking less time off? You can’t do what we do unless your organization has transparency, has trust, is very collaborative working between manager and people on the manager’s team, communicate, talking about what you’re planning to do; and certainly that we trust people to get their work done and we do. We have a culture where we don’t take the vacation time, even that we’ve earned, a lot of the time, and the most popular reason given—I think something like 40 percent of people in surveys point to this reason—is that there’s just too much work to come back to after some time away.