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I once said unlimited PTO was a scam. Clickbait? Sure. But poorly thought-out unlimited policies do end up being worse for employees than traditional set time policies.
The 3 main reasons:
You don’t get paid out for accrued time off when there is no accrued time off.
Peer pressure and lack of clarity drive people to work just as much if not more anyway.
It isn’t unlimited anyway. People have to actually work at some point.
Still, it has its benefits. And we’re thinkers here at Hirewell. So we went full red-pill and adopted unlimited PTO this year.
From leadership’s perspective, it was pretty straightforward:
👉Tracking PTO sucks.
It’s more busy work that’s totally unnecessary when you trust your team.
👉We only really care about results. (And not being jerks.)
If someone delivers, who cares if they take an extra week. Or two. Or three.
👉The end of the year, cram-in-all-your-unused-time is silly.
Especially with the free week off before the holidays. Not to mention a counterproductive to the business when it happens across the board.
But if you make this move, it’s going to have challenges. We’re still working on the best ways to solve them. A few things we learned along the way:
1. It feels like a trap to a lot of employees.
Especially new hires. Everyone’s heard the unlimited PTO schtick before. No one believes it right away. They’re still expecting to be shamed for time off.
You’ll have to do “untraining” to get over their PTSD from bad, micromanaged environments. Messaging needs to be clear and reinforced from orientation on.
2. Every Friday is a Summer Friday.
I’m from the North. I’ve always thought Southerners must laugh at the idea of shorter Fridays just because the weather doesn’t suck. We don’t mind working longer every other Friday because it’s freezing and we were going to sit on the couch anyway?
Sure, you can say Summer Fridays aren’t a thing and work your staff until 5. But they can just take unlimited half days…
Like everything else with unlimited time off, it comes down to whether or not people are getting the job done or not. Why shouldn’t it be year round?
Which brings me to the toughest part…
3. A “job well done” based on individual interpretation can lead to people penalizing themselves.
People “taking advantage” of unlimited PTO won’t be very common. But people stressing over whether or not they’ve done enough to earn that extra day or week? That will be.
Of all these, this is the hardest. Some jobs are easy to track with performance metrics, some aren’t.
But even with the by-the-numbers approach: people having a bad quarter need a break too. Might just be what the doctor ordered.
Metrics are a great basis. But humans require a human touch. An ongoing conversation about how they’re doing, what they need to work on, if they’re taking enough time, etc.
You know, proper management. Unlimited PTO may not be scam, but it’s also not a set-it-and-forget-it policy.
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Speak for yourself when you say "We don’t mind working longer every other Friday because it’s freezing and we were going to sit on the couch anyway". Many of us DO NOT cower on the couch during the winter. Many of us are off to our winter pursuits on Friday afternoon/evening. (Skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, ice fishing, etc etc etc.