Unlimited vacation + holiday time off
As a coach I have seen how the wrong vacation policies can be massively disruptive to teams. A lot of startups think it looks generous or cool to have unlimited vacation to attract talent, but I’m going to make an argument here for why you need a clear set of boundaries around time off - especially around the holidays - to help your team thrive.
Problem #1: The wrong people take advantage of unlimited vacation.
I’ve seen this way too often: you get a middle or low achiever and they seem to always be out of the office. They push your unlimited vacation policy to its limit taking off days here and there or, worse, multiple long stretches at a time. My guess is that your startup team has very little talent redundancy so if one person is out, it has a big ripple on your collective productivity.
Without a policy in place you are expecting for common sense to guide individual decision-making. But what happens when one person takes way too much vacation? As managers, you have to address it but the conversation is super awkward, like this:
You: “Can we talk about your vacation time?”
Direct report: “Sure. It’s unlimited, what’s there to talk about?”
You: “Well, when we said unlimited we didn’t really mean this much…”
Direct report: “But isn’t that the definition of unlimited?”
I hope you see my point. It’s incredibly hard to course-correct without any clear policies in place.
Problem #2: The right people never take vacation.
Unlimited vacation makes it really hard for overachievers to take a break, which leads to burnout. There’s rarely a very good time to take a vacation in an early stage hard tech startup and so folks end up pushing themselves from milestone to milestone and feel guilty or uncomfortable asking for a break. Maybe you even have a martyr culture. Maybe you are modeling this work-until-you-break approach unintentionally as a leader.
What ends up happening is that your team’s energy and pep dwindles away. Your team's reserves to handle unexpected sprints and emotionally hard things slowly diminishes. Your buoyancy and flexibility gets stifled when your team never gets a chance to recharge and reset.
I’m a huge believer that micro-breaks prevent us from burnout - taking a few hours here or an extra long weekend there. It’s a delicate balance and when we pull for too long from our reserves, we end up needing to take a 4 week hiatus on a beach somewhere to get our drive and focus back. Or worse, you get pneumonia, which is what happened to me after hitting a big deadline in my twenties. It took me out for weeks and I had no choice but to sleep and rest.
When you have a limited amount of “use it or lose it days off” then it sends a message to your team that you want them to actually take those days off - or else they vanish at the end of the year.
Problem #3: “Working from home” days vs vacation days
Many people work from home as a way of taking it a little bit easier. Sure there are some folks who can focus and crush tasks like it’s nobody’s business when they’re at home. But, often. folks say they’re working from home and are actually only working half-speed or running errands here and there in between essential calls.
The honest truth is that not all jobs are created equal. If you have a lab-based job, it’s hard to do much other than analyze data from home. I’ll write a separate post soon with my thoughts about work from home policies but, for now, I’d try to push your team to be honest about what they want to accomplish when they are at home and whether or not just taking a half-day off makes more sense.
What if, instead…
What if you had approximately 20 paid time off days (PTO) per year. You can use them for sick days or personal days or whatever. As a team you have a clear set of protocols for how people get days off approved and how they communicate their absence to the team. I’d suggest you have a specific protocol put in place for longer vacations - like you need to have at least two weeks notice so you can re-adjust responsibilities and stay on course with your OKRs.
Consider having a shared team vacation calendar so it’s transparent to everyone who is offline when. Maybe you have a protocol in place in which everyone sends out a reminder email before they leave and sets up a bounce-back reply on their email while they’re gone with a clearly identified person who can answer timely questions.
You can always make an exception for someone who has legit reasons why they need additional time off and troubleshoot individually. Perhaps there’s a sick relative or a VISA issue. Policies are meant to manage most situations. Unlike some of the large institutions I’ve worked at previously with thousands of employees, your relatively small startup can still be nimble and adjust on-they-fly as unique situations arise.
Something to consider: shutdown days for everyone
I’m a big fan of company shutdown days around major holidays that are freebies for everyone. In the US, I’d suggest adding a day or two around July 4th, Thanksgiving, and Christmas/New Years. No one is going to be working anyway, so you might as well give everyone an easier time preparing for and transitioning back from what are often big travel days.
One thing to plan for, though, is finding alternative solutions for some of your lab-based team members who can’t take a specific day off or else it would mess up lengthy experiments. Make sure those folks know what they can do instead, if they can’t take a particular day off for the sake of scientific progress.
A few more thoughts about holidays…
Holidays can bring up big feelings for some people who have complicated family situations or are ex-pats away from their country of origin. I was raised Jewish and I now celebrate Christmas as well but for years I felt left out of company holiday celebration stuff that didn’t represent me.
So, as you head into the holiday season, try to be as compassionate as you can be about representation and inclusion. If you can host an extra person at your table, consider inviting a teammate who has nowhere to go. Even if they don’t accept your invitation, I’m sure it would mean the world to them to be asked.
