Don't you just love it when real life turns conventional wisdom upside down?
Take this growing trend of unlimited vacation policies at companies like IBM and Netflix. While on its face, it might sound logistically challenging at best and downright chaotic at worst, the policies actually not only appear to be improving productivity, but easing employee stress, as well.
In practice, it appears to level off the traditional seasonal and end-of-year jumps in vacation days, making life easier for human resource managers as well as the employees.
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Fast Company, which covered this more extensively not too long ago, presented at least two successful case studies in unlimited vacation policies. Software developer Hubspot got rid of the traditional "two weeks a year" a couple of years ago and has managed to stay the second-fastest growing software maker ever since, based on Inc. 500's numbers.
And GoHealthInsurance.com, which appears to have no policy at all, notched 200 percent growth this year.
Not while unlimited vacation time is almost certainly a factor in the Hollywood success stories these companies seem to be living, they just a part of what appear to be more comprehensive benefit plans that are clearly aimed at employee loyalty. These cases just happen to show us a quantitative outcome to not only putting employees first, but trusting them and their role in the company's larger success. More often than not, they respond well to that. Trusted employees tend to respond by earning it.
This past weekend, we toured New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colo., the third-largest microbrewery in the country with a well-deserved reputation in the benefits business and almost no turnover. The locker room doesn't have locks, and the weekly free case of beer each employee is promised is doled on a "help yourself" honor system. Nothing's ever gone missing.
I've been criticized for comparing employees to my own kids in the past when I fumble through one of my convoluted analogies. And maybe there's something to that. Because when we treat employees like grownups, allowing them to make their own decisions about issues like time off, they tend to act like them.
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