According to Ayers R (2018), the unlimited vacation usually fits for tech startups because they have flexible time off which they are not tied to time sensitive tasks, or need face-to-face interaction. Healthcare, customer services are the example of actives industries which does not suitable to have this unlimited vacation policy. According to spokesperson of Kickstarter, he said that they always taking care of their quality of team work, how to balance and enjoy their work.
One of their additional benefit to their employees are by giving the unlimited vacation. The question is the employees does not know the amount of days that necessary for them to take a leave. In order to answer this question, the employees and employers should clear about the unlimited vacation policy first.
Unlimited vacation time is given by the company to the workers to take as many time off as long as they can get their job done. At the ZenPayroll company, they give their trust to their workers to have unlimited vacation to build their ownership mentality. Eventhough the vacation is flexible but they must know that the employer expected that they will use 75% of their vacation. Besides, employees also need to let their boss or colleagues know about their leave.
Advantages of Unlimited Vacation Time
According to Boitnott J (2018), the advantages of this unlimited vacation is to increase employee happiness. The main reason of this unlimited vacation time are to improve workplace culture and boost employee morale. According to State of the American Workplace Report (2017), there are 53% of employees say it’s “very important” to have a job that allows them greater work- life balance and personal well-being.
By offering this unlimited vacation time really help the employees to achieve both of these components. Other than that, the advantages of these unlimited vacation time is can attract and retain top talent. Research from Glassdoor show that nearly 80 percent of workers prefer additional benefits over income increases. They also can save their costs without offering higher salaries by offering the top talent these unlimited vacation time.
In addition, this unlimited vacation also help the burn out employees to take their leave for a trip to release their work stress. This way will improve their quality of work for the better result. Other than that, the unlimited vacation give benefit to the employer to cut the costs because they do not have to track the unused vacation time and they does not need to pay for the employees who leave the company for unused vacation time.
Disadvantages of Unlimited Vacation Time
Eventhough there are many advantages from this unlimited vacation, there also few disadvantages of this benefit such as the workers are underutilizing the benefit. It is worrying for some of the employers because their employee can taking off any time without worrying the risk of being losing their job. In the result, their employee unable to balance their work-life. The second disadvantages is the senior employee can lose their vacation time as a reward.
Some of the senior employees feeling that they are undervalue because this policy is also given to the new employees. They think that they are deserve greater reward which is more worth. Furthermore, this unlimited vacation does not really effective when the manager does not show the good example to their employee when using this benefit. As the leader, they are the one who should encouraging open communication which can help to signal that taking vacation is normal.
There is also problematic to the employers to trust their employee as they are given flexible vacation as they need perform well. Lastly, there are also some employees hesitant to take this flexible vacation as they do not want to be seen as taking advantage for this policy. Some of the employee also follow their employer when they become risk-averse and cannot make decision which cause them to make low choice, worse or not sign at all (Griswold A, 2013).