A UK-based recruitment company is lifting its unlimited vacation policy for employees in favor of a fixed 32-day vacation limit, a policy that its founder says will offer more “clarity” on vacation standards.
“No one spends more than 21 days a year,” said Olli Scott, founder of Unknown, in a post on LinkedIn on Monday.
“It turned out to be consistently among our best performers, so it set something like a strange ‘guilty standard’. There’s just a general anxiety about ‘yes, but like, how much can I actually take?'” Scott wrote.
Dozens of studies and studies confirm that employees often take fewer days off if their company has an unlimited vacation policy, especially if there is a limited framework for how many vacations they can or should take.
In a 2017 study, the HR platform Namely found that employees with unlimited vacation plans take an average of only 13 days off per year, while employees with a traditional plan take 15 days off per year.
“Depending on how the policy of unlimited PTO (paid leave) is implemented in practice, it is often more beneficial for employers than for employees,” the study authors write.
Other studies show that there is an element of guilt associated with adopting a PTO for both limited and unlimited vacation plans.
According to a turnkey survey of 2,000 respondents from 2019, 54% of employees surveyed feel guilty for taking leave, and 70% went to work while out of work.
On top of that, the record of 768 million days remained unused by American workers in 2018 for those with limited holiday policies, a study by the American Tourist Association found, citing “difficulties in running away from work” as the main reason.
Unlimited vacation remains a popular advantage among major global companies such as Netflix, LinkedIn, GitHub and most recently Goldman Sachs.
The number of job offers offering unlimited vacation days as a reward increased by almost 180% from May 2015 to May 2019, according to Indeed, with technology jobs about six or eight times more likely to offer the advantage in their publications.
Some Canadian companies are following suit, but four-day work weeks are also gaining popularity – the city of Springwater in Ontario is currently participating in a pilot project for a 4-day work week, and several Toronto-based companies such as The Leadership Agency and Alida Inc. have already introduced the 4-day policy.
“The truth is, this has an immediate impact on our business,” Jamie Savage, CEO and founder of The Leadership Agency, told CTV News last year. “The immediate impact was their well-being.”
Changes in the way jobs work in the country could have a positive impact on the way North Americans view and treat work, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Nearly a third of working Canadians describe themselves as workaholics, according to a 2005 Statistics Canada study, and in 2015, nearly half of Canadians surveyed by the Angus Reed Institute said overtime work was a choice.
Canadian employees are legally entitled to a minimum of 10 days of paid leave (PTO) per year. This law often excludes freelancers, contracts, temporary workers and workers who do not qualify for PTO and cannot afford unpaid leave as living costs rise.
According to the Government of Canada, federally regulated employees are entitled to 9 paid statutory leave.
In the UK, where Scott’s company is located, employees are entitled to 28 paid days off. According to the UK government, this applies to almost all full-time workers, including agency workers, part-time workers and zero-contract workers.
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