Updated
May 16, 2023
In this episode, we explore unlimited paid time off policies: what they are, what they aren't, and items to consider when implementing this type of approach to PTO.
Katrina Donald takes over hosting duties and turns the interviewee's microphone unusually in Tim Cynova's direction as they discuss Paid Time Off and his experience transitioning an organization to an Unlimited Paid vacation day policy.
Guest: Tim Cynova
Guest Host: Katrina Donald
Guest
Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.
Guest Host
Based in Treaty 7 Territory, Katrina Donald (she/her) is the principal consultant at ever-so-curious. She believes that listening and sensemaking practices bring us into community, reveal pathways forward, encourage and embolden us, and allow for greater impact. Her approach is relational and developmental; she works in partnership with people and organizations to co-design inclusive, collaborative and continuously emerging evaluation and HR strategies.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Manitoba and a Masters Certificate in Organization Development and Change from the Canadian Organization Development Institute (CODI) and the Schulich Executive and Education Centre (SEEC) at York University. She is a mother, wife, daughter, sister, systems thinker, developmental evaluator, program designer, and a Registered Professional Recruiter (RPR). She’s committed to showing up for her own ongoing learning and to building workplaces that are actively anti-racist, praxis-centered and humble as they work through the prickly bramble of change. Learn more on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. In this our 70th podcast episode, we're changing things up a bit. My brilliant colleague, Katrina Donald, is taking over hosting this episode and turning the interviewee's microphone unusually in my direction as we discuss paid time off and my experience transitioning an organization to an unlimited paid vacation day policy. Let the adventure begin. Over to you, Katrina.
Katrina Donald:
Hey, Tim, how's it going?
Tim Cynova:
Living the dream, Katrina. Living the dream. How are you?
Katrina Donald:
Cool. I'm super glad that we have a chance to chat today because one of the things that we keep touching on in some of the other conversations we've recorded and things we've been talking about, but haven't had a chance to really chat about yet is this idea of unlimited paid time off. I'm really hoping that we can take the next 30 minutes or so and just pick your brain for some of the things that people should be thinking about or to help people understand what this is all about
Tim Cynova:
I've found it really fascinating recently as we're in this period of the pandemic where a lot of people have given thought to what's the balance between their work and their life or... I don't really like the balance between work and life because I view the work that I do as part of my life, but how do you balance different aspects of your life, I guess? What do you use time for this thing or for that thing? Especially with organizations and roles that have had more flexibility with hybrid workplace arrangements or remote workplace arrangements, and then being on lockdown for a lot of roles for two years maybe, where people are like, "I could have 400 vacation days, but I can't go anywhere. What am I going to use the vacation days, sit here and do something else while I'm sitting at my computer?"
I think there's been a lot of thought for a lot of people in different roles going into, what is a vacation day? What should it be used for? Where do I do my best work? How do I recharge? How do I make time to be with family? I think it's been really interesting to hear more of these conversations happening. Because for many years, I've been curious about why most organizations start with 10 days. There's these templates that many organizations use where it's like, all right, your first year you get 10 days. Your second year you get 11 days. You just add a day per year, but where did that come from? Or bereavement leave.
I was really fascinated around this when both my parents passed away. I was really fortunate to be on an organization that was like, "Just take the time you need," but thinking that's a really privileged space for a lot of people. Why do most organizations have three days bereavement leave, where you just copy and paste it from one to the next? I was talking to an appointment attorney and I asked her, I'm like, "Where did this thing come from? You can draw back to Henry Ford and the 40-hour work week and the five-day work week and stuff like that, but where did these three days come from?"
She was positing a couple ideas, "Well, maybe back in the day, it was a day to travel to the funeral, a day for the funeral, a day to come back from the funeral," or she was thinking about various faiths and how long you have to bury the body. It was really just fascinating. Most people don't think about what goes into that thing. We just copy and paste from one organization to the next. I think all of this work that people have been doing or all the staff people have been doing were like, what's a vacation day? And maybe how can we align time off, and in particular paid time off, with our values around maybe trusting people to get the work that they need to get done?
We're all adults. Why do we treat this the hall pass that you had to have in school if you need to go to use the restroom? It's like, why is there such rigidity around this? I say that also understanding why some organizations have just gone for this rigidity around being consistent and the lowest common denominator thinking, who's going to abuse this policy? But to think about how might you change this thing around? Several years ago, when I was at Fractured Atlas, we had a very traditional the 10 days plus one for every year that you were there. We had vacation day bucket, sick day bucket, personal day bucket.
Managing this, it was one of the things where I felt like every day I was always in the tracker. Someone was always asking me a question and usually work in the angles, if you will, around like, well, this isn't really a vacation day. It's more of a personal day, or it's a sick day, because vacation days rolled over and then you could cash out vacation days at the end of your tenure, sick days and personal days didn't. I'm like, oh my God, the amount of time people are trying to spin this one into it's not a vacation day and the amount of time I'm taking tracking it, there's got to be a better way of doing this. We started to hear about unlimited paid vacation days.
I will say the employment attorney that I mentioned around bereavement days hates this idea, and the reason they hate the idea is because there's no upper end. As we'll talk about, it gets me a little complicated if you're not really consistent about the application, but we had heard about it, let's just do unlimited paid vacation days. Take as many as you need. We'll make sure we have a performance management process in place so people know that they're getting the right work done to the level that we need.
But if you're doing that, take any reasonable number of vacation days during the year, which for us, most people were taking between 20 and 30 days during the course of the year, including some people who were like this was their very first job maybe ever and they had this benefit where it was very tough to find this kind of thing where you take 30 vacation days in your first job ever. We said, "All right, let's do unlimited paid vacation days." Our fiscal year started September 1. We said, "Okay, when we do this, people will no longer be able to roll over vacation days." This was the week before Memorial Day or something.
We're like, all right, so we're moving toward this new structure. We had been talking about it for a while, and so people knew it was in the mix. We were like, all right, we're really doing this thing. With the new fiscal year, everyone's ticker is usually reset, so we're taking that opportunity to say, "We're moving over to this thing." If you've banked 11 days, 15 days, whatever it is, it goes to unlimited as of September 1. What we're going to do this summer is we're going to make a concerted effort so everyone runs it down to zero, because we want you to take advantage of this time off.
Katrina Donald:
It's the time you're owed.
Tim Cynova:
I mean, it was a horrible summer for coverage. We were trying to figure out what's a bare minimum for coverage because everyone was doing this and we're encouraging people to do it, but it's like, all right, we have to have two people in this department in order to make sure it still works. I don't think we ever said no to requests, but we're like, "Can you shift it a little bit, or can you work this one day from wherever you might be because we need this coverage?" We made it work. It was a really interesting process to do that. We were really honest about having done our research.
A couple of points that people raise around unlimited time off or unlimited pay vacation days were research shows that people take fewer days because they don't have to ticker. When you have 10, I got to run this down to zero or I lose them in the next year, or I need to run it down to whatever will roll over. We were honest. We said, "Look, this is not the reason we're doing this, and you should know that this is just what happens." Part of the responsibility that supervisors are taking on with this is we're going to pay attention to who's not taking vacation. Not who is, but who's not, because that usually means you need to take a vacation.
Why have you not taken any time off in nine months here? That was one data point. And then the other data point that we stressed was research shows that you only get the psychic benefits of time off if you've chunked it in two week increments. Don't take off every Friday because you might have the same number of days off, but you're not going to get the ability to unplug. As we know, it's usually the first week where your body is just getting used to not being in that routine. The second week is when you really start to see those benefits. We're really honest about both of those.
This is what you need to know, this is how we should approach it, and it's an experiment. We will try this. If it doesn't work, we'll see what doesn't work and then we'll iterate again. But this feels like it fits more of our values than the paternalistic 10 plus one vacation policy.
Katrina Donald:
I'm really curious, you've helped us to think about what actually it is. I just want to clarify, when you're talking about this unlimited paid time, are you including in their sick days and the bereavement days and some of those other personal mental health days as well? Is that all included in what you're referring to here?
Tim Cynova:
Some organizations do. I would encourage people not to because it gets really complicated when the edge cases start to happen. This is one of the reasons, going back to the employment attorney I was mentioning, they got really antsy about it because there are certain legally in the US, certain legally allowed required mandated leaves that employees could have. If it starts to get squishy with... Let's take, for instance, someone who goes on parental leave. In the US. If you're a certain size organization, there's certain types of parental leave frames that can be made available to you. Maybe it's eight weeks paid and then four weeks that are unpaid, but you can take 12 weeks during a period.
Where it's really challenging then to be like, and then you have these unlimited paid vacation days or unlimited days off that you might tack onto that and then that becomes really blurry. You have to say, "No, these are different things. You're optioning for parental leave here and then the vacation days are separate," or you end up with if you're not really firmly structured around sick days, this is another way that something can slide into something else without you even realizing. For instance, say I might not be feeling good for a day and then that turns into a week. And then I go to the doctor and find out that I have a condition that's going to require that I have surgery and it's going to turn into a month off.
It goes from what might be sick days into what might be short-term disability, long-term disability, other employment laws that come into play here. If you're not being really, really consistent about what this thing is and what bucket it fits in, this is the messy place that you can find yourself in that that can also lead to this person is not being treated the same way as this person. And then you open yourself up for some really challenging dynamics there. Certainly discrimination could be claimed if you have someone asking for the same thing, for the same whatever it might be, but you're getting two different things.
That's why really structuring it as this is unlimited paid vacation days. This is what a vacation day is. This is the lead time that you need to request it. For instance, you need to request it twice as long as the time that you want. If you're requesting a week off, you have to request at least two weeks in advance or something like that. Come up with some frame, which is different than a sick day, which is you wake up, you're sick, you take the day off, or you have doctor's appointments, things that fall into that bucket.
This is one of those things up front that's really important to get clear yourself as an organization and with everyone in the organization, what is this thing, what falls into it, and what doesn't so that you don't get into these really messy situations. You might miss that someone needs access to something else sooner than if they're just requesting vacation days or whatever it's for, and actually you missed the point at which you could have requested that thing.
When you think about insurance, when you think about timeframes in order to file or apply for exemptions or accommodations, this is another reason why it's important to be really clear about it because you might miss the 15 days that you have to report that or the 30 days or the 180. Really stressing that up front before you get to the point where it's great. There's a lot of flexibility and autonomy and agency. Make sure that you're structuring it so that's really, really clear what falls into what bucket.
Katrina Donald:
Thanks, that's so helpful. You talked to us a little bit about those two pieces of research. The first one is you're paying attention to who doesn't take the time. I think my assumption would be that the general assumption out in the world is that these kinds of policies can be abused really easily. I'm really surprised to hear that that's what studies were finding was that people actually were using less vacation days on average or were accessing them, thinking about them differently. And then I also hear you talking about, well, this isn't actually something that we're putting in place so that you're not spending time in the tracker.
You still need to have that little bit of balance between you do have to be in the tracker because there are good reasons why you can file things into certain codes or whatever you're using in your system, but you're also really trying to say, what do you need and how do you get what you need? Because I think some of the advantages that I'm hearing you talk about here are like there are health and wellness reasons that you might put in something like this for people. There are passion projects that people might have that they want to be able to focus on from given points of the time year or month or whatever it is.
But there's also increased feelings of motivation or rejuvenation that come from being able to take regular time off whenever you need it as opposed to when you might be automatically closed or those kinds of things. Lots of benefits I think we can think about. You've started to allude to some of the challenges. Are there any other challenges maybe? I want to get to tips and insights and things like that as well, but maybe just where else do people get stuck in thinking about what a policy this might mean for their organization?
Tim Cynova:
When we were getting ready to introduce this, in one of those conversations I was talking about it like, this is what summer's going to be. This is what fall's going to bring about. We were doing this in the context of an organization that had strict fixed tier comp where everyone at a given tier made exactly the same amount. Every associate made 40,000, every specialist made 50, regardless of if you were in that role for 10 years or 10 days. The tier moved together, but it wasn't tied to an individual. There were costs of living adjustments applied to the tier that if you were in that role for 10 years, you saw because the tier moved, but everyone in the tier moved together.
Within this context whereas we're talking in staff meetings and various convenings, anyone have questions? All right, here's how this is going to work versus here's how it works now and the types of changes. This is one of these moments where I was in a meeting and someone asked a question, I'm like, well, I did not expect that, but I should have. Someone raised a question to say, "Now that we have unlimited pay vacation days and we have strict fixed tier comp. In the old structure, in the old model, if you were here X number of years longer, we had so many more vacation days than people who started earlier, but now we all have the same thing."
It was this moment that I realized, right, when some of those things that maybe in another organization flex differently where comp structures are different and they evolve based on tenure or whatever it might be differently than a strict fixed tier comp, people start to attach meaning and value to other data points in their experience in the organization. It was this really surprising aha moment for me that it showed up in that way. Like I said, I should have expected it, but I didn't.
It was like, right, you have 13 days, people have 10, and there's something about those three days. Even though everyone has a lot more days together, it was really that three days meant a lot because that was what differentiated people from the person who started yesterday.
Katrina Donald:
It sounds like you're talking about some kind of status trigger maybe to go from I've accrued this or I've been here long enough and so I'm entitled to a bigger leave than. As you think about values aligned and equity lenses in the work, this is real places people have been triggered that you've witnessed.
Tim Cynova:
Exactly. We explored this when we talked about compensation and that old saying around a rich person is someone who has a dollar more than their brother, or whatever it might be. It's the differential. You might make a dollar more or a dollar less. On the whole, you're still making essentially the same, but not. That just creates a lot of friction intention around it. That's where you looked at the three days, it was that dollar instance where things like Adams' Equity Theory comes into play there and Vroom's Expectancy Theory where, "I've been here three years. Someone just started yesterday. We now have the same thing, again, on top of comp that we have the same."
This is one of the fun, challenging, unexpected things about people-centric org design where your office spending a lot of time in meetings talking about something that's not necessarily the thing you're trying to change, but people's reaction to the change. Trying to be transparent and open, why are we doing this? What are the downsides? How is this going to work? And stressing, this is an experiment. We will iterate into something new if this doesn't work, and here's the period in which we're going to assess this experiment.
Here's how we're going to get the data, but we feel like this is more values aligned then this structure that was just given to us that doesn't make a lot of sense for how we want to structure the way we work and live.
Katrina Donald:
There's a piece here for me, you're talking about the experiment of doing this. I think about the story that, oh, well, if we resist it or if we ignore it, it will go away. If you're thinking about bringing in a policy like this, I assume that putting some parameters around the experiment makes sense. What kinds of parameters do you think, we try it for a year or we try it for six months, or actually it needs to have an iterative process over three years? Do you have any experience with how long it takes you to understand if it's working, what the issues are, how you might need to adapt?
Tim Cynova:
With something like this, it's really at least a year, because you need to see the full cycle. You need to see a full year in order to tell a number of things, one of which is how it compares to what people did before. I think that's one of the things to keep in mind as you're approaching it. Also, with this, this is one of the things where vacation days don't exist in a silo. For organizations that roll them over from year to year, they're oftentimes carrying those as a liability on their books because they might have to pay those out at a certain point. You're changing your accounting system and how you do this thing.
It's not an easy change in certain areas. I think there's that point too around wellness and people taking the time that they need, which I think this goes back to why vacation days. Vacation days or paid time off isn't for a future cash out. It's like, how do you think holistically about what people need, how you structure your life when you're living it in a way that is not this future payout? I've done it, but also at what cost did that have for me and how many years might you be in a role and not taking time off? And then the flip sides is we hear about people who are like, I've got 100 vacation days that I'm never going to take because I can't take them because I'm in a role that won't let me take them, or I'm too busy, or whatever it is.
I think this is one of the really important parts where leadership modeling this is important. That was one of the things too, when we were moving toward that rundown of days, everyone in the organization took time off. It wasn't executive leadership didn't, but said that everyone else should. It was really modeling how this is supposed to be used. We had active conversations in that first year certainly around supervisors and managers and executive leadership, "When are you taking time off?" Put it on your calendar so people know, this is when so-and-so is going to be gone. Because again, you don't want this to be like you have this benefit, wink wink, but you only get 10 days a year.
How do we actually make sure that this becomes part of the routine, which is going back to your question, you have to see it over a year. You have to see how this flexes, and then going back to be like, all right, so not from a surveillance tracking standpoint, from just a comparison, on average, how many vacation days did people take this year under this system versus last year were the comparators before? How does this slice and dice? Everyone across the organization or certain teams or certain roles? This relates to one of the big concerns people always ask when he was talking about unlimited pay vacation days.
He's like, "Well, what if people just take a lot?" It's never like, what if people take too few, but it's like, what if people abuse it, which is one of the reasons why so much of HR is that least common denominators, who's going to abuse it, how will they abuse it, and then let's design for that, not let's design for the 99% of people who will operate the way that you hope and then be prepared to have those hard conversations with people who don't, or realize, well, actually we didn't structure that in the right way because that's how people used it. They got creative in how they used it. I find it's oftentimes though when you're like, wow, someone seems to be taking a lot of time off, that it's actually a leading indicator of something else.
It's not the time off that they're taking that's the problem. Over the years, I found out it's maybe because they're just disengaged in their job. They've been doing an entry level role for four years and it's no longer providing the same engagement and intellectual stimulation and fun that it did for the first couple years. And oh, now they feel stuck in this role because they're in a place where... Certainly a Fractured Atlas where we had unlimited pay vacation days. You can work anywhere in the country, and this was before COVID. You were given a brand new MacBook when you started, which for a number of nonprofits it's like, here's this dusty Dell that people have been using for 10 years.
It was tough to find the next thing. People were getting stuck, and then they were just taking days off because they didn't really enjoy that in the same way. I think that was a leading indicator to be like, oh, we need to have different conversations about the work and the engagement. You're like, "Is this really the role you want anymore, and not, "So I see you've taken 30 days off in the past year."
Katrina Donald:
There's the theory around well-being and engagement and trying it out. There's also this piece here around you said how you slice the data. I think that's where this gets really interesting, because this isn't something that you do to save money. This isn't something that you do to, oh, hopefully people use less of it and then we have more reserves or something. This is a wellness and engagement experiment. On the other side of that, it's what are the implications for people who are actually using a policy like this for the overlap of holidays that people want?
Because we know when you book a vacation, you may be going with somebody else whose time you're supposed to be syncing up with your own, or you might use it because you have a specific family or friend gathering that you want. But then if it doesn't line up with because there's other people, you've got overlap in people requesting certain times, or you have busy times in the organization, how do you handle that? But also on the really purely logistical side, it's like, how do you be responsive as an organization to knowing that you might have two weeks notice that somebody will be away for a week if you use your previous double time?
How do you continue to make the people that are there feel like, A, it's okay and people can adapt, you can take time you need too, but also we're not going to let you drop while others are accessing this benefit
Tim Cynova:
There are a couple of things over the years that we started to realize. I was at Fractured Atlas for 12 years, and I'm going to say one time, maybe one time or two, someone's vacation request was outright denied. It was more like, can you slide it because this is a really busy period, or can you work this one day offsite so you can take it? But more from like, all right, if people are getting the work done that they need to get done in the way that they need to do it and we have the support we need, yeah, let's be flexible with how people want to use this benefit.
We did start to institute over the years carve out periods where we're like, okay, every year we're really busy during the last week of the year because donations are coming in for contributions for projects, or during this two week or three week period in March, there's a really big grand deadline that a lot of our projects apply for. It takes a lot of work. That might be one team. And then another team's like, all right, around the audit in September, we know it's going to be really busy. We started to create these carve out periods to say, whenever possible, try to avoid requesting time off during these periods. I think that's the other important part here too.
Time still has to be approved. You can request it, but it still has to be approved. I think this is where it goes back to being really consistent around how you're approving time so that one person isn't like, "This person just got it approved. Why am I getting denied for the exact same thing? Why can't I get the same two weeks as that person?" Being really consistent at one aspect and also saying, all right, what are the really busy times? Don't throw a blanket on the entire year. But if you have a season or if you're doing sales and it's like, all right, we know around this holiday it's going to be really busy, to say, here are the couple of times where we're really try not to take it.
But otherwise, flex. I think that was really helpful. One of the data points that we didn't start with, but we realized we needed a little more structure. This was also on the flip side a really interesting thing that, again, I was fascinated by it. It was where you talk about shared purpose culture and shared identity culture, where shared identity is us and our connection to each other where a lot of organizations aim. I think when people think about great company culture, it's the 5K fun runs and the book clubs and stuff. It's us. It's very internal versus shared purpose. That's like those we serve, those who are here for why do we exist outside of internal.
There was really, on some teams in particular, a really focused shared identity culture to the point that people didn't want to take time off because they knew that their work was going to shift to other people on the team. It was like if we had eight people on our team, I know if one person has taken time off, so we're already shifting their work. And then if another person, we're shifting their work. I don't want to be the burden on our team, even though on the flip side it was like, but you should take your time off. There's this really weird disconnect to try and get people to the point where, yes, let's figure out how this aligns with busy and slow periods and what's the minimum number of people that we need to have on.
Let's make sure it's not the same people every time. If we can run the department with three, let's make sure it's not the same three people every year that this comes around. But let's just recognize and set up structures so that people know how the work's going to slide around because it was a really strange thing to be like, so you're not taking time off. You're burning burning out or whatever it might be. You're really stressed. Take time off, but I can't take time off because then it's going to stress the other members of our team.
There's this really unhealthy cycle, but the side effect that seem to exist more with an unlimited vacation days than the former structure of these are my 10 days, I'll spend my 10 days or I'll spend my 15 days, and then that'll be the end of it.
Katrina Donald:
Did you find or have you found in your experience that actually the need for more communication to actually get people talking about when they'll be away and what has to happen and where they're going to get their files to for this particular time, that also creates positive impacts for the team culture itself? Because it shifts the conversation from I'm entitled to these 10 days and I can use them as hall passes or whatever, the example you gave earlier, to creating more space around thinking about when people are away and how they can be away.
And that it's something that you want to promote that people can use for their own time management and their own benefit or periods of rest or whatever it is, but you're encouraging each other a little bit more like, if I think about what it takes to actually look at busyness and look at covering people and looking at making sure you're where you need to be, it strikes me that there'll be some other benefits to that as well.
Tim Cynova:
This, again, is one of those places where when you start to pull back from the page of just vacation days and really think more holistically about how does the organization work and connect, one, it gets really complicated when you're trying to hold all these different things at the same time. But two, it's the work to do. It's the better work to do. This is where you look at traditional HR departments, it's like there's really no value in trying to figure out this messiness. It's like just be grateful that you have days off type of thing versus, no, let's figure out how this works for us. And also, let's talk about when you say work, what do you mean by that?
Providing some clarity for it I think is helpful because the lack of it, you start to fill in the gaps that aren't necessarily great. But if you start to even just pull apart someone's role and say, "What are the tasks? What are the relationships? What's the cognitive connection to those things? And then how does that work with the team," and then you could... This is the classic job crafting or team crafting where you're like, when this role gets pulled out or this person gets pulled out, what shifts around to what places? Importantly, what work is intentionally not going to get done?
I think this is something where a lot of organizations always forget this piece or for whatever reason, they don't address this piece where it's like, if you have eight people doing 100% of the work, or let's make math easy, you have 10 people doing 100% of work and you pull one person out, it drops to 90%. You pull out the 10% of the work. They still think, all right, let's use these nine people to do 100% of the work versus saying, no, what's the 10% in this structure that we can just not do while this role isn't occupied if they're on vacation or on leave or whatever it might be?
Doing the work of pulling apart roles and responsibilities and relationships and tasks make it so much more helpful than, "Oh my God, we're going to be down a person, or we're going to be down three people. We're already stressed. We have more work that we could possibly get done," especially for longer leaves and coming into this if you have longer lead times to say like, "All right, what can we just punt and no one's going to care that we haven't done it for two weeks or four weeks or whatever it might be in order to be realistic about what's possible for X minus one people to accomplish during a given period?"
Katrina Donald:
Are there any tips that you'd offer organizations who want to take this on? Any real Tim's top five tips for thinking about paid time differently?
Tim Cynova:
Oh my God, you said five and I'm like, can I come up with two?
Katrina Donald:
Three is perfect.
Tim Cynova:
It's always X minus one that I can come up with. I mean, I think the first thing is to... There are a lot of ideas that people hear about, four-day work week, unlimited vacation days. It's like, all right, that's cool, let's do that, rather than are we an organization that that aligns with our values, or are we in the right place, or what needs to happen before we do that thing? For instance, many organizations found this out in very quick time at the start of the pandemic where you're like, all right, we were in an organization that worked entirely on site, and now we're an organization whose work is done entirely virtual. All right, well, you need computers, you need phones, you need all these different ways of communicating.
Let's recognize most people are pretty stressed, especially at this point in the pandemic. We're like, we're all exhausted and this is a change. What needs to happen to get people to the place where, all right, this is the thing that we're doing. That said, I'm not saying you need to get 100% of the people there, but let's be kind in understanding like, all right, this is a change to how most people operate. I was working 15, 20 years in organizations with traditional vacation days, sick day policies before I worked in organization that had this. It changed the way you even think about this time. First of all, what needs to happen before you get here?
Second, how can you be transparent and communicative about this in multi-directional? It's not just I'm communicating or we're communicating what this thing is, but how are you putting in those feedback loops to people's initial concerns? Let's talk about that. All right, well, how far are we getting into this experiment before we do another check-in or a survey or whatever it might be? I think that's another piece so people don't feel like, all right, we're doing this forever. If it's not working or whatever it might be, let's add that in. I think three is spending some time individually around, how do I structure my time?
How do I get into a vacation, if we're talking about vacations? How do I make the most of that time off in a way that's useful? How much time do I need, and where does it fall in the year? You see this where most people just coming hot to a vacation, it is like they're working full on one day, they're on vacation the next, and they're full on when they come back.
Katrina Donald:
I need a vacation from my vacation.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, we hear that a lot, right? It's like, how might you benefit from this? And then for those who are like, "I can't take any time off," really spending some time to think about why, why do you say that? I've said to myself, "I can't take any time off for four years," or whatever it might be. But why? I probably can. There's that classic saying, cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable. I think this is another one of the things to think.
In the US, I think it's the SEC requires certain roles in certain financial institutions to have a mandated two-week period where they can't work, where they're completely off the grid as far as the organization's concerned, so that you have the ability to see, does everything run smoothly? Or is there any fraud that's taking place? Or do we have the backups that we need? Often I think about, what if you couldn't do anything? How would you structure your time away as an organization and as a person where you're like, yeah, I'm on vacation, but I'm checking my email every day, or I'm on Slack if you need me. It's the classic, I'm on vacation, but text me if something's urgent.
We're like, okay, let's take some time to unpack what that means. I think this past two years, past three years, people have given a lot of thought to what that means and that constant psychic burden that people are having when they work at home, live at home, are working at their kitchen table. And then what do you do when you're done with work and how do you bifurcate those things? I would say that's maybe three, four, five, I don't know. There you go. Voila!
Katrina Donald:
Thanks, Tim. This has been very useful. I hope others are finding it useful as well.
Tim Cynova:
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