Vacation Policies: Can We Please Enter the 21st Century?

Recently on one of the ASAE listservs, I saw a discussion on vacation policies. Looking forward to reading innovative or unusual policies, I was shocked to see how many replies still contained draconian years-of-service vacation policies.

Only one reply was about a Paid Time Off plan (PTO) in which employees receive a certain number of days each year to use as needed, whether it is vacation or illness.

In a century and society where employees are transient, build personal brands, and put personal fulfillment over loyalty to an organization, why would you continue to use a policy from the 19th century and early 20th century?

In olden days, when an employee stayed with a job for life, it might have made sense to have a vacation policy based on years of service -- after all, your employees were not going anywhere else and you expected to get and keep their loyalty.

But times have changed! Continuing to use a vacation policy where employees do not get any vacation for one year, and then only get a measly week after one year, and two weeks after four years is a flat out refusal to live in the world we are in.

Employees are likely not going to be there for years and years -- unless you implement enlightened benefits policies -- and treating them like an outcast simply because they have not been at your organization as long as others is a sure way to discourage loyalty and encourage job hopping.

Most importantly, if you hire someone, it is because they already have experience, usually many years of it. Treating them like they are a newbie when they start at your organization is simply ridiculous; after all, you hired them to get all that experience.

Times have not only changed, but society has as well. With the complete breaking of trust between corporations and their employees, attitudes have adjusted too. No one is going to stick around for years for fear of having it "stuck to them."

Since we are supposedly enlightened, let's act like it. Employees are people, and if you want them to act like professional and reliable ones, treat them that way. It's the only hope for keeping any one longer than one year.

If you could change vacation policies, how would you set it up to get the most benefit for both organization and employee?

Comments

[Realestate]

Interesting site, always a new topic .. good luck in the new 2011. Happy New Year!

[David M. Patt, CAE]

When I was CEO of Chicago Area Runners Association, vacation time was earned from the moment a person joined the staff.

First-year employees should not have to cancel planned vacations just because they start a new job - that's just the employer's way of denying benefits to someone who it thinks may leave.

We also had a 20-day cap on vacation time, so it was up to the employee to use it whenever desired, or not earn any more. We did not believe in the "use-it-or-lose-it" philosophy. We wanted to give employees as much control over their working conditions as possible.