Adam Grant

In an experiment with thousands of employees at a professional services firm with my colleagues, Reb Reboli and Grace Cormier, I found that asking people to reflect on the personal benefits of time off didn't motivate them to use more vacation days.

What made a difference was inviting them to consider how their time off would benefit others.

Just reflecting on how their family members and colleagues would appreciate them being well rested and energized was enough to spur a 5% increase in vacation time.

people started to realize that taking time off wasn't a selfish decision.

It was an investment in wellbeing that would have ripple effects on the people around them too.

Those ripple effects were apparent to Shashank.

Baiba, the project director at Simpliflying, has noticed another benefit of the mandatory vacation policy.

It gives people permission to take time off.

And she's learned to detach completely during her week off.

Do you think that this mandatory vacation policy, a week every, let's say, eight weeks, is that feasible in an organization of 100 people, 1,000 people, 100,000 people?

I find your perspective so refreshing, except for one thing.

There's one thing I just vehemently disagree with.

I don't think this is limited to small organizations at all.

I think in a company of 100,000 people or an organization of a million people, this is completely scalable.

Number one, the bigger your organization, the more people there are who have skills to backstop you or cover for you.

Number two, as a manager, you could implement this in your team.

And obviously, if you have interdependencies with other teams or with clients, you need to sort that out, right?

But within your span of control, this is something you could implement in your own world.

What I would say is this is an experiment worth running in any organization of any size.

Getting time off from work is important, but it's not enough.