More Vacation Could Keep You From Quitting
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The show that asks the questions other shows are afraid to ask. The Last Show with David Cooper. Do you remember the great resignation when millions of people didn't just leave their jobs for better pay, but they left because they were overworked or perhaps prioritizing a job more compatible with their lifestyle, their personal life? Well, a new study suggests something surprisingly basic might have kept people in their jobs, and it shows how to get employees not to quit. The finding? Give them enough paid time off. I'm here with someone who worked on that study. His name is Bill Costeas. He's the Dean of the Graduate College and Economics Professor at Cleveland State University. Bill, welcome to the show.
What triggered the great resignation and how does it relate to job satisfaction?
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So you look at the data. What surprised you most about the fact that PTO, paid time off, actually affects whether people quit their job?
You know, I'm not sure that anything was terribly surprising in it, honestly. You know, it's, you generally expect any kind of benefit that, whether we're talking about paid time off, whether it's flexed scheduling, retirement plans, training, all of these things can have an impact on job satisfaction and ultimately worker turnover. So, yeah. And that's, I'm hoping we'll later, we'll kind of, we could dig into some of the, why, why the, the nuance of, you know, in this paper, we focused on retention, right? On turnover, but there's other margins of, of how workers can kind of respond to being dissatisfied at work. And, you know, that's, maybe that'll be future, future avenues of research that we didn't dig into in this series of papers that we did, but.
And so not terribly surprising, maybe the magnitude of the results that we get. But, you know, there's, you know, there's some limitations in the study.
What surprising findings emerged from the study on paid time off?
So I one thing I always say to folks is something I was hammer hole with my own students is, yeah, on a single study, be careful not to put too much weight on the exact results, you know, and whatnot, you know, when we future research to kind of dig a little deeper.
OK, let's talk PTO and take a step back because the show's on the air in Canada. I live in the U.S. and the U.S. is kind of like the weird kid at the party internationally when it comes to paid time off. Yes. How did the U.S. end up like the only rich country with no guaranteed paid time off in jobs? And then why does that make it so interesting to look at the effects it has? Because you get this wide, wide difference between different careers.
I'm not sure about the full history of how we got there. In a broader brushstroke, we've tended to be a bit more laissez-faire. We have a smaller welfare state, typically. If you compare us to Most other OECD countries, but especially compared to Europe, where Europe, the amount of vacation time is more guaranteed. And we wanted to be a little careful, too. We lump in PTO, pay time off. We're lumping both vacation and sick leave in together, and it's partially an artifact of the data. The way the data was collected. So we wanted to use the full timeframe available to us. We had to look at them together. But part of it is just that it's a cultural difference in the way we approach mandating benefits versus allowing businesses to choose.
How does paid time off influence employee retention?
And so I think I'll just kind of leave it at that kind of broader context. That's kind of where we're at. But yeah, for listeners in other countries, whether it's Canada, whether it's in Europe, this might sound like an odd conversation.
It certainly was when I first moved here. Okay, let's look into the data. Five days of paid time off basically does nothing. People are as likely to quit as ever. At what point do more PTO days start to get people less likely to resign?
And so one thing it's important to note here is we took, right, the data was continuous in the sense of people reported F1, F2, F3, F6, F7. So we kind of chunked it up into 1 to 5, 6 to 10, and then more than 10 days. Uh, and so you, we know it may not be exactly that, you know, cut off at fighters, but I think what the point is that too few days may not be enough for folks.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–0:44
2
What triggered the great resignation and how does it relate to job satisfaction?
0:44–1:49
3
What surprising findings emerged from the study on paid time off?
1:49–3:23
4
How does paid time off influence employee retention?
3:23–10:01
5
Why does the U.S. have no guaranteed paid time off compared to other countries?
10:01–10:05
Speakers
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