Unlimited Vacation Time: The Latest Corporate Perk
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Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, May 18th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Most people in full-time jobs get three, maybe four weeks of vacation per year. But imagine if your company let you take an unlimited number of days off. Well, that's exactly what some companies are doing.
Companies who have adopted the policy say it can minimize burnout to give people a little bit more flexibility and also instill just a sense of trust in the workplace that, you know, it's up to you to manage your time to get the job done.
But does unlimited vacation really mean unlimited? And what if you don't take advantage of it? We'll talk with our workplace reporter, Lindsay Ellis, about that after the break.
A growing number of companies like the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs are offering some employees unlimited time off. Why are they doing it? And what do these policies actually mean for workers in practice? WSJ workplace reporter Lindsay Ellis joins us to discuss. Hey, Lindsay, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
So, Lindsay, Goldman Sachs recently rolled out this unlimited time off policy, but it's not the first one to do so. What kind of companies have this policy and why did they decide to go this route?
Unlimited paid time off has been adopted more broadly in this tight labor market. In some cases, it's only for certain types of employees who have reached a certain level at the company or those who are full-time and not part-time.
What is unlimited vacation time and which companies are offering it?
But companies who have adopted the policy say it can minimize burnout to give people a little bit more flexibility and also instill just a sense of trust in the workplace that it's up to you to manage your time to get the job done If you think you can do it while taking days off here and there, you know, that's good for both of us. And, you know, the other thing, of course, is that when you're trying to bring employees in the door, it's a perk that seems to be pretty popular among job candidates and among employees. Some Glassdoor data that we reviewed looked at when people have this benefit, do they cite it as a perk? And nearly all of the reviews that mention this say it's a benefit and not a drawback.
Okay, so how does this work in practice? It's unlimited in theory, but I'm sure that there are limits. So what happens if you're a worker who wants to request time off?
So I think in a lot of cases, it starts with a conversation with a manager and sometimes with a team. Instead of going to an internal software system and saying, I would like out a week from Tuesday and take a long weekend the day after, it's more a conversation with a manager saying, here's what I'm thinking. How does that square with the team's needs and our project's needs. Companies who I talked to made the distinction that it's not necessarily fair to call this unlimited time off because if you're not doing the job, then you're not going to get the approval from your manager or But I think sort of it goes back to the sense of, you know, a lot of places aren't keeping track. They're kind of eliminating that sense of, OK, you know, Lindsay's taken off X number of days or John Smith has taken off Y number of days.
that it really is more of a trust-based conversation between employee and manager the one other thing i'll add too is just that you know one company i talked to said if you're going to take more than three weeks off consecutively let's talk about whether that should be a different kind of leave i mean is this for a personal reason i mean is is there sort of a family need
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