I’m going to tell a couple of related stories about a similar topic today, just because they fall together in my mind and I think it’s an interesting contrast. Let’s talk about time off from both a management and a human perspective. (All quotes are paraphrased from memory.)
I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have managers who, at the worst, would listen to HR when they were told that they needed to make me use up my accrued vacation time. And I assume they weren’t generally just waiting for HR to nudge them; they genuinely understood that vacation was important and everyone needs time off now and again. Even working in the video game industry, which is legendary for crunch, I only had a really brutal stretch once. Even Chris Chong, my boss at Amazon, was pretty good about nudging me – although not during preparation for peak traffic periods. At Amazon you gotta plan your life a little more carefully than usual.
My first story is about another Chris: Chris Higgins, my skip-level director at Oracle Cloud. That’s the Oracle Cloud in Seattle, not any of the previous iterations of Oracle’s cloud ambitions. Lovely Irish guy, who told me like a month or so after I was hired that he wasn’t really sure my hiring manager should be trying to build out the group I was supposed to be leading. In retrospect he was right; my time at Oracle was really weird although educational, as I figured out entirely new ways to build a role for myself. His bluntness was one of the things that made him a lovely guy.
So a bunch of us were sitting around one day; someone or other had just gotten back from a week’s vacation and was telling the usual travel stories. And Chris said something like, “Ah, you screwed it up! You only took a week! What were you thinking?” My head snapped up, as I wasn’t accustomed to hearing directors say things like that.
Chris smiled cheerfully and said “Look, a week isn’t enough. You need to take two weeks, minimum. You’re going to spend most of the first week getting rid of the work stress, calming down, and you won’t be able to enjoy the vacation yet. The second week is where you start to really enjoy it. Never take a one week vacation.”
And I mean of course he was kidding, and of course one week vacations are fine. But it was really wild hearing someone so senior say something like that. I’ve taken my share of one week vacations since – but I also started looking for chances to take two week vacations, and you know what? Chris was right. It is better.
It’s also a more powerful forcing function to make sure you can be away from work without the house burning down. Almost anyone can be out of touch for a week without horrible repercussions. Stretch that to two weeks and you’re really testing your delegates, your processes, and everything else that should function OK without you. I don’t care what your level is.
So that was Chris, teaching me to think better about time off. My next story is about a company with unlimited paid time off. Are the alarm bells going off yet? Everyone’s heard the stories about how unlimited PTO just means nobody ever takes any – or experienced them. They’re true stories.
This place had unlimited PTO and meant it. My first manager there put some effort into making sure that I took time off and encouraged me to do the same for my team. The company values were a real part of how the company functioned and avoiding burnout and crunch time was part of that. In general it was a great place to work.
I got in the habit of calling it “unmetered PTO” there, since that’s more accurate. No company is going to offer literally unlimited PTO; every company with a formal policy around this has a clause that says your manager can say no. I think that’s reasonable. But by the same token, once you start measuring it, you’re heading towards limits.
A brief digression: one of my favorite sayings is “what gets measured gets fixed,” courtesy of David Henke at AltaVista. I believe in it passionately. If you don’t measure a problem, you don’t fix a problem. But at The Pokémon Company International, my pal Ben Goldsmith pointed out the dark side of this fundamental truth. You fix what you measure, which means that if you’re measuring something that isn’t broken, you’re still likely to try and make that metric move. Ooops.
So: I like “unmetered PTO.”
Anyway, the policy worked well for me at that job for quite a while. Then we had a reorg and I got a new boss. We had an offsite, which was nice; get to know my new peers and my new manager, that sort of thing.
I think it was the second day of the offsite when my boss got onto the topic of our PTO policy. “People are abusing it,” they said. “We need to do something about that.”
My head snapped up. Not as cheerfully this time. It’s not a bad thing to be aware of, because unlimited PTO could be abused, but I knew my team wasn’t doing that.
“I’m going to talk to HR and find out if we can put a cap on this.”
Wow. I mean, I wasn’t worried – I knew the policy wasn’t about to change because of one director – but talk about missing the point and avoiding responsibility. Any place that has unlimited PTO is putting more work on management’s shoulders. As a manager, you have to both take a bigger role in pushing people to take vacation, since some people won’t and you don’t have the PTO accrual cap as a spur, and you may also have to make value judgements about whether or not someone’s pushing the envelope too far. In the unlikely case that someone is taking too much time off, you need to make sure you’re working with them to fix the issue in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the employee’s happiness.
I didn’t leave immediately or anything and that wasn’t the only factor in my decision, but man, it was an eye opener.
There’s no real moral to these stories, other than one: the things you say casually as a manager generally have more impact than you expect.