Making Unlimited Vacation Time Work

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2017

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Aron Ain, the CEO of Kronos Incorporated, explains why unlimited vacation can be in the best interests of employees and the organization. He describes how his software company tracks requests for time off and the conversations he's had with skeptical managers and longtime employees. Ain says the "open vacation" program benefits the business and serves as a template for other companies figuring out how to make unlimited vacation work for them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do you navigate gender in your workplace?
0:04.0	HBR's fan favorite podcast Women at Work is back with personal stories, the newest research,
0:09.2	and practical advice on navigating disability, career failures, and joining a board.
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0:15.0	Women at Work, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Ideacaste from Harvard Business Review.
0:30.0	I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:32.0	Like a lot of tech companies, the software firm Kronos had its difficulties trying to recruit enough talent.
0:39.0	For a while there, the mid-sized company had around 300 hard to fill positions open at any
0:45.2	given time.
0:46.4	We try to hire people in almost every case who are above average.
0:50.7	Above average people have choices.
0:53.0	That CEO Aaron Aane.
0:55.0	He says one of those choices is vacation time.
0:58.0	And prospective employees in their 30s and 40s
1:00.0	were turning down job offers because of the company policy of three weeks vacation time for new employees.
1:07.0	These candidates had accumulated up to four, five or more weeks of paid vacation in their current jobs and Aane says they didn't want to
1:15.0	start over. So we said what can we do to make it so that when they come and they
1:20.4	interview with us and they interview with others and they get maybe more than one offer, we want
1:25.9	them to say I want to come work for Kronos.
1:28.2	Most companies would answer that by increasing vacation time to match what competitors were
1:32.4	offering.
1:33.0	But Kronos went way beyond that by offering unlimited vacation time for all employees.
	...

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