By Alex Yohn
Aug 25, 2020
Adversity doesn’t discriminate. Every single person in our workplace has experienced it regardless of their skin color, age, position or other demographic trait we are often grouped into by society. What gets us through adversity are typically two traits: grit and resilience.
Studies show that these two traits define successful people and go hand-in-hand with individuals who often check in with their feelings, shake routines that may get them into constant ruts, and deeply understand their “why.”
But before we go further, it’s important we talk about the definition of both. It’s easy to group the two together as they are closely related. Grit is someone who has determination and perseverance to move forward and complete a goal, or get through a sticky situation. Employees with grit often have confidence, high levels of focus and have no issue making mistakes if they are bound to learn from them. You’ll be able to quickly identify employees with grit. They’re the ones who are consistently pushing boundaries, exceeding expectations and have a fierce passion for doing their best.
Next, let’s talk about resilience. While grit is about the consistent effort to make a goal even after we struggle or fail, resilience is our capability to rebound after we have struggled. So while grit will get us through, resilience, or ability to get back on track, will make sure we don’t quit. Without grit, we can’t have resilience, and without resilience, we don’t have grit.
When we talk about resilience, a TedTalk by Lucy Hone comes to mind. Lucy lost her 12-year-old daughter to a terrible car accident when they were suppose to be going on vacation. The situation could have been paralyzing, however, she was able to get through it and begin to educate others on how her resilience played a large part.
Here are three traits she started to realize people with high levels of resilience have:
They know that suffering is a part of life
Those with resilience aren’t necessarily welcoming terrible situations into their life, but they aren’t blindsided by them either. The “Why me?” mentality simply just doesn’t exist to them.
Lucy details her daughter’s death in her talk. Within weeks of the occurrence, she was greeted with several terrible statistics by well-meaning people and professionals, including that her marriage was much more likely to fail after the death of a child, she was at a significantly higher likelihood to become mentally ill and many parents who lose children will find themselves in deep states of grief for upwards of five years.
Instead of delving deep into the “Why me?” mentality, Lucy distinctly remembers telling herself, “It’s time to sink or swim.”
People with resilience often do this. They are challenged with what may handicap others, but see it as a time that they must get through in order to proceed with life. By switching the mindset from, “I can’t believe this is happening,” to “This is a horrible situation, but I need to get through it” allows people to rise to even the biggest challenges they may face in life.
Think back to when things got hairy at work. Who immediately stepped up and tried to help solve the issue, or provided insight on how you might move forward? Those are your employees with grit and resilience. Those are the ones you want to keep around.
They choose where they direct their attention
Our brains are naturally wired to notice threats and weaknesses. It’s how we stay alive. While it worked well when our lives were much simpler living in caves, it now bombards our brains with constant unrealistic fear triggers.
According to Lucy, resilient people have evolved from these triggers. They’ve created ways to “tune out” of the bad signs around them, and “tune in” to the good. Lucy is the prime example of this. When her daughter passed, she thought to herself, “You cannot get swallowed up by this. You’ve got so much to live for. Don’t lose what you have to what you have lost.”
Let’s bring this back to work. Imagine you just lost your biggest account. It’s a big hit and wasn’t expected. Look around the room. Who is wallowing or quickly hitting the web for a job search? On the other hand, who is diving in to try to reclaim the client or fill the revenue gap they’re about to leave?
Resilience and grit quickly show themselves in times of distress. In psychology, this trait is called “benefit-finding,” where individuals spend significant focus on trying to find the upside or benefit to situations around them that are less than ideal.
They ask themselves often, “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?”
It’s so important to make an effort to tune in to what’s moving you forward. This mindfulness helps you not only navigate hard times in a healthy way, it also keeps you away from decisions that could potentially put you into more challenging times.
The question, “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?” can be applied to say many different life situations. It’s the guiding light that allows you to navigate. It puts you back in the driver’s seat of your life, as Lucy Hone says in the TedTalk.
This simple question can be so powerful when we apply it to work. We’ve written before about the idea of “firing yourself” from your current position. No, not really terminating yourself from your company, but terminating the way that you do the work. Perhaps you do a lot of inefficient tasks throughout the day that have become an old habit, but don’t move the company and take up a lot of your time. Are they helping or harming you?
Have you been scared to ask for help on the big project you took on? Is that fear helping or harming you?
This eight-word question is so incredibly powerful. Make sure you ask it to yourself. Make sure you pass it on to your colleagues.
By Alex Yohn
Aug 20, 2020
If you’ve read our previous blog posts, you know that employee performance reviews should be happening regularly – not just once a year. While that’s a great first step in providing better feedback, there are a lot of other things that should go into employee reviews that aren’t necessarily par for the course. By creating employee review processes that include key drivers for success that may be a little “out of the box,” you’re likely to keep your employees happier and engaged longer. Here are a few ways to improve review cycles that will lead to better relationships between you and your employees.
Update job descriptions
Nothing is static about work. Our roles change as the company does. While we have a good handle on the job description when we come into our positions, it will likely evolve over time.
It’s good to spend some time one-on-one with your teammates to occasionally review their job descriptions for a few reasons. First, you need to understand how they’re contributing to the company over time. This is vital to be able to recognize them for the work they do that you may not even know about. And that work they do that you may not know about? It’s likely crucial to your organization’s success.
By spending time reworking the job description together to best reflect the employee’s current role, you’ll better understand everything on their plate, too. It’s important that no one in your company becomes so entrenched in work that they don’t feel comfortable taking time off. Ultimately, that’ll lead to burnout and a crash your company could have avoided altogether.
While asking questions about workload and making sure work/life balance is there, doing something a bit more objective like rephrasing or drafting a new job description will give you a better understanding as to where that employee is focused and how you can help them.
Second, if that employee were to leave and you needed to rehire for the position, could you guarantee the job description written three years ago when they started is accurate as of today? Are there some things the employee did that perhaps weren’t written down, and were the “secret sauce” to their job being so successful that you need to rehire for it?
Instead of doing brain dumps the last two weeks of their tenure, occasionally resetting the job description to reflect their contributions now will be extremely helpful later on when you begin to look for their replacement.
Know how the team works together
When we set out to create objectives for the quarter or year, we often look inward first: What is my role in the organization and how do I help achieve the bigger company goals?
While that is important, it’s equally as important to understand what the team around you is trying to accomplish. Employee reviews are a great way to calibrate these efforts.
When only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities according to a recent MIT study, we’re positive there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to understanding smaller pieces of the puzzle – like our teammates main objectives outside of their day-to-day tasks.
Before we got into this habit at Kin, I received a list of past objectives from a group of teammates I didn’t work closely with. I quickly scanned the list and realized there were several objectives there that fell in my wheelhouse. It wasn’t that these should have been my objectives, but I could have helped them more easily accomplish them with the knowledge and experience I had in my role.
This experience helped us realize the importance of sharing objectives with one another and ensuring that we were more transparent. We were great at talking about our day-to-day work. Our bigger objectives for the year often went undiscussed outside of manager-employee meetings.
This led into even bigger opportunities. From there, we knew the paths that each other were on which led to more freely providing feedback based not only on daily performance, but our larger goals as well.
One key way to make sure this happens is to put someone in charge of it. My role at Kin was ultimately to connect the dots between individuals and their work. Making sure that everyone knew each others’ objectives was key, as was making sure that their objectives naturally flowed into their work. When I saw overlap and room for connections between two employees, I would bring them together so that they could see it, too. It led to a really well-gelled team. They not only had great working relationships, but also had immense respect for each other both inside and outside the workplace.
Understand what drives employees
Someone who came into your workplace as a very tactical worker may eventually develop a more visionary mindset as they become involved in the work. Or, it may be vice versa. While you may learn this during the interview, it’s employee reviews that will help you keep a pulse on their mindset after the hire.
We use the thinking wavelength test as a preliminary way to gauge where employees stand when they are first hired. This allows us to understand how they associate themselves with risk, multitasking, logical thinking, task management, ambiguity and more.
The higher a person scores on the test, the more likely they are a leader who enjoys big pictures and casting visions. The lower they score, the more likely they are to be well-suited for task-oriented work. Put a visionary thinker in a task-oriented job and they’ll quickly be unhappy. Same for a task-oriented worker being put into a visionary job.
From there, we can have deeper conversations with the employee about where they feel most valued in a company: either as someone who enjoys checking things off a to-do list, or someone who likes creating the to-do lists…or somewhere in between.
Oftentimes if you feel like it’s a rough start for a new employee, it’s because you’re asking them to begin at the opposite end of where they feel they can contribute best.
One thing to note though is just like people evolve, so do their mindsets when it comes to work. Annually, we have our entire team retake the thinking wavelength test. While some don’t budge too much, others switch completely. In fact, our founder went from being a computer engineer to a visionary thinker. While I didn’t know him as the computer engineer, I can’t imagine him as anyone other than someone who can cast complete visions for a company without missing a beat.
People change. Make sure you acknowledge and appreciate that by ensuring employees have work that provides both value to your company and fulfillment to them. Use employee reviews as a way to truly connect with those you work with, not just to provide feedback back and forth.
By Alex Yohn
Aug 18, 2020
The term “working parent” is really the understatement of the year for parents who have been thrust into remote working because of office closures while their children are doing school virtually due to the pandemic. While these measures are helping us stay physically healthy, our mental health is taking a toll as our workload and personal responsibilities rack up and compete for top priority.
So how can we as employers help lighten the load and keep our employees comfortable enough to be engaged, productive and focused on their jobs? We’re glad you asked.
Here are a few tactics you can easily adopt into your company’s remote working routines that may seem small, but make a world of difference.
Adopt flexible scheduling
As school departments become more solidified in how they’ll do virtual schooling, regimented schedules and agendas are appearing before students and parents. Kids have to sign onto certain meetings at different times during the day. Plus, they need help with assignments, meals, snacks and anything else that may come up when a child is home. This is all happening when the parent is still expected to be working full-time.
By adopting flexible work schedules, you’re letting your employees with children adapt to what the coronavirus is throwing at them – which is basically a completely unpredictable calendar of events. This will put less pressure on them to complete their work within the confines of 9-5 (or whatever your schedule may be), ensure one child logs in to math class on time and the other one gets their sneakers on before signing into PE.
Set boundaries around this if you’re feeling a little uncomfortable with allowing this type of freedom. For example, work hours may be anytime between 8 am through 8 pm Monday – Friday. This still gives your teammates the freedom to set their schedules. Plus, colleagues now know when they can expect to see them online and assisting one another.
And know this: work flexibility will not only give your employees better control over their schedules, it’ll also likely lead to higher engagement and longer tenures, too.
Help out with grocery shopping or food delivery
In a busy parent’s life, something as small as someone else doing the grocery shopping and bringing it to their door can be a huge relief. There are plenty of services, whether your employees live in rural or urban settings, that can do just that for them.
From Shipt, to UberEats or DoorDash for meals, sending your employees a gift card to these services can help knock a few things off of their list this week. Plus, it’ll give them the extra time they need to successfully help their child with school while nailing that tight deadline.
If you’re not sure exactly what services to provide, you can create a small “miscellaneous stipend” budget baked into payroll that employees can use to make their lives a little easier during the pandemic.
Create a #Parents channel in Slack or your messaging platform
Nothing builds bonds faster than people going through the same situation in the same place. Allowing the parents in your group to have a place to blow off steam, share ideas or just have a good laugh together lets them build camaraderie during a really unusual time in history. And as we’ve seen, strong bonds at work can lead to reduced turnover, higher productivity and a better sense of employee well-being.
Sometimes, you just need a good friend and a good joke about toddler life to get you through the day while remote working.
Provide time for your teams’ kids to get together virtually
Kids love seeing new and familiar faces, yet the pandemic has stopped many new friendships for them.
By providing a Friday afternoon remote-working Kids’ Zone Zoom Chat, or hosting a multiplayer video game challenge, you’re giving kids an outlet to talk with one another and socialize, and you’re also giving parents a small break from finding activities to keep their younger children occupied, too.
Kick this off by asking the parents on your team what might be best so you can easily choose age-appropriate activities.
Encourage taking time off
At Kin, we are big believers in using the PTO you’re given – even when there’s not a global pandemic unfolding around us.
Studies show that when time off is used, it positively impacts employee productivity and engagement.
However, it may not be something your employees feel comfortable taking right now when they know they can’t go far from home. Instead, encourage them to use the time to just relax at home, catch up with family or, heck, really lean into that Netflix binge.
Time away from work helps us do better work, even when we work remotely. We earn it, we deserve it, we need to take it no matter what 2020 throws at us.
Promote mindfulness while working remotely
In a time where we feel like we have little control over much, being able to focus ourselves on what matters is key. Promoting mindfulness in the workplace can have a multitude of benefits.
In fact, several studies now show that mindfulness leads to more self-confidence in leaders, greater autonomy and a higher sense of well-being in the workplace.
You can promote mindfulness in a variety of ways. Calm, a meditation app, has a company plan that allows you to add users. This app lets users pick their meditation style, and “builds up” their mindfulness through different guided meditations.
You can also create space for people to be mindful throughout the day. Start by asking thought-provoking questions that bring them back to the hear and now, such as “How did you feel coming into work today? What about work made you happy today? What felt challenging and why?”
The deeper the conversation you have with your employee, the more in touch they’ll be with themselves and their success within the company.
By Alex Yohn
Aug 6, 2020
Believe it or not, the one thing the pandemic didn’t seem to negatively affect through May 2020 was employee engagement rates. In fact, Gallup reported record highs in May, with nearly 38% of respondents saying they were actively engaged in their work. This is the highest level since Gallup started recording this data in 2000.
However, following the killing of George Floyd at the end of May which triggered protests and riots globally, we saw a historic drop in engagement. It went down to just 31% between the period of June 1-14, 2020.
Rightfully so, the US saw sharp spikes of anger and sadness increasing in early June due to Floyd’s death, making it extremely clear as to why engagement dropped. The focus was not, and frankly could not, be on our daily work.
For some, work becomes a refuge during times when other parts of our lives feel chaotic or at unrest. For others, it becomes a part of their life that needs to take a backseat while they work on more pressing life issues.
Either way, we as employers owe our employees more than a paycheck. Our team is the backbone of our organization. Whether it’s a family illness, a global pandemic or racial injustices, our priority is to evolve the support our team needs when they need it.
Here are a few ways to support employees through difficult times, whether it be personal, national or global challenges:
Teach your managers how to provide a space for healing
At home, employees may be processing problems from work. At work, they may be processing problems from home. Considering the obstacles you’ve navigated in the past week or year can be very helpful in empathizing with team members.
Were you able to be completely mentally present at work when you were having a struggle at home? Probably not. Did the work still get done? Probably. Could it have been done better? Likely, yes.
Acknowledging the shared human nature of these scenarios, it’s important we as employers see our colleagues as true human beings, not just workers designated to do a job. They will have good days and bad days, ups and downs, highs and lows.
Our job as an employer is to create an environment where overall performance isn’t judged on the employee’s worst day. We need to be able to recognize when someone isn’t being their normal self, and have the empathy in leadership by being curious enough to ask them what’s wrong, and how we can help. Having raw conversations like this will not only improve your ability to manage your team well by having deeper understanding, but it’ll create more loyalty and trust amongst one another other leading to less costly turnover.
Keeping open communication and taking extra time to notice signs of distress from employees should always be a top priority, especially now. No two people will respond exactly the same, but everyone will appreciate the effort made to see them as an individual.
Work with the people managers on your team so they understand how to have these conversations before they need to take place. Managers are often elevated into positions of leadership because of their work quality. When they become managers, training for people management rarely happens.
There are excellent organizations, such as Be Plucky, that hold incredible managerial seminars to train people to become great leaders.
Encourage time away to process thoughts, emotions and situations
While productivity is always something we are looking to maximize in our work spaces, sometimes taking a needed break can create exponentially more progress than keeping our heads down and forging ahead. Talking and working out inner fears and insecurities can free up mental space to allow us to focus back on the work at hand.
Those PTO policies you have? Encourage their use. Heavily.
Over time, the lost productivity of a distracted person is greater than a few days’ time off. And more importantly, our employees should feel empowered to take time off so that they can rest, reduce stress and enjoy their lives away from work. Time off is a great opportunity to let work and home and the world to fall back into their proper proportions. Having had time to resolve their distraction will allow employees to return to work sharper and more focused.
Even though time off is something available and even paid for in most situations, employees can feel guilty about taking advantage of it. The best way to combat this is to create open dialogue about using it, and encourage the use of PTO from the top down.
Don’t ignore the national conversation
Closing the office door doesn’t close out the rest of the world. Now, more than ever, the issues of our country are all around us and they belong to each of us. Ignoring elephants in the room will only serve to further draw us apart from each other.
Is there something in your workplace that needs to change as racial and political relations do? In any space, there may be very strong differences in personal experiences and opinions. There should always be an opportunity in your workplace to re-think and re-frame standing company culture, as it needs to evolve with your team, your work and your national conversation. You may personally see an issue to be small where an employee may see it as gigantic.
By having frequent feedback sessions, you’ll be closer to your employees naturally and able to better gauge issues that are preventing them from feeling comfortable, accepted and valued in your workplace.
Ask questions that may be awkward such as hard hitting ones like, “How do you feel about (insert national or global issue here)?” After some practice, it’ll be just as easy to ask as, “How did that last project go?”
Taking extra time to learn and be able to anticipate the effect global and local changes will have on your co-workers and your business will go a long way to unifying your team. We spend almost as much time with teammates as we do our families, and more time than we do with most friends. Your investment in each other is enormous.
Be extremely clear in your expectations and your daily communication
In this moment where there aren’t many absolutes, concrete initiatives can create more comfortable certainty. Being clear from the outset with goals and priorities will give employees confidence and a self-reliance in achieving what their team needs from them. Hitting benchmarks may truly be one of the only things an employee can feel control over right now. We don’t have to look any further than our own selves to realize how valuable it is to be able to control at least one outcome in the day.
A Harvard Business Review study by Watson Wyatt shows companies that have effective communication enjoy a 47% higher return to shareholders over a five year period than those who don’t. Almost a 50% increase just based on how clearly you communicate to your team is one of the easiest way to grow your company.
Of course, every company and every employee are different, but that level of yield with only good communication as the cost is vital to every business regardless of size.
The study calls on great leaders to “have the courage to talk about what employees want to hear.” Courage is exactly what our leadership must have now to face the many uncertainties this year has brought on.
By leading with empathy, kindness and understanding, we are better equipped to navigate our team through easily one of the most unsteady times in our history. Have grace with yourself, have grace with your team. Nothing is normal, and recognizing that alone will help you better lead your team along the way.
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By Alex Yohn
Aug 4, 2020
Let’s face it: with all of the perks remote working brings, it isn’t always easy. This is especially true if you’ve been thrown into it during a global pandemic. You likely miss your normal routine, the hustle and bustle of the office and the feeling of closeness between you and your colleagues. While working from home is an excellent way to stay safe during these unprecedented times, it takes concentrated effort to keep your motivation and productivity high.
Kin has been 100% remote for almost three years now. We began nearly seven years ago, when our front-end developer put in her resignation not because she wanted to leave the company, but because she wanted to leave Chicago where we were headquartered.
Our CEO thought, “If your only dissatisfaction with work is where you’re doing it, why not work where you’re happiest?”
And so, our remote culture began.
Over the years, more and more people at Kin began to take advantage of working remotely. We started to recruit from across the United States, not just from our own backyard. Finally, we let go of our office in Chicago in September 2017 and became fully remote.
While we’ve had our ups and downs while working remotely, one thing is for sure: it was the best decision for our team. Our perspectives and solutions are more diverse with contributors all throughout the United States from different backgrounds and upbringings.
Here are a few things we’ve learned to keep our culture intact and our team connected while working remotely.
Focus on balance
One thing that’s easy to do when working remotely is losing the balance of work and home.
Normally, you’ve had the physical separation of your office and your house, but that is taken away during this time. It’s easy to feel like work is all-consuming when you have nowhere to retreat from it. Laying firm boundaries in the beginning is extremely important when it comes to a good work/life balance.
By building time for yourself into your daily routine, and understanding when work should start and end, you can begin to build health habits when both work and your personal life happen in the same place.
For example, make sure that your early mornings aren’t consumed by work. Doist, the company behind Todoist, has a blog all about remote working. They nail it when they talk about a morning routine and what goes wrong when you don’t prioritize yourself first.
When you wake up and check your phone for emails first, you run the risk of deprioritizing everything you want to accomplish for the day to help others with their priorities. Instead of checking email first thing, take that time in the morning to get up, drink your coffee without distraction, make your own priority list. Then check in.
This will help you avoid making non-urgent issues the focus of your morning which then have the ability to derail what you set out to accomplish that day.
Over-communicate
At Kin, we have an ongoing conversation about communication…and over-communication. We often talk about the need to over-communicate our thoughts and emotions. This is because we can’t physically see each other, therefore we can’t tell if someone is stressed or uncomfortable about a situation.
Each day, we have a designated time that we meet “face-to-face” via Zoom and go through our days. This daily standup provides a time not only for us to update each other, but also to check-in with the team and have a bit of connection throughout our day.
We also are quick to have a Slack call whenever we need to, and are constantly communicating throughout the day via direct messages and channels on the platform.
Body language accounts for so much of our communication as human beings, but it’s easy to be missed when working remotely. Instead, we’re stuck with emails, texts and direct messages that can be misinterpreted. It’s so important that we find time to communicate and see our teammates so we can maintain and grow those bonds that help us do our best work.
“Peripheral communication happens accidentally in an office. We usually know what our coworkers are doing because we overhear snippets of conversation, we celebrate triumphs, or we see them struggling. Entire books have been written trying to increase office productivity by blocking out peripheral communication in meetings, email, and offices,” Jeff Robbins, from Yonder.io, wrote in his blog post about tips for working remotely for the first time, “By contrast, peripheral communication needs to be intentional in a remote working environment.”
Make team time a priority
Following the idea that peripheral communication needs to be intentional, one way to do this is to make the time for it on your calendar. The best part about work for many people is the team they get to work with. You build strong relationships with colleagues that allow you to face a host of challenges.
When you go from working in an office to abruptly working from home, it can feel like you’ve been ripped away from the best part of your job – teamwork with people you enjoy being around.
Take the time to make seeing your colleagues outside of work meetings a priority. A few ways to do this are to schedule lunch meetings where you “go out to lunch” together. Grab your meal, and hop on a video call to share it with one another. Just like you would if you had left the office to pick up something to eat with a coworker, don’t make it a work meeting. It’s okay to talk about life or what you’re doing on the weekend during your virtual lunch date.
Same thing with happy hours. Perhaps every Friday afternoon, you could instate a weekly happy hour at the end of the day to celebrate another week down. Just sitting back and laughing with your colleagues on camera to end the week is sure to send everyone into the weekend feeling good.
By Alex Yohn
Aug 1, 2020
Creating a personal time-off (PTO) policy that works for your company and your employees can be challenging. I’ve seen my fair share of policies while working with customers at Kin. Some create great work environments, others put employees into a panic and create a constantly churning workplace.
Before we begin, let’s define what personal time off means to our team as often times it can mean different things at different companies. At Kin, personal time off is a stand-alone policy our employees can use for vacation or time away from the office in general. We have separate policies outside of our personal time-off policy that let team members take time for illnesses, bereavement, parental leave, jury duty, etc. For a closer look at specific time-off policies, check out a previous blog post of ours here.
By now, we know that PTO policies do much more than allow an employee to take time off work without a financial burden. They allow employees to recharge and regroup. They even allow employees to do better at work, since studies link employees that use all of their PTO to being more engaged at work and more likely to receive incentives, bonuses or promotions. A good time-off policy is one of the top benefits employees look at and weigh when thinking about making a career move. At times it even surpasses salary as a factor.
With the weight of this benefit, what is the right answer when it comes to setting up a policy that gives your employees the flexibility to leave the workplace that they need, but also the stability that you deserve as an employer?
The answer may not be clear cut, so let’s walk through the models and how to come to a conclusion that works for your company.
Personal time-off policy models
There are various personal time-off models out there, but the three most popular types are upfront, accrual and unlimited.
Upfront: An upfront time-off policy gives the employee all the time they are owed for the year on the first day of the policy period. For example, if a policy runs January 1 – December 31 and I receive 20 days off per year, I am eligible to use all 20 days starting on January 1 of that policy year.
Accrual: An accrual time off policy gives employees more time as they work more hours. For every day or week worked, the time off policy accrues a certain amount of time. For example, if I receive 20 days a year of paid time off within an accrual policy, I will have about 10 days ‘earned’ to use by July, and my full 20 days by December. Often times, these policies allow you to ‘borrow ahead’ if you want to take a large trip before you’ve accrued enough hours. This is not always the case, however.
Unlimited: An unlimited time off policy allows the employee to take as much time at any point in the year that they so choose. Occasionally, an unlimited time-off policy will have a minimum amount of days or weeks an employee must use each year.
How Kin does personal time off
Instead of just creating a pro and con list for each model next, I wanted to walk through some real-life scenarios I’ve uncovered when working with our customers and while working on our own people operations.
For the sake of transparency, Kin currently operates on an upfront policy. Employees have the ability to use as much of their allotted them as they wish at any point in the year.
We also have a policy of paying out time out when an employee leaves. This is when our accrual policy comes into play. If an employee has used more than their allotted time earned to date at the time of resignation, we will deduct the ‘borrowed time’ from their final paycheck. If they’ve used less than what they’ve accrued, we’ll add the monetary value of that leftover PTO to the final paycheck.
It’s a win-win upfront/accrual combination for us: Employees can take the vacations they want when they need to, and we don’t lose money if an employee leaves in the middle of the year and has used more personal time off than what she or he has earned.
The problem with the unicorn unlimited time-off policy
We’ve seen a lot of companies come to Kin starting with an unlimited policy. Many folks doing so complain that the opposite happens of what you’d expect: people just don’t leave the office.
How could an unlimited policy create such a problem? Studies show that when you have an unlimited vacation policy, you may actually be creating an environment where people compete to take the least amount of time off as a way to show who is most loyal to the company.
There is no competitive, driven employee on this earth that will take advantage of the policy. And in turn, folks who don’t enjoy their job or feel ownership over their roles will be the ones likely to use it most.
Companies who see this deterrence are quick to put in a minimum time-off amount per year employees must hit. Unfortunately, many great employees do just that and stop once the quota has been achieved. It sounds great – giving a benefit that our best folks don’t use? Talent acquisition through the roof, costs reduced and additional output! Yes!
Nope, not so fast.
When an employee doesn’t use their PTO, they’re more likely to burn out and perform poorly at their job over time. It’s proven time and time again. It’s extremely beneficial for both you and the employee to encourage and – in some cases – make them use their personal time off.
The scarcity mentality with upfront and accrual
Now that upfront and accrual models look like much better options, we have to talk a bit about their dark sides too. If you do not give enough time to employees each year, they are likely to have a scarcity mindset and not take it at all, or take a long vacation at the end of the year when they finally feel comfortable enough to know something couldn’t possibly go wrong in their personal life that they would need to take time off for.
For example, if your team only gets 8 paid days off a year, they may choose to ‘save’ those days for if their child is sick, or if an unexpected doctor appointment or family emergency comes up. None of the events I listed above are truly allowing the employee to take time off to unplug and recharge, yet that’s often what ‘eats up’ their personal time-off balances. As an employer, is it worth adding a few more days to their compensation package to switch their mindsets to abundance versus scarcity? At Kin, we believe so.
We offer 15 days upfront the first year of employment. The second year, an employee receive 20 days and the third year on they receive 25 days a year. This is in addition to paid holidays, sick time and other basic policies such as maternity/paternity leave, jury duty, bereavement, conference time off, etc.
Most of our team takes their time away from work without hesitation, though we do frequently remind them to do so. It’s important to us that our team uses the benefits we provide them. At the end of the day, it makes them better at work and better family members and friends at home. No one loses.
With accrual, the scarcity mindset only gets worse. Since all of the time you can accrue in a policy year doesn’t come to you at once, you have employees forced to calculate how much time they’ll have at X date to see if they can take a vacation or not. It’s also tough on employees who may have a family emergency or another reason to leave, but not have enough time to take to adequately deal with it.
It gets even worse when accrual employees are left with a bulk of their time earned at the end of the year. Companies often tell us that they see massive exits of employees for vacation in the last quarter due to this, leaving a time when you should be finishing strong in the office and hitting those annual goals as a ghost town instead.
Should you pay employees to take a vacation?
Now that you have an idea of all the benefits that good vacation policies have other than attracting quality talent to your company, the question becomes, how do you incentivize folks to actually use PTO? Some companies have decided to go the route of actually paying employees to leave the office and dubbing it a ‘paycation.’
“I think this comes back to the idea of what is the purpose of this benefit? The business reason for me is to ensure that I have more T-shaped employees, meaning that they are very deeply knowledgeable in their expertise from their work experience, but that they also have a varied-interest personal life that allows them to bring different perspectives to the table. Far things allow for that better than vacation. And if paying for it makes them more likely to take it, I’m all for it,” Mary Ellen Slater, an HR consultant and business owner, told me a few months ago during a chat.
Paid vacation stipends can range from a few hundred dollars to lavish multi-thousand dollar checks. It all depends on your budget and your goals. While it is a great way to get people out of the office, it also does come with its own sets of worries. What’s deemed a ‘vacation’ to be paid for? Does a ‘staycation’ count? Make sure you address this thoroughly prior to implementing it so that you nor the employee are disappointed come time to redeem the stipend.
After reviewing the pros and cons of the three major time-off policy models, which will you choose for your company and why?