Dive Brief:
- A handful of employers, mainly in the tech sector, offer an unlimited vacation benefit. But Kickstarter, the popular crowdfunding company, recently decided to drop its version of that perk.
- A Kickstarter spokesperson told BuzzFeed that the company changed from a "flexible" (meaning unlimited) offering to a 25-day-per-year leave policy because the former was somewhat confusing, you could say, to the 100 or so people who work at the company.
- Confusion about vacation time within unlimited policies has been a commonly reported issue with the benefit.
Dive Insight:
“It’s always been important to us to ensure that our team is able to enjoy a quality work/life balance,” the Kickstarter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “What we found was that by setting specific parameters around the number of days, there was no question about how much time was appropriate to take from work to engage in personal, creative, and family activities.”
The Kickstarter scenario shows that HR leaders need to establish ways to directly encourage employees to take their full paid leave days, and one way to do that is through a strong communications effort that focuses on the issue. Employees who are not taking their time off could be prone to suffer higher levels of stress, both at work and at home.
Kickstarter's move makes sense in light of a Glassdoor survey that found that only 51% of Americans use their full vacation day allotment.
