Leave cycle swings to employees

02 October 2015 - 02:06 By Bloomberg

A self-diagnosed workaholic, Jeanette Russell knows that a real holiday requires her to completely unplug by letting her work laptop battery die in a corner. It's also company policy. "When we say 'work-life balance', this is our proof that we mean it," said Russell, director of operations at Denver's FullContact, a software firm that helps businesses sync contact information across devices.Holidays are a serious business at the four-year-old company. Each employee is granted a yearly $7,500 (about R105,000) bonus to use for time off, with a mandate to stay completely out of touch while away. The extra pay is forfeited if that rule is broken.While the start-up's policy seems like a worker's dream, it hints at the kind of perks needed to attract and keep staff in a job market that's increasingly tilting in the employee's favour.It's also a win for companies because the added flexibility helps attract sought-after employees.In Silicon Valley, where tech companies feel the strains of an especially tight job market, employers are enticing workers with buzz phrases like "unlimited vacation" and "paid-paid vacation".With unlimited holidays, companies don't institute a set number of days per year for an employee to get away. Instead, time off is flexible, dependent on adjustments made by other workers to ensure the business doesn't skip a beat.So-called paid-paid vacation takes the policy one step further, offering a bonus earmarked solely for days off."It makes economic sense," said Drew Lawrence, FullContact's director of business development.As long as employees don't leave co-workers in the lurch, everyone returns from their time off as ready as ever to meet their targets, with minimal interruptions to clients, he said.Matt Rizai, chief executive officer of data analytics company Workiva, sees additional rewards: "If they're happy, they're more productive, and if they're more productive, we do better business."Workiva, founded in 2008, started by offering a standard two-week holiday , and now allows up to twice as much.Last year 85% of the company's 953 fulltime employees used their allotted paid time off, according to Kevin McCarthy, Workiva's senior public relations manager.That beats the national average. Just 25% of employees used all of their paid time off in the prior 12 months, according to a survey by job-search network Glassdoor.When employees did take leave, 33% reported working because "no one else at my company can do" the job and 28% said they feared "getting behind".More leave also shows that companies are weighing up what they might otherwise spend to keep their employees healthy, said Jennifer Schramm, manager of workforce trends and forecasting at the Society for Human Resource Management."There's a lot more science coming out about the actual impacts of not taking time off," said Schramm. Managers "are starting to look at these things more holistically"...

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