Some days ago I reed quite a intressting article at Lifehacker (Lifehacker in their turn got the article from FastCompany).

The idea behind this article is that productivity can increase rapidly when companies stop tracking their employers vacation days. The folks at Hubspot has seen this for example:

[CTO Dharmesh] Shah says Hubspot doesn’t track anyone’s time off, so it’s hard to know if the policy makes people more or less wary of taking vacation. “One thing we are pretty sure about is that it’s a less stressful way to manage it,” he says. Rather than hoard days for times when they really need it, then scramble to take days at the end of the year (or fight for extra pay for time not taken), Shah says Hubspot’s open, unlimited vacation policy makes all of these problems go away.

There are some great upsides to this approach and some downsides, let’s take a look at them.

The upsides are from the employees point of view that they can plan their vacation whenever they like. If an employee would like to take a few days off when they feel that they need to recharge their batteries they are able to. This then of course has to plan out with the rest of the team that the employee is working with. You just can’t take a vacation when you are close to a deadline and you are a bit behind, but that makes sense, right? And if an employee would do such a thing that employee is not supposed to work for the company.

Another upside is that employees can travel anywhere in the world and don’t feel that they are missing out on anything wherever they are traveling because they can go whenever they like.
And from the company point of view the positive outcome is that all employees won’t go on vacation on the same time. So the office doesn’t has to shut down completely for a month which is normal in some businesses. Another positive outcome from this is that the employees can work from anywhere they are in the world, as long as they got a phone and a laptop (depending on their job). And the odds are high that the employees will bring their mobile office with them on vacation and still work.

The downsides of being able to take vacation days whenever employees fells for it is that some employees will use the system and get away with it. That’s a risk with this system that should not be overlooked. But sooner or later someone will notice.

From the employees point of view it’s maybe not that great to feel that you can take off on vacation whenever they like. The employee might feel a bit guilty and still works while on vacation. Then the vacation that the employee really needs doesn’t recharge the employees batteries enough and can maybe in the long run lead to that people get burned out?

What are your thought on this subject? Please leave a comment and tell me if you would like this system of not.