Unlimited Annual Leave
For some leaders the thought of Unlimited Annual Leave might just be a step too far. I mean, how could you possibly ‘police’ it? How could you make sure that people don’t abuse it? Surely there would be too much lost productivity. The business would suffer. The customers would suffer. As an idea it almost sounds impossible to introduce.
I remember having a conversation with a Senior Leader once about how much people value annual leave and being able to spend time with loved ones. I tried to gently suggest that maybe the annual leave entitlement was a little too low and we should look at potentially increasing it. I was completely shot down and honestly, it made my heart sink a little. We work to live right, not the other way round.
The Concept
Let’s start by talking about the concept of it rather than the practical application.
Introducing unlimited annual leave would certainly demonstrate that you trust your people. That actually, you want to treat them like adults and you believe that they wouldn’t abuse the gesture anyway.
It would show that you believe in the importance of spending time with family and friends away from work.
It would also show that Wellbeing is an important part of your culture as annual leave gives people an opportunity to mentally switch off from the challenges of work and spend some time rejuvenating.
Introducing unlimited annual leave is quite a progressive thing to do in todays world of work. Some organisations have tried it and failed, in so much as they changed it back to having a cap. They found that in fact, people weren’t taking enough time off and by introducing a cap people felt more comfortable booking holiday because they knew what the boundaries were. If the culture of the organisation is not one of trust and there are boundaries around most things, then this would be quite an alien concept and I can see how it would be tricky to implement.
Implementing Unlimited Annual Leave
So let’s talk about implementation then. How could you introduce Unlimited Annual Leave and successfully embed it. With anything at work, employees do like some rules to ensure fairness and consistency so I would definitely think about what that would look like in your organisation. Some suggestions might be:
You cannot book more than 2 weeks at a time. Anything over this would need to be approved by a Senior Manager and maybe reserved for ‘special occasions’ or ‘life events’.
You need to give twice as much notice for the amount of time you would like off. So if you would like to book 2 weeks off, then you would need to give 4 weeks notice. This encourages people to think about the time they would like off in advance and it may discourage people from waking up in the morning and thinking, I can’t be bother today and trying to book last minute annual leave
All annual leave needs to approved. This may be an obvious one, but whilst the amount of leave is unlimited, it still needs to be taken at a time that suits the business. You need to make sure that normal service is not disrupted by too many people being off work at the same time
You need to make sure that you are meeting expectations in your role. Stating the obvious, but there are 260 working days in a year. You couldn’t possibly take 260 days off and still fulfil your duties
Having a policy on this topic would be super important because employees will need the guidance.
Monitoring and reporting
It would be important for the People Team to track how much annual leave people are taking
On an individual basis
On a team basis
Companywide
On an individual basis we need to know if people aren’t taking the statutory minimum. There are always people who don’t use all their annual leave and if they had the option to sell it back to the business I’m sure they would. But as a responsible organisation you need to keep an eye on this, and remind the employee in plenty of time that they need to book annual leave.
On a team basis it would be interesting to see on average how much annual leave is taken because it might raise some concerns that a manager is maybe not approving enough, or conversely isn’t really keeping an eye on things
Companywide we would want to know the average amount of days taken. And this is something that I would communicate out to people. If they average is 35-40 days this would certainly be helpful for some people to know so they didn’t feel like they were taking too much.
I would advise caution around the communication of how many days are taken because you would never want it to sound like you are querying that too much is being taken. If there are performance concerns then of course, I would want to look at the amount of leave being taken, but if all is fine with their performance then you need to stand by the company decision to introduce unlimited annual leave.