How to implement "Unlimited Leave"

Tuesday, 2019 Nov 12 00:00 (UTC)

More and more tech companies are offering “Unlimited Leave”. While such a policy allows employees to determine how they want to structure their time off from work, it also introduces uncertainties, both on the side of the manager and the employee. Common questions from employees range from the optimistic “Can I take every Friday off now?” to the pessimistic “If everyone else doesn’t take leave but I do, will I be judged unfairly?”.

As managers, implementing unlimited leave is also difficult. Without clear guidelines, we have to use our judgement to determine whether time-off is appropriate, but our judgement can be biased, which opens our decisions to questioning. To avoid bias, we should establish clear guidelines to the policy, which will allow both sides to clearly understand the consequences of a time-off decision.

Recently, another manager I work with gave me this gem to help solve the problem:

Unlimited Leave turns the spotlight on your performance, instead of your working hours.

This makes sense, because software engineering is a creative role. Sometimes, with a flash of insight, we can finish an impossible task in a matter of hours; other times, we can chip away at a problem for weeks and get nowhere. Controlling an engineer’s working hours is at best an indirect way of setting a minimum amount of work done. By pivoting the focus from time-off back to performance, we can eliminate an indirect metric and place the emphasis back where it belongs.

Let’s look at how this guideline can provide predictability in our decisions:

• James takes leave every Friday but finishes all his assigned work on time. There is no problem with his time-off decision, but his manager should review whether his load was too light for his role, or is he just completing his work really quickly.

• Tim tries to follow James’ footsteps and takes every Friday off, but he can’t finish his work on time. As Tim’s manager, I only need to inform Tim that his performance is not meeting expectations. Now he has 2 choices: Stop taking Fridays off and finish his work, or continue to take Fridays off to the detriment of his performance review.

• Jessica overperforms week after week, but doesn’t take time off every Friday like James. Her performance review will be in the upper bands, which differentiates her from James. She can also take on more responsibilities, leading to promotions.

As an added bonus, re-focusing on performance allows us to decide what matters most to us in life. Do I want a promotion, or do I want to spend more time in other parts of my life? In our examples above, James could be a new parent who wanted more time with his baby. If he can complete his work faster than expected, why should we make him sit in the office instead of spending time with his baby?

Whether you’re an employee or a manager, I hope this helps you refine the way you think about unlimited leave.