We have unlimited vacation time as long as your work is done. I don’t take any vacation days from New Years to June and then take pretty much all my vacation time (about three weeks) during June – August. I really enjoy this pattern and find it to be very productive.

We close down between Christmas and New Years. We find this time allows for everyone to enjoy the holidays. We also found that this was a pretty slow time for us as our clients are all on vacation, so it works out well for everyone.

I also started to instituted “bell days”. I took this from Mt. Holyoke College. One day each year the President of the college, declares a mountain day and all classes are cancelled. This past fall, we had been working hard, so I declared the friday before labor day as a “bell day” and we all took the day off and had a nice 4 day weekend. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hatlas/traditions/mtnday.htm

This is a hard topic for folks to discuss as it seems counter to the high tech startup culture. I actually had a manager once who said “I don’t care how many hours the developers have to work, they are young they don’t need sleep.” That is often the mentality of a high tech startup. In the long run, that doesn’t work. Taking care of employees is a winning solution!

Shannon

We use our own staff holiday app http://www.fabmin.com to manage requests, approvals and records – it makes it really easy to see who is taking their holiday (forgive the plug – we do use Groove to support our customers).

Our office works typically 9:00am to 5:30pm and we don’t expect people to work longer than that other than on special occasions — nor are their any macho accolades attached to long hours.

Make the office friendly, fun, flexible and respectful of your staff and their families — after all nobody said on their death bed “I wish I’d spent more time in the office!”

As I was reading the article, particularly your mention of velocity as a measure, I had a thought: why not add “Vacation” as an item in your PivotalTracker? Assign explicit value to this “issue”and voila! You can budget and track vacation WITHOUT affecting your velocity. The added benefit is that the team does not feel guilty over taking time off instead of putting in work when “vacation” is treated on par with “work” in your PivotalTracker. The guilt over increased workload will go away too because the actual workload is reduced by virtue of vacation occupying some space in the total for particular week/sprint.

The idea is not fully formed and I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts, particularly if they have seen/read about this being employed and what were the outcomes.

It’s the same at our startup and I think with everyone who loves their work. As a CEO (or leader) you’ll have to recognize this and ease that burden for the employees by coming up with those solutions.

I’d like to add that it requires a personal effort from all employees too to make sure they’re balancing work/free time to find _their sweetspot_ as it changes from person to person! Of course that can only happen after you have hired more people and they actually have the option to take time off 🙂