How to take a break - enterprise edition
Robust vacation policies increase risk resilience for companies: here's how.
Sunny day scenario - that’s what in Product we call a situation where everything works out as expected: the user never chooses the “wrong” option, they don’t ask questions we weren’t prepared for, and they successfully do whatever we wanted them to do.
When working with humans though, the reality usually looks more like London in winter. Mapping out different scenarios, hence, becomes your super power. It’s not about being pessimistic, it’s about acknowledging reality.
The same happens with your vacation policy or PTO policy, which very likely is based on a sunny day scenario with a bit of user enablement.
Your planning kind of assumes that no one ever misses a day of work.
If someone goes on vacation, they are expected to frontload their work or play catchup aftewards.
There are no clear guidelines around what happens if someone leaves more than a few days.
You remind employees to use the Out of Office settings and update their Slack status.
If you feel really progressive you even recommend them to uninstall Slack from their phone to “really disconnect”, ignoring the fact that they’ll come back to thousands of notifications.
This set of rules works really well if your workforce is made up of people without any outside responsibilities (or interests) who never get sick and don’t have friends. It’s also a sure way to innoculate yourself against new ideas and innovation.
And it is about as realistic as expecting the entire winter to be sunny.
Reality is risky - time to acknowledge that
People are going to miss work, whether you have a vacation policy or not. As the employer, it is your responsibility to mitigate the risks that come with their absence.
Let me repeat that: it’s not your responsiblity to mitigate them taking time off. It’s your responsibility to be prepared for when that happens.
Vacation days are only one example - and once you’ve solved for those, you have a blueprint for all the other instances when someone can’t attend work.
Some countries have a generous honeymoon leave for those who got married.
Parental leave can vary from several weeks to several months.
People get sick. They break a leg while hiking, get food poisening, or catch every nasty virus their little ones bring home from kindergarten.
People even die before retirement and without much notice. Accidents happen, and they are traumatic enough for colleagues without having to piece together all the information that is gone, too.
And sometimes, people simply resign and leave.
How to prepare your company for time-off
Use a searchable knowledge base, like Notion, Slite, or Almanac.io. And then train your employees to use the knowledge base to find answers. It’s less about finding answers those, and more about discovering gaps.
Document your processes and how things work in general. You need someone to own this part, though everyone needs to share their own activities.
Use written standups or weekly summaries. Geekbot is a good tool for that. Make sure team leads regularly review those written standups to discover what might need documenting in a more formal fashion (e.g. a sales person being really successful - maybe that can be replicated).
Actively create redundance. As soon as you can afford it, make sure that you always have at least two people within every knowledge domain. No person should be irreplaceable. This does not mean that two people should be doing the same. Instead, if Maria goes on vacation she should know that Lena, Markus and James are going to take over her responsibilities in the meantime.
Actively work on a sous-chef mentality. The sous-chef in the kitchen is the second in command. They can take over whenever the chef needs to be elsewhere. In your company, every person needs to know their sous-chef or sous-chefs. This can start as easily as asking: “If you weren’t here today, who could help me with […].”
Allow for 15%-20% of everyone’s time to be dedicated to projects or learning. This ensures that everyone has a little bit of capacity available to step in when a colleague is out (for whatever reason).
Time-off enablement goes both ways
Employees need to learn to do proper handovers, to plan their time off, to document what needs to be done in their absence. In exchange, they get to completely disconnect, recharge and recover - and as a company you have an interest in this process. It drives innovation, and it mitigates the very real risk of knowledge drain.
How to stresstest your leave policies
Some companies offer so-called sabbaticals. After a certain number of years (usually 3 to 5) at the company, employees get to take a set amount of weeks off - usually a full month or more.
This is a genius way to make sure employees document all of their activities. They can’t put all of their work on hold for a months or more, and they’ll be coming back so they have a vested interest that things proceed smoothly.
It’s also a lightweight opportunity for others to try out a new role for a limited time, or to get deeper insights into a specific position.
On a smaller scale this happens in countries where the law requires employees to take at least 2 weeks consecutive leave every year.
Instead of expecting people to front-load and catch-up, teach them to document and teach their peers. You’ll be stronger for it in the future.