A United States-based startup, Go Nimbly has strengthened its HR Policy by deciding to adopt a leave policy in their firm which made it mandatory for employees to take 20 leaves every year.
Kyle Lacy, Director of People Operations at Go Nimbly shared the information on LinkedIn and said, “I used to think ‘Unlimited’ PTO was an anti-employee policy, was firmly against it, and would gladly die on that hill. We rolled out a Flexible Time Off policy in Q2 this year. What happened, and how do I sleep at night?”
“Some background: We had a pretty standard accrual-based time off policy that had tenure milestones. We also had a Sick Time policy. And Bereavement. And Jury. And Parental. Etc. Etc”, the post added.
“Before the change: We had been hearing employee requests for a flexible plan for months. I’d share my perspective on why I didn’t want to make that change, and then I’d move on. It didn’t stop the requests. Eventually, I opted to include questions about our time off policies in an engagement survey (s/o to Lattice) and directly ask the company if we should consider moving to a flexible time off policy. The results were overwhelmingly positive to change, which we shared in its entirety with the company:, the post further added.
“The change: We designed a new plan and made sure to include a few important things:
•We’re explicit in the minimum number of days an employee should take per year (>20)
•We adjusted our incentive plans to align with the new time off policy (ex: employees can take 1 week off per quarter and still easily hit their quarterly target, they can also take 2-3x than that and still be on track to achieve a % of the quarterly bonus)
•We set up a workflow to monitor the time taken during a quarter and flag it’s below the minimum amount (s/o to Rippling)
•We kept Parental Leave as a separate plan
•We asked a few employees to review and provide more feedback before officially rolling it out”, the post added.
“After the change: We rolled out the policy like any other major change and continued to test for feedback via pulse surveys throughout the quarter. Today, we’re sitting at 94% Agree/Strongly Agree with the statement “I’m happy with our Flexible Time Off Policy” (the remaining 6% are Neutral). Time off usage has increased by 19% compared to last quarter and by 28% when compared to Q2 2022 (and adjusted for changes in headcount)”, the post concluded.
