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Sometime deep into a closed door meeting it was decided that employees must be kept happy in their workplace. There was much debate about what mechanism would be used in this endeavor, but one fact was undebatable. Any benefits that were to be put in place, they were to come at a minimum cost to the company while providing the maximum effect for recruitment and retainment. This is nothing new. Every company looks to keep costs down while keeping its workforce intact, growing, prospering. And every company looks to provide a wide enough array of benefits that it believes will satisfy those looking for something special, something that few others receive at their jobs.

The brainstorming made their heads spin and their tongues hurt, and it was then that the first ace was pulled out of a sleeve and set the bar for the illusion of comfort and stability. Following in the footsteps of companies that love and appreciate their employees, this firm decided to set a “no limit” PTO (Paid Time Off) policy. Sounds great, doesn’t it? It sounded awesome when I first came across this concept. Just to think that there is no limit on how many days off I can take in a calendar year. No counting, no planning your days off months ahead. It started off that way for sure. No one in the company even gave this a second thought. If someone needed a day off, they just requested it, were granted it, and took it. If they needed a week off, same process. The trick for the supervisors was to look to the work ahead, rather than the amount of days off taken in the past. Nice and Easy.

In the grand scheme of things, however, this policy actually benefited the company as much as it benefited the employees. There’s something about human nature that keeps us civil, keeps us from taking advantage. With a policy devised specifically to be unlimited, it was remarkable how many people chose not to take advantage of it. And that’s where the company ate up the benefits. Grasp your mind around this concept – while there’s no limit on how many paid days you receive in a year, there are also no guaranteed days off. So if Joe Schmo worked his ass off for the entire year and took only 4 days off, there’s no fat check for the remainder coming. There’s no remainder to speak of. If Joe Schmo worked for a company that guaranteed employees PTO, even a basic package of say, 2 weeks vacation and 1 week sick, he would receive a check for the 11 days he didn’t take off. Or the PTO would carry over to the next year. Or if Joe was to quit or get fired, he’d receive a check for all the days that he earned and didn’t take. But not here. Here, if Joe took 2 days off or 12 days off, no one would really notice.

I’m not going to lie – there were plenty of Joes that took advantage. But there were also plenty of Joes that for whatever reason did not. They would wake up, come to work, do their time, and go home. The next day they’d do it all over again. And they only took off a day or a week during the holidays. May be an occasional sick day here and there. The system sparked my interest almost immediately. Are people afraid to ask for time off, I wondered? I had to research this further. It was an enormously useful recruiting and retention tool, yet was in effect a lesser cost than a standard PTO package. My interest was piqued. I had to quantify this phenomenon.

And then I fucked it all up…

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