This company is making summer vacation mandatory

Employees are burned out and ready to quit. Is this something a vacation can solve?

Employees left 768 million days of PTO on the table last year, due to the restrictions and uncertainties of the pandemic, according to the U.S. Travel Association. Yet even pre-COVID, employees weren’t taking their allotted vacation days, because of guilt over missing work and fear their workload would be unmanageable when they returned.

Overwork is putting many employees at risk for burnout and more serious mental health concerns. Overworked employees are also less productive and are more likely to quit their jobs. If employers want a more productive workforce with reduced burnout and improved mental health, it might be time for them to start mandating employees take their PTO.

Read more: Pandemic PTO: Why ‘staycations’ are vital to employee mental health

Lessonly, a workplace training platform, already offers employees unlimited PTO. The company is taking it a step further by requiring employees to take an additional two weeks off to regroup and reset. After successfully implementing a company-wide winter break, Lessonly expanded the program to include a week off in July, too.

“The standard definition of vacation changed in 2020, because if you did take time off, it was highly likely that you didn’t have an opportunity to go anywhere,” says Megan Jarvis, vice president of talent at Lessonly. “We’re not only responding to what's happened over the last year, but wanting to make sure we're continuing to support that whole person as part of our team.”

Read more: ‘I can’t lose this job.’ Why employees aren’t taking PTO

Jarvis spoke with Employee Benefit News about the benefits of mandatory PTO and how other companies can prioritize time off while strengthening their corporate culture.

What was the benefit of offering this mandatory week off for your employees?

One of the things that we think a tremendous amount about at Lessonly is time — knowing that work is such a tremendous part of somebody's life, how can we give them time to rest and recharge.

In the last few years, we’ve given our employees a winter break between Christmas and the new year to step back and say what are we doing? What can we do more of or what should we stop doing? And now we’re looking at summer as a way to apply the same thing. Give employees a mid-year boost and a release to come back feeling refreshed and inspired.

How has COVID played a role in this decision?

At the end of 2020, we launched a campaign that employees had to take five days off over a three month period to make sure they were taking time to unplug. Then that fueled the conversation around our summer break and making sure that people had time to recover and spend time on themselves. We're giving you that time because you've just been through an incredibly difficult period.

The feedback from employees has been fun: one team member said she hadn’t had a summer break since college, and this person is in her forties. There’s a sense of relief and excitement around getting to take this break. We’ve also had some emotional responses from employees who have been through a lot of life who need a break.

Why should other companies make PTO a priority?

When you think about the employer-employee relationship, it’s a partnership and you both have responsibilities to each other. Think about your culture and your team: you have a team with radically different experiences in the workplace and radically different experiences for what a job looks like and what an employee-employer relationship looks like. So if we leave it to each individual to decide what to do when my company tells me to take time off and we don’t set an example, we have people who have different definitions based on their experiences. So set some times to make sure individuals are taking the time because they might not have the trust to do it based on their experiences.