July 30, 2012
Unlimited vacation days. It sounds like the holy grail of perks, the work equivalent of a $7.95 all-you-can-eat buffet: Take as many days off as you want, whenever you want to take them, as long as you get your work done.
A number of companies, particularly the Silicon Valley, start-up kind, are moving away from the traditional vacation accrual policy and toward a looser, more employee-friendly unlimited paid time off policy. These somewhat new policies give workers greater flexibility and free managers from the administrative drudgery of having to track employees' time off. More important, an unlimited vacation policy gives these companies a recruiting edge in the war for talent.
Full-time employees at Netflix; Chegg, an online textbook rental site; Gilt Groupe; TIBCO Software; Zynga; Castlight Health; Bluewolf; NerdWallet; and magazine publisher Rodale, among others, currently have this perk.
