Advertisement
New Zealand markets closed
  • NZX 50

    12,105.29
    +94.63 (+0.79%)
     
  • NZD/USD

    0.5980
    -0.0025 (-0.42%)
     
  • NZD/EUR

    0.5535
    -0.0007 (-0.13%)
     
  • ALL ORDS

    8,153.70
    +80.10 (+0.99%)
     
  • ASX 200

    7,896.90
    +77.30 (+0.99%)
     
  • OIL

    82.68
    +1.33 (+1.63%)
     
  • GOLD

    2,234.40
    +21.70 (+0.98%)
     
  • NASDAQ

    18,280.89
    +0.05 (+0.00%)
     
  • FTSE

    7,963.48
    +31.50 (+0.40%)
     
  • Dow Jones

    39,778.77
    +18.69 (+0.05%)
     
  • DAX

    18,496.80
    +19.71 (+0.11%)
     
  • Hang Seng

    16,541.42
    +148.58 (+0.91%)
     
  • NIKKEI 225

    40,168.07
    -594.66 (-1.46%)
     
  • NZD/JPY

    90.4440
    -0.3360 (-0.37%)
     

When companies offer unlimited vacation, do workers take it?

Yahoo Finance Live’s Akiko Fujita and Brian Cheung discuss unlimited vacation time in the workplace.

Video transcript

BRIAN CHEUNG: Goldman Sachs is adding unlimited vacation days for senior employees in a bid to retain top talent amid a hot labor market. Bloomberg reporting that the Wall Street bank will permit partners and managing directors to take time off, quote, "without a fixed vacation day entitlement."

Now, in our latest Yahoo Finance poll, we asked the question, if your job had an unlimited vacation policy, unlimited PTO, do you think you would take more paid time off than you do now? And 60% said yes. And Akiko, I have to say, I was a bit surprised by that answer because I've also heard the flip side, which is that if you have unlimited paid time off, because it's not use or lose, you actually, in the long run, end up taking fewer days.

ADVERTISEMENT

AKIKO FUJITA: But more days than you take off now, I guess is the question, right?

BRIAN CHEUNG: Right.

AKIKO FUJITA: And oftentimes, I know people who have worked at companies who offer unlimited vacation. What you hear often is that there's a bit of a guilt trip that kicks in.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Stigma, absolutely.

AKIKO FUJITA: Right? And, you know, Goldman certainly, they, last year, had junior analysts who were coming out and saying, they're working more than 100 hours a week. And obviously, they're trying to retain talent. But in that same Bloomberg article you were just talking about, they sort of estimated, what, 15 days is what those employees will take off. That's not more than maybe one day more than you usually get, which is 14 days.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Right, and the challenge is that everyone in the office will know that everyone else has unlimited paid time off. So if someone else is not taking the time off, you feel like there's pressure for you to do the same. So it kind of becomes a little bit of this game that might be more complicated and convoluted than if you know, for example, you have 15 days a calendar year. And if you don't use them, then you will lose them.

At the end of the day, I think, yes, it's really about how many days that an individual will take off. And for Goldman Sachs, we know that the banking industry, and especially investment banking, is extremely high pressure. So yes, this could be something on paper that might be nice to them. But when you're working 80, 90 hours a week, I don't think that changes because of this policy.

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, and--

BRIAN CHEUNG: You'll still be working very hard.

AKIKO FUJITA: And also, the key is to be able to time your vacation, right? So you're not sort of just saying, we'll see you later, in the middle of a project, right? I mean, that's always the trick, is that you need to be able to complete your assignment, whatever that is, before you actually take off. And that's easier said than done. From the company perspective, yes, retention is one, but the other thing I've also heard is, companies often find that everybody wants to take off time off during Christmas. They all want to take time off during Thanksgiving. It's a way to distribute the time off because people know that they can take off--

BRIAN CHEUNG: If it's unlimited.

AKIKO FUJITA: --time if it's unlimited.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah, well, then the other bit of it, too, is that if you leave a company and you have paid time off, that's on the books.

AKIKO FUJITA: You get that paid out, yes.

BRIAN CHEUNG: You get that paid out to you. Now in an unlimited PTO situation, you're not going to get unlimited pay to cover for those days. So that could be a way that HR might be kind of getting around some of those costs as well. But again, worth noting that that Goldman Sachs story, again, it's not for everyone. It's only for managing director--

AKIKO FUJITA: [INAUDIBLE]

BRIAN CHEUNG: Bagels are for associates only.

AKIKO FUJITA: Bagels are for associates only.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Bagels are for associates only.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah. I would like it. Just a note to Yahoo Finance--

BRIAN CHEUNG: We don't have that. We don't have that here, yeah.

AKIKO FUJITA: --Yahoo Finance managers who may be watching. I'd be for it.

BRIAN CHEUNG: And we try to stagger our vacations so that one of us is here.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, that's it, right? Although we still wouldn't be able to take time off at the same time, even if we had unlimited time. It just wouldn't work.

BRIAN CHEUNG: We didn't, yeah. I've left you hanging more days than you've left me hanging, but.

AKIKO FUJITA: We're not going to get into that.