Mandatory Time Off Is Our New Normal

Happy first day back after a long weekend. You feel good, right? Yeah, us too. Really makes the case for taking more time off without us even having to push for it, but because we like a challenge, we'll elaborate.

Recently, Ad Week—which, for those outside of the agency space, is one of the more prolific hubs for agency news—published the article, “We Need Mandatory Time Off as We Get Back to Work.” As the Director of Operations here at Black Sheep, I was excited, maybe even relieved, to see such a lauded publication tackling the topic as it’s one that we had been trying to solve for, too.

Going into 2020, the numbers were already there. Americans get and take far fewer vacation days than their European counterparts who just don’t blink twice at spending their hard-earned time off. More than half of Americans squander their fully allotted vacation time, which amounted to a staggering (and depressing, if you ask me) accrued-and-untaken 768 million PTO days in 2018. On average, employees with an unlimited PTO policy take 13% fewer vacation days than those with a defined vacation policy. But we’re Black Sheep. We like doing things a little differently. So I had hoped that maybe we would be the exception to the rule. However, when I dug in further, it was pretty clear that our even team was taking off far less days than we’d hoped, which was not great in an average year, and absolutely crushing in a year that was hitting us with a global pandemic, social injustice, a head-turner of an election and a jam-packed workload.

We needed to change it up. Big time.

I’m proud to say that we rolled out mandatory time off this spring and created more context around why we offer unlimited PTO and how our employees will be encouraged to use that benefit to their benefit. While that shift was brewing long before COVID-19 turned our world upside down, it was 100% hastened as we saw what the pandemic did to our team. We needed to do more to protect our collective health and wellbeing—which means shutting off computers, logging off of email and letting the work temporarily go on, short a team member or two. We’ve also established mandatory Wellness days 4x/year to give folks more frequent three-day weekends and provide a defined break during those busy months where it feels challenging to leave for any substantial amount of time. How will it play out? Well, that remains to be seen. But we feel like it’s worth the effort to see if this can do something positive and impactful for our agency.

If you were thinking about how you can support your workforce in a post-pandemic world, here’s our two cents: join us in the shift and insist on mandatory time off. Chances are your organization will head back to that desk feeling more refreshed and more committed to your work. And after last year, I can safely say that’s what we all deserve.