New Albany company offer employees unlimited vacation time

Ashley Best would like to spend some extra time — maybe even taking a full-fledged staycation — with her newborn daughter.

Both Hahn and Best will be able to do so without any protest from their employer, SmartBox Web Marketing in New Albany.

Colin Receveur, the founder and CEO of the New Albany business, which provides marketing services to dentists, recently implemented an unlimited paid time off policy for most of his company's 75 employees.

That means Hahn and Best are free to take as many days off as they would like this year — and get paid for it.

It might seem like a radical idea. Only 1 to 2 percent of companies in corporate America offer the benefit, according to the Society for Human Resource Management's 2016 Employee Benefits report.

That doesn't surprise Receveur.

“We look at ourselves as a progressive company,” he said. “We have a lot of remote time for everybody who works here. [Unlimited paid time off] just seemed like the next logical step.”

Receveur also sees the policy as a way to attract and retain talent. After all, it's the people who make SmartBox what it is, he said.

Before February, SmartBox employees were given two weeks of vacation each year, which they could accrue if they chose not to take it all.

Then SmartBox launched its new unlimited PTO policy, currently only for salaried workers, which make up about 70 percent of the company's employees, according to Receveur.

SmartBox's hourly employees are restricted to only three weeks off each year, but only because the corporate labor laws surrounding the policy for them are vague.

“When the courts and laws catch up to progress, then we'll expand that into unlimited paid time off for the hourly folks as well,” Receveur said.

To prevent employees from taking less time off under the new policy than they would under the previous one, Receveur has also instated a two-week minimum on vacation time.

“There's no reason for people not to take two weeks of vacation a year,” he said. “Take every Friday off a year if you want. You know, get some time to recharge and spend some time with your family and whatever you enjoy doing.”

Vacation time is one of those things that is not taken advantage of as much as it could be, even when it is shown — and known — to be beneficial to individuals.

Men who didn't take a vacation for several years were 30 percent more likely to have a heart attack than men who did take time off, according to the Farmington Heart Study. Women were also shown to be at risk if they took a vacation only once every six years or less. They were almost eight times more likely to develop a coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than women who vacationed at least twice a year.

Leisure time, including vacation, has also been shown to lessen negative emotions and depression, according to a study from the University of Pittsburgh's Mind-Body Center.

Employees seem to understand this, with 96 percent of those surveyed in a 2014 study of 1,300 employees and business leaders saying they recognized the importance of using PTO. The survey was released by Project: Time Off, an organization that advocates for more vacation time.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they did not plan to take all of their paid time off, however — citing worries about returning to more work after their vacation and the fear that no one else could do their job, among other things. As a whole, American workers lost 169 million PTO days in 2013, or 1.6 per employee, according to another Project: Time Off study. And those were the PTO days that didn't roll over into the next year or could be paid out.

Companies can also be hurt by employees not taking a break if their PTO is accrued. A total of $224 billion in liabilities hang over American companies due to unused vacation time.

Receveur, 32, doesn't like the mentality that companies should work their employees as hard as possible. That's a mindset he associates with older generations.

It was another reason Receveur was so quick to embrace the idea of unlimited PTO when he first started hearing about it.

SmartBox has connections to companies, some of them in the tech fields, that are out west. It's those businesses that already have unlimited PTO — businesses such as Netflix and LinkedIn or even lesser-known ones like Infusionsoft.

Receveur really started to consider unlimited PTO as an option in the third quarter of last year. He estimates he looked at hundreds of policies before deciding how to craft his.

He also introduced the idea to employees before it was official and asked for feedback.

It was mostly positive, he said. Best, who received the news when she was on maternity leave, was flabbergasted by the news.

“I heard about it and go, 'What? This can't be. I read this wrong,'” she said. “I totally thought I had read it wrong... I mean, you just don't hear about it, right?”

There were still some puzzles Receveur had to solve while he put together his plan. What would he do with employees who had accrued time off? He could make the days disappear and risk upsetting employees ... or pay it all out at once and wreck SmartBox's budget. In the end, he took a third option. Employees who have accrued time off will have those days subtracted from the vacation days they take in 2017. They'll get paid for any remaining accrued days they don't take.

Receveur also worried that employees would end up not taking any or fewer PTO days than they had in the past, hence the two-week vacation minimum.

That was a concern Receveur often saw during his research on unlimited PTO.

One thing he wasn't worried about, however, was employees taking advantage of the new PTO policy. It wasn't something he saw happening at other companies doing the same things.

Both Best and Hahn said they'd be OK with taking extra unlimited PTO only if they felt they had worked enough for it not to be a problem.

“If you're going to spend time off, you're going to bust your butt when you are here,” Best said.

One last thing Receveur considered was whether or not employees would want to have unlimited PTO. He gave everyone the option to stick with the current policy.

No one took him up on his offer.