We trust our employees to take the time they need to refresh and rejuvenate to perform their best. That’s why we initiated an unlimited paid time off policy — but do we really mean it?
We’ve all been there. You’re counting down the days until Thanksgiving and Christmas, you’ve had a busy year and all you want is to take a couple of extra days to spend with the family.
Except your business has a holiday policy of 12 days, and you’ve used them up across the year as you’ve (deservedly) given yourself a summer vacation, a couple of mental health days and taken your birthday off.
At SimpleTexting, we didn’t want our employees to go through this. We know our employees work hard – it’s the reason we have such a great business in the first place. So if they need to take time off, we let them.
It might sound too good to be true, but there are a couple of key reasons we’ve found this to be so successful at SimpleTexting:
The fact is, we trust our team to take the time off they need to refresh and come back to work at 100%.
We don’t want to force people into the workplace if they’re going through personal problems, or feeling overwhelmed. We want our team members to want to turn up, which means giving them the opportunity to turn off, too.
There are no two ways about it: having an international team could make holiday days over-complicated.
With employees across the globe, we need to cater to a variety of national holidays and celebrations – so why not just allow our employees to choose for themselves?
In the U.S., we celebrate Thanksgiving big time, while our team members in Eastern Europe will take time off in early January to celebrate Christmas. Some team members will want to take off Hanukkah, while others are celebrating Ramadan and need to take time off accordingly.
So you see, it’s not just texting that we like to make simple.
No, it really is unlimited. However, we do ask that our team members take a minimum of 10 days per annum to reset.
This is to avoid overworking and overwhelm, we want our team to perform to their best, and we genuinely don’t believe this is possible without some downtime too.
Of course, we do ask that our team keep things reasonable – six-week summer vacations aren’t considerate of other team members. But overall, we do our best to accommodate requests.
After approaching their direct manager to ask for time off on specific dates, each team member fills in an online form to formally request that time off and alert team leaders to their absence.
In our form, they can select:
This is a way to differentiate why they’ll be off. As most of us don’t plan to be sick, there’s also the option to submit the form belatedly.
No strings, no caveats. Only you know how much time you need off to perform at your best. And we trust you to do just that.
If you’re interested in learning more about what it’s like to work for us, check out Inside SimpleTexting, our open work culture blog.
Alice is a copywriter at SimpleTexting. When not teaching the world about the benefits of business texting, you can find her feeding family, friends and strangers with her latest baking experiment.
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