Start your new job off the right way: with a vacation
In an effort to ensure my new website has a blog with entries at launch, I’ve decided to write up my own personal innovation in HR: give people a week off when you hire them.
The idea is that when you’re starting a new job is the ideal time to actually take time to unplug. Americans are well-known for not taking as much vacation time as people in other countries, and part of that is that it’s just difficult to take time off in the middle of things. You have to work extra beforehand to get everything in a place to leave it, and then also work extra when you get back to catch up.
But at the beginning of (most) roles, the hire isn’t urgent. You don’t usually need someone to start that Monday. Set a start date for payroll, and then have their actual work start date a week or so later, so they can actually take a week to relax - no job searching labor, no crushing feeling of unemployment lingering, no work assignments or teeming inboxes looming - before jumping in. Once they’ve started, they’re part of the team, and vacations mean multiple people setting aside work to accommodate. We should absolutely do this more than we do, but might as well also take vacation in ways that don’t require it at all.
We started doing this a few years ago at an org I work with, and it has been great. The only downside is that you do need to meet up with them in their first 2 days to fill out their i9 (legally required for all new hires, and you do not want to be a week deep into payroll before finding out your new hire actually isn’t authorized to work in the US), but this is usually easy enough to accomplish. A couple other orgs in my network have adopted the practice and also really like it, not to mention it tends to be pretty popular with new hires - we’ve all been in the position where we consider taking an extra week off between jobs but just don’t feel like we can afford it.
In my experience, even if a new hire can’t (or doesn’t want to) take advantage of this benefit the week they start, offering it usually means they get their first vacation on the calendar early: “Oh I really can’t take this week off because we need to start X right away, but I plan to take my week later in August when that X launched and running”.
If you’re an HR person trying to get your team to actually take more vacation, this is a great policy to run with. And I think I made it up! Just goes to show you that good ideas can come from anywhere.
