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Inventium, a Sydney-based innovation strategy and management consultancy that uses psychology, neuroscience and management science to underpin its offering, has introduced an unlimited paid holiday scheme.
The consultancy introduced the concept more than two years ago as a result of Inventia founder Amantha Imber’s dismay at the four weeks of annual leave under Australian employment law.
Australia currently ranks 20th in the world for annual leave, with the country receiving a minimum of 20 days of paid holiday plus 8 days of paid public holidays.
While this is much better than in the United States – where paid annual leave is not enshrined in law and paid leave is left to the discretion of the employer – Australians are on a par with Chile and Saudi Arabia in their entitlements.
According to Imber, the annual leave cap does not fairly equate to the unlimited working hours employees are exposed to. “It is not uncommon for employees to work more than 50 hours per week and travel interstate or overseas relatively often. So while annual leave is limited, working hours are not.’
To correct this imbalance, Imber tried to implement an innovative strategy herself and called it Rebalance Leave. The idea behind the scheme was not to offer more leave for the sake of it, but to ensure that Inventium employees had the opportunity to lead a balanced lifestyle.
The innovation consulting firm found that the results were overwhelmingly positive and that Rebalance Leave did just that, rebalancing Inventium’s workforce. Imber measured this success by the average number of days her employees took each year and compared it to the number of sick days.
At Inventium, before the introduction of this policy, the average annual sick leave of employees was 2.45 days. A relatively low number compared to the public sector average of around nine days a year. Two years after Rebalance Leave was introduced, that figure has dropped to 1.4 days a year, which Imber says is “almost unheard of in Australia”.
Before the introduction of unlimited paid leave, the company’s employees also used up 19 of the 20 days of leave per calendar year, now this number is a comfortable 27 days per year. Imber says the results taught her three valuable lessons; four weeks is not enough, model it from above and from the sides and it’s about the intention, not the instructions.
Trust in the team
“One year after the launch, the average amount of leave was 24 days, and after two years it was up to 27 days. As a business owner, I see this as a huge success. It means staff are taking what they need (which was clearly over four weeks) but by the same token there is no abuse of the policy.’
“Five and a half weeks is about what I’m taking now,” she said, reflecting on how similar attempts to introduce leave have failed, citing one example where employees are afraid to take extra time off. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my own vacation is the same as what the employees are taking now.”
“I wanted to be careful to avoid the trap of having the amount of vacation taken go down rather than up.” To make this happen, Imber made sure her management team led by example and got employees who looked like they needed a break to take Rebalance Leave. The power of peers should never be underestimated in creating a successful policy like this.
When thinking about how to avoid overcomplicating the program, Imber said it’s all about building mutual trust. One key part of this equation was that vacations did not have to be approved by management. “It seemed patronizing to create a set of guidelines, given that one of the points of the policy was to treat people as adults and allow them to make their own decisions.”
“So instead of creating a set of instructions, I launched it with a clear intention. The intention was to use the additional leave to achieve balance in my life. Hence the name: Rebalance Leave. I made it clear that it does not replace other types of leave that have specific purposes, such as parental leave, sick leave, carer’s leave and so on,” she said.
“One of the key ingredients that made unlimited vacation a success at Inventio is the high level of trust between everyone on the team. Plus, because the leave doesn’t have to be ‘approved’, it takes a respectful and considerate team so we don’t end up with everyone on leave at once and create problems for our clients and the work that needs to be done,” she said. concluded.
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