How can employers set a holiday allowance scheme that attracts & retains talent, promotes well-being and high productivity?

Rewind twenty years and the answer was quite simple, because almost everyone had the same scheme – “You start on 20/22 days, rising to 25 days after 2 years’ employment”. As with most things for employers…..things have changed!

I have been talking to our region’s employers over the past few months, researching the subject of holiday allowances and run a survey of employees over the past month to try and present some clarity and some advice to our market.

Our analysis of private sector employers in the Yorkshire & East Midlands region is that 83% offer 25 days holidays. Public sector employers offering a range from 25 – 40 days.

‍

UNLIMITED HOLIDAY ALLOCATION

This was a concept that originated in the 1990s but became more apparent in the 2010s. It was adopted by employers such as LinkedIn, Oracle and Netflix. The idea was to manage people on outputs rather than inputs and to allow everyone to benefit from the freedom of their own decision making. There are a lot of positive stories of it, but predominantly with tech-based businesses and it is hard to see it catching on in our region in my opinion. Some employers scrapped the scheme because employees were taking less time off than before – being at the top of the unofficial “Who has taken least time off?” list with the badge of honour provided an unwanted and unhealthy motivation.

(All of our team receive 30 days + bank holidays. Everyone took between 24 and 30 last year).

‍

WHAT DO CANDIDATES VALUE?

Our consultants have found holiday allocation to be in the top 5 criteria for candidates at certain levels over the past year. The result of our survey of local candidates supports this:

‍

‍

‍

• 74% of candidates would not accept a good job offer with only 20 days’ holidays. (41% if the allocation was 22)/
• 75% said that an extra 5 days’ allocation would make a 10/10 impact on their decision of job role.

Interesting figures but no surprise. To summarise – If you offer 20 days’ holidays then,  “Good luck!”, 25 days, “No problem”, 26 days’ plus “Where do I sign?”. There are of course, plenty of other variables for employers to consider.

“More holidays = Better Candidate Attraction” did not feel like a very strong conclusion to this article, so I have listed a selection of the other features of holiday / time-off allocation that we can share that have made a difference in employee engagement. We are still looking for an employer who offers every one of these!

‍

‍

Jeremy Gledhill is the CFO at Homesbyhoney in Sheffield. As they look to establish and grow their business during the year, they have invested the time in establishing an outstanding EVP – one that will be able to attract, retain and motivate the very best. Jeremy has made the decision to set their holidays at 27 days + summer Fridays + bank holidays. He explained the rationale to us:

“As we are now into heavy recruitment mode, we have looked hard at our overall EVP.  Our offering includes many components – holiday allowances, holiday buy and sell and summer Fridays being part of this.  Team members have told us that these are important as part of an overall offering that promotes balance and wellbeing.”

‍

Our team can provide some more details on any of the above and data on how popular each scheme is. I would love to hear any of your questions or if there are any holiday / time-off features that I have not covered. Feel free to contact me at any point.

‍