Clarity and Execution
Except for my brief stint in government (which I realized quickly wasn’t for me), I’ve only ever worked places that offered unlimited paid time off (PTO). While that sounds like a pretty great perk for employees, it’s also, so long as everyone acts responsibly, a pretty good deal for employers. With no time off to track, there’s no paperwork, no accruals, and no unexpected payouts for unused time.
So I was surprised to read on LinkedIn that software company Bolt (a company that had previously gotten rid of its HR department), was also killing unlimited PTO. Explaining the decision, Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wrote, “When time off is undefined, the good ones don’t take PTO. The bad ones take too much. This leads to A-performer burnout. B-performer luxuries. And feelings of unfairness across the board.”
So now Bolt mandates that everyone take four weeks off per year.
This was interesting to me because a constant challenge I face is trying to determine when something should be structured and when something should be left deliberately unstructured. Because, as in the unlimited PTO example above, there can be costs and benefits to both approaches.
This is precisely the dilemma Permanent Equity struggled with as we contemplated experimenting with boards of directors at our portfolio companies late last year. We decided to do it, as our CEO Brent wrote about in his annual letter, reasoning that we needed more structure in order to govern an organization at scale.
Maybe you’re wondering how it’s going.
As Brent noted in his letter, even when we were in the early days of boards, we heard from people that they felt significantly more supported. And our experience to date has only improved from there. The takeaway is that when people have a clear objective and plans to achieve it and also know that (and how) they will be held accountable for doing so, performance and culture are better than when they don’t.
Because as Breslow wrote summing up Bolt’s PTO policy change, “execution requires clarity.” Especially at scale.
– Tim
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