I suppose that whether that's good or bad is pretty subjective.
Unless you literally mean take as much vacation as you feel is right and no matter how much you take (even 4 weeks straight), we won't ask questions, then I'd rather have a specific number.
For sick time, I think this is a great idea. I have unlimited sick time where I work, so I only take it when I'm really sick. It's like the saying that what gets measured gets done. The measure of legitimate sick time is not "do you have the time" but "are you sick," so that's what people use to judge when taking sick time. If it was "do you have the time" then as long as they had the time, people would feel fine taking sick time, even if they weren't sick.
If you tell me I can take as much vacation as I want as long as I need a vacation, then even to take a half-day, I need a justification. Every vacation day, or part of a day, becomes a risk that I'm going to look like I'm taking too much vacation.
Or even worse, the policy at my employer - within a given year you may take up to five of your accrued sick days no questions asked (assuming you have the sick days banked), but to use any other sick time you have, you must submit a doctors note as verification. As an incentive intended to reduce absenteeism, if you take no sick days in a given year, you're given an extra "free" vacation day usable during the following year.
What this means is that if you end up taking even one sick day during a year, you've lost your bonus vacation day. So now you may as well burn down the remainder of your five unverified days by calling in sick when you really aren't.
After a lot of hand waving "don't worry about it" answers to preliminary queries about sick time logistics, I was told (after the fact) I had to take open-heart surgery as a vacation day.
While on the face of it this policy looks like an improvement, it turned an entitlement into something that depends on the generosity of one's boss. Also, keep in mind that when quitting you don't get any accrued money. I highly dislike it.
Also, when you do leave a company, you don't always get the vacation days as a bonus in your paycheck. Sometimes those days just disappear. What's even worse is that some vacation days may be a part of your compensation plan, but work pressures prevent you from using them, and they expire within a year. Vacation days are hardly an entitlement.
Personally, my ideal work situation would allow me unlimited and untracked vacation days, absolute freedom to work when, where, and how I choose, and pay me ONLY based on performance (both my direct contributions and a percentage of overall company profits). I suppose this is fairly close to actual business ownership.
Depends on the state. In California, vacation time is earned as it is accrued and thus must be paid out on termination (voluntary or not).
Also, don't give up on old wages. An employee at a former employer filed a class action lawsuit (somehow I got attached), his hardwork resulted in an $8k check that found its way to my doorstep. ;)
I disagree with your use of the word scam to describe an untracked vacation policy. An employee at any one point in time will probably have no more than 6 weeks of accrued, unexpired vacation time (assuming they get 3 weeks per year and haven't taken a vacation in 2 years and their vacation rolls over a little bit). This is only 3 pay periods, or just over 10% of their actual pay (6/52 weeks).
I would agree that in general vacation policies are a bit of a scam in that you are promised x days as part of your compensation package, but then are told when they can or can't be used, and resist if you try to use them all at once, and expire them if you hold on to them for too long... Come to think of it, defined vacation days are a bit like airline miles.
Where I work, we're given pretty generous paid time off, with very precise definitions of how said paid time off is to be taken, accrued and if not taken in its entirety by the end of the year, how one can "roll over" some of those days into the next year. Every 5 years or so, we get an additional 5 business days.
I get 30 days of paid time off. I used 15 last year. And I've never even come close to the 30 allotted.
I'm salary, and I have really real deadlines. But I've been at my company and in my sector for a long enough time that I know when I can take time and when I cannot. I can get in 15 days by taking the first week that most public schools start off. It's usually a lull time, and being a homeschool family, vacation packages around that time are usually great deals. We have a lull time around Christmas and August due to being a B2B business, and outside of that, I know my deadlines, manage my workload and have a boss that doesn't care if I give a day or two notice when I want time off (primarily because of the former ... I self-manage my time to ensure the least impact for that time off).
All of that said, we have a PTO policy, and I know of very few people who get anywhere close to it. Nor do I know of anyone I work with that actually takes advantage of the "rollover into next year" policy because there's no point. We simply won't use them because there's too much to be done and too few people to do it and in our corporate culture it's "get it done" or enjoy unemployment. Frankly, I'd find other employment if my employer decided to do the whole "we don't track vacation" policy because in my field at my company that'd basically mean "no vacation".
I can definitely agree to shift them around, but if they expect me to take less total time off in order to get things done, then I get another job and they get to enjoy their time of not getting anything done at all.
I'm thinking it some genius/evil HR ploy at this point.
The Barings bank collapse, for example, was brought about by one guy who juggled the books and hid information over a long period. That's much easier to pull off if you are around all the time.
Looking at job descriptions with their little 3.5 weeks of vacation is just a bummer now. Who wants to sit around thinking about the optimal way to use that time? Just do a kick-ass job and take vacations when you want. This benefit means more to me than a considerable increase in salary would.
Perhaps. It'd be tough to swallow the hit in productivity though.
And I guess it might mean a few extra jobs, which surely can't be a bad thing.