When we hang the proverbial “Closed for the Holidays” sign on Well Done Marketing’s front door from Dec. 21 to Jan. 1, it will be the first time in the agency’s 14-year history.
We’ll maintain a small on-call staff for clients throughout our 12 free days of Christmas, but the entire team will be out of the office to celebrate this festive season and the start of 2020. While we hope this perk gives our staff well-earned time to decompress and enjoy friends and family, there’s a strategic reason for the holiday vacation, too.
The goal: Start 202o with a rejuvenated team, full of bold, new advertising ideas.
“Part of our business plan is to invest in our staff because we know a satisfied staff is more engaged and can inspire each other to produce fantastic work,” said Lisa Sirkin Vielee, Well Done’s president. “By investing in our staff, we are investing in the future of our agency.”
The Well Done holiday break is an extension of our firm’s self-managed paid-time-off policy, something else we put in place in 2019.
A trend in business, unlimited PTO is a perk aimed at increasing employee happiness, helping team members achieve improved work-life balance, and ending the more traditional use-it-or-lose-it approach to time off. Workforce-management giant Kronos, Netflix, and plenty of Silicon Valley tech startups were early adaptors of the philosophy, which continues to be a hot topic among business writers.
Not only does it stop people from feeling pressure to take their annual allotment of days off to avoid losing them, flexible PTO is a great tool for attracting and keeping top talent in the advertising and marketing industry.
“The industry has a high turnover rate. When people come to work here, it really is about trying to cultivate a great environment where they want to stay,” said Vielee.
Employees enjoy the flexibility of managing themselves and the trust the policy cultivates.
“We know people work really hard here,” said Vielee. “Unlimited PTO is one way we can treat our team members like they are adults.”