Keep in mind, bosses—employees don’t really want your Amazon gift card, gag gift, or company mug. The real prize under the tree at the company party is paid time off.
That’s exactly what Colourette, a cosmetics company based in the Philippines, raffled off during its holiday party. Nina Ellaine Dizon-Cabrera, CEO of Colourette, posted to LinkedIn that one of its raffle prizes was five extra days of paid vacation leave in the coming year for three employees. She posted a video of the raffle on TikTok, with cheers and applause among employees sounding off in the background.
She shared the TikTok video on Facebook with the caption, “We should give out more of these next year!”
After all, paid time off is an appealing prospect: Half (50%) of workers in the U.S. would take unlimited PTO over higher pay, according to a Harris Poll for Fortune of 2,000 workers.
But it can be hard to know what to do with so much of a good thing. Devoid of clear expectations, employees can feel guilty for taking this time off if their manager or company culture creates a stigma around it. Such flexibility remains an important way to help employee mental health and retain workers, but companies must make sure bosses make it clear that it’s okay to take time off.
But when workers do take a vacation, some become nervous about the work sitting for them when they return. Monster deems this pressure as “PTO woes.” A whopping 87% of 1,399 employees polled by the careers site report experiencing PTO woes, and 72% add that they’ve decided not to ask for time off because of how intense this anxiety was.
A company like Colourette that outlines and encourages taking paid leave can potentially mitigate these worries and hesitancy. But the Philippines has more of an explicitly permissive paid leave culture than the U.S., as employees are entitled to five days of PTO annually. While this might seem small, most companies based in the country offer 12 to 15 days. Meanwhile, the U.S. has no national paid leave policy, leaving it up to the discretion of the company. As such, the U.S. is ranked the second-worst country globally when it comes to allotted paid vacation days.
Maybe it’s time that U.S. employers take a signal from other countries and join the PTO raffle train this holiday season, or simply start outlining it as a federal right.
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