Workplace

Forcing your employees to unplug for a week is harder (and easier) than it looks

Scheduling a week off for the whole company to unplug got popular in the first two years of the pandemic. But is it right for your company?

Inflatable palm tree in an office.

Scheduling a companywide week off has stuck around as one of the tech industry’s favorite pandemic-born wellness trends.

Photo: Jetta Productions/Walter Hodges via Getty Images

Call it a recharge week, a wellness week or collective leave: Scheduling a companywide week off has stuck around as one of the tech industry’s favorite pandemic-born wellness trends. With everyone offline at once, employees get to unplug without experiencing Slack FOMO.

A synchronized week off wouldn’t work everywhere: Just ask execs at fast-scaling startups. How do you know if it would work for your team, and if it would, how do you implement it well?

Growing too fast to slow down

“I haven’t even broached the subject with our founders,” said Amy Zimmerman, chief people officer at the logistics fintech startup Relay Payments. “I feel pretty confident that they would agree that it’s not a thing that we’re going to do at this point.”

Companies in “hyper-growth mode” like Relay may not be able to afford to leave customers in the lurch for a week. The 130-person company started the year with just one product on the market, Zimmerman said, but has aspirations to go to market with multiple new products and expand to 300 employees by the end of the year.

Twitch and Hootsuite, two more-mature companies that started offering a synchronized week off during the pandemic, address this staffing problem by keeping a core group of employees on call or on the clock during that week. That skeleton crew takes its week off at a different time so that customers and vendors aren’t left hanging.

At Hootsuite, this worked well enough last summer that the social media management company is planning its second Wellness Week in late August, so that its North American employees can tack on Labor Day at the end of it.

“We gave our customers the heads up. We gave our stakeholders and vendors [warning] so that everybody knew that we were going off beforehand,” said Tara Ataya, Hootsuite’s chief people officer. It was worth it: 97% of Hootsuite employees said being able to disconnect at the same time as their colleagues was valuable.

How to plan for a week off

The toughest part of implementing the week off is planning for it, Ataya said. Hootsuite leaders looked at every week they were considering to make sure they wouldn’t be missing a deadline, which could leave some employees or teams feeling like they couldn’t take that time off.

Hootsuite executives started discussing their first July Wellness Week during the first quarter of last year, and publicized it in March 2021 so that employees, customers and vendors had a few months’ notice, Ataya said.

“It’s a really important piece to consider if companies are thinking about doing this: just making sure you give everybody enough time in advance,” Ataya said. “Also just from a personal standpoint, so that people can actually use the week and do something that matters.”

Now that Hootsuite has all the materials and communications set up, Ataya expects that the Wellness Week will require much less planning this year.

Both Twitch and Hubspot also decided to offer a week off in July. Spring and summer proved to be a popular time to schedule a synchronized break last year, and a number of companies already offer a week off around the winter holidays, either officially or unofficially.

Bumble offers two company-wide weeks off per year. LinkedIn has given its U.S. employees a week off in July and a week off in December for years, and added a third “RestUp” week last April, “during the height of the pandemic,” but decided not to take another week off this spring.

“RestUp! Week came at a time when we needed it most,” LinkedIn’s vice president of global talent, Nina McQueen, told Protocol in an email. “Although we have no plans to add a RestUp! Week in 2022, we still have our two paid shutdowns in July and December and will continue to explore ways to support employees.”

That could include half-day Fridays in July and August in addition to LinkedIn’s periodic no-meeting days, according to McQueen.

How do synchronized weeks off affect PTO?

Companies that offer a synchronized week off are quick to point out that they also offer traditional (or, more often in tech, unlimited) vacation policies that aren’t affected by these shutdown weeks.

“We actually do encourage employees to take time off in addition to the time off that we’re providing for the synchronous time off,” said Lauren Nunes, chief people officer at Twitch. “Our philosophy is that you need to figure out what’s best for you, and take that time off.”

Hootsuite’s vacation policy starts at four weeks per year, and Twitch, Bumble, Hubspot and LinkedIn all offer unlimited PTO in addition to their synchronized weeks off. Still, it’s easy to imagine that employees (or managers) might schedule less PTO as a result.

And for companies, maybe that’s part of the appeal. But for some HR executives, that’s one downside to the practice of offering a synchronized week off: Employees may feel discouraged from planning time off on their own timelines.

Coinbase, for example, now offers four recharge weeks per year, and encourages employees to keep their vacation time within those weeks. (Though, the company said when it announced the policy in January, “we know that’s not always possible, and that’s OK.”)

“That may or may not sit well with employees, because people want to have the flexibility to take time off when they truly need it, not being told to take time off,” said Gia Ganesh, the vice president of People and Culture at Florence Healthcare.

Florence offers unlimited vacation with a three-week minimum, but decided against offering a synchronized week off, Ganesh said. Although she sees the benefits to having the whole company unplug at once, Ganesh said that for Florence, a recharge week wouldn’t give employees anything they don’t already have.

Really, that’s the key when it comes to deciding whether it’s worth it to offer a benefit like this, Ataya said.

“First, listen to your people and figure out if this is what they need,” Ataya said. “Leaning in and actually having that conversation with your people is really important first.”

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins