We’ve tried a host of policies over the years for dealing with vacation and sick leave. I can’t really say that anything we’ve done has resulted in any major changes in our firm. We’ve spent a lot of time on this issue over the years and the people that want to work hard, work hard. The people that don’t, don’t.

Originally, we offered ten days of vacation per year plus five days of sick leave. I didn’t really like that system because it seemed to reward people that pretended to be sick. That drove me crazy.

We changed the system to provide 15 days of paid leave. We stopped distinguishing between vacation and sick leave. We still have that system in place for our hourly employees. We add a day to the base number of days for each year of service. A ten year, hourly employee has 25 days of paid leave.

We struggled with lots of questions, mostly from attorneys, about how to count paid leave time. Were they using paid leave if they were out of town with their family and dealing with a client emergency? Were they using paid leave if they took the morning off for a doctor visit and then worked that evening to catch up?

We had answers, but they were all, arguably, irrational.

About a year ago, we changed the leave policy for our salaried employees. We lifted all limits on paid leave for these people. They’re permitted to take as many days as they wish to take. It’s all up to them.

How’s it working? Very well. As usual, the hard core committed people remain serious about getting things done and advancing their career. The slackers? Well, they abused the system before and they abuse the system now (of course, I say that in the theoretical sense since we don’t have any “slackers”). Our system doesn’t really solve the slacker problem and it seems to me that no system really solves that problem. Ultimately, slackers just need to go somewhere else.

The nice thing about our current approach is that it communicates that we trust our people. We’re treating everybody like adults and they respond in kind. I’m not suggesting that we’ve evolved to the perfect system, but our current system is presenting the fewest issues we’ve had with the vacation policy question since we started on this journey back in 1990.