> One-Month Sabbatical Every Three Years: Every three years, employees are eligible to take a one-month-long sabbatical.
For some reason, I keep being surprised how a month long vacation is called "sabbatical" in American terms while in Europe everyone gets 4-6 week vacation every year, and it's not that rare to take it all at once.
It's madness. I take a month off every year. I only get paid for two weeks vacation, but I take a month because, come on. Two free weeks a year? Who the hell ever thought that was reasonable?
I lived in Italy for most of the past 15 years, and no not everyone gets that kind of vacation time. A lot of people don't:
* The unemployed. There are a lot of them - with youth rates approaching 40% at one point.
* People who do not have a "Permanent Job", which includes a lot of younger (under 40 is 'young' in Italy) people.
* Even people with permanent jobs are starting to take smaller vacations - 2 weeks, for instance - because the model of "hey, let's shut down the entire country during August" isn't really sustainable when you're competing against people who stay open and stay productive by taking turns taking time off.
> "hey, let's shut down the entire country during August"
Puerto Rico does this with all schools & daycare. From the middle of July to the middle of August almost everywhere is closed. If you don't have family on the island and have younger children, you're screwed. Daycare is expensive (relative to cost of living) in Puerto Rico, and independent childcare is even more so. Sitters are also difficult to find due to cultural reasons.
It's on top of their basic vacation (which, at 3 weeks, isn't stellar, but is better than many US jobs), and the implication is that you take it all at once -- so not to be sniffed at, I'd say. It's not really equivalent to traditional academic sabbaticals, but it is potentially enough to study something new or get a little side-project off the ground.
Edit: the 4-day-summer-weeks thing should typically work out as an extra 17 days off per year, which makes the total -- before counting sabbatical -- higher than the great majority of UK employers, albeit (maybe) with less flexibility.
Or, you know, actually spend the time (and all the money) and get away from a screen. No amount of money could convince not to travel for at least a month or two each year
(+ about 12 weeks in Barcelona/London/Florence, but with a notebook)
In the United States of "why aren't you working right now?" it's certainly an unusual benefit. I also work for a company that provides a sabbatical after X years. They also pay for you to travel during it if you wish. But I don't know how many people make it to it/take it.
I used to work for a company which did this, though it was 4 weeks each 4 years. It was actually mandatory: to check that that the company could function without you.
Mandatory vacations are also a good way to detect fraud. Most fraud schemes require ongoing work to avoid detection, and having someone else do your job for a while can lead to the scheme being discovered or unraveling in your absence.
I work in the US and get 4 weeks of vacation a year, but I wouldn't take it all at once in the summer. My kids are in school and schools close for 3 weeks during the normal school year - one between Christmas and New Years, one in February and one in April. The Christmas to New Years week coincides with 4 of the days my office is closed (Christmas eve and day, New years eve and day), so I can take 2 to 3 days off and be home for that stretch. That leaves about a week and a half in the summer for a summer vacation. If you're taking 4 weeks in the summer, do you not take time at all the rest of the year? Do schools in your country not have vacations?
But the school is also closed during the summer? Where I live there is free daycare for kids up to 12 (?) or so during holidays, but many people take some vacation days during the year and maybe 3-4 weeks during the summer.
They offer vacations too (3 weeks per year - towards the end of the list). I think Sabbatical is on top of that.
I think their benefits are quite good even compared to the typical benefits of nice-to-work European countries (i.e. Germany).
The money is quite good ($100 for fitness, etc.), but 15 days holiday is very bad. The statutary minimum is 20 days in most of Europe, and 25 is common in the UK (plus 8 bank holidays; I think you get 11?). I get 27 days. My g/f gets 25 with the option to buy 5 more.
With the four-day-weeks in the summer, it's really ~32 days (albeit with some restrictions on when you take them). They also mention "a few personal days" -- so call it 35 total? I've seen few places offer more than that...
I think overall this sounds like a great benefits package, but I find it troublesome that there is such a disparity between maternal and paternal parental leave. This is one of the standard policy disparities which puts a great deal of the career coat of parenthood on women, and I'd urge Jason and company to reconsider the disparity.
I agree with you in spirit, but this policy is pretty damn close: note that "primary caregiver" leave is also a full 16 weeks. I've seen companies move away from "maternity" vs. "paternity" terms and just talk about "primary caregiver" and "secondary caregiver". Which not only gets away from the gender-specific career costs, but also covers non-birth parents (e.g., adoption, surrogates).[1]
In other words, the father[2] is more than able to step into the primary caregiver role and allow the mother to return to work and minimize career impact.
Now, there's a separate argument that both parents should get equal time off. I agree with that view as well, but it's a different philosophical argument.
Finally, I would be interested to know if there's a tenure requirement for parental leave at Basecamp. It's often 12 months "vesting", which is a bummer for those with children on the horizon. I recently switched jobs and had a kid: I gave up an 8-week parental leave benefit at my old company for no benefit whatsoever at the new one. I made the decision that the cost (losing the benefit) was worth the opportunity, but I could see others deferring a job change in that instance. This is a rather insidious form of Family Responsibilities Discrimination that adds a career cost to both men and women (and moreso for women).
[1] Traditional maternity policies are often focused on the medical aspects of childbirth rather than newborn bonding and care.
I see where you're coming from but couldn't disagree more. In a balanced world, there is no such thing as a primary caregiver—both parents are equally responsible. A company should be completely agnostic with regards to who is giving what care to the child and when.
We don't disagree. My point is that Basecamp is "above average" on parental benefits, and their policy isn't "standard". Could they be better? Yes. And is it fair to ask them to be even more of a leader? Sure. But let's recognize how far they've come, rather than chastising them for not reaching "ideal" goals.
I believe I did note that they have a great benefits package overall, but especially in light of all of the attention on diversity in tech issues, I believe it's even more incumbent on us to point out egregious double standards. Perhaps because they do provide a generous maternity leave, it's especially noteworthy (and to me, irksome) that the maternity leave is almost three times longer than the paternity equivalent. Stopping at a pat on the back for coming this far isn't enough.
I appreciate how the vacation is no-nonsense and clearly spelled out, unlike the trend of "unlimited vacation" or combining all PTO into one bucket. At first I thought 3 weeks was a little low for senior people, but when you add in 4-day weeks in summer, that is a huge amount of time off. Combine that with the 40-hour week and Basecamp is one of the few companies I'd trust to make vacation-in-deed equal vacation-in-word.
This is a solid benefits package. The "core" benefits (insurance, 401(k), vacation) are competitive. (6% match is strong, and 15 days vacation plus "a few" more is pretty good in of itself.) The "perks" (work-life balance, sabbatical, allowances) put this over the top and emphasize the company's commitment to it's people.
It's a pity not more employers do this. I've always been a big proponent of 4-on-3-off work schedules. Traditional work 5 out of 7 was arbitrarily chosen. Regular 3-day weekends really rejuvenates you. If 40 hours of work a week is mandatory, spreading the 8 hours of the fifth day into the 4 days isn't so bad.
Underlying problem is that productivity increases are not tied to work hours per week. As the world gets more productive, we should be ratcheting work hours down. Kudos to those doing their parts to ensure employee quality of life.
We should, but not at the expense of labor. We measure GDP; an excellent measure of how much productivity is being squeezed and consumed by capital owners/shareholders. We should be measuring for happiness/quality of life, and optimizing for that.
Because then we don't get to enjoy the benefits of that productivity. We are exponentially more productive than we were back 50 years ago. Yet, we still have to work 40+ hours a week. We could be working 20-30 hours a week, and still be far more productive than we were back then. But more productivity meant more profit for the company, so they didn't want to do it.
We do 4 day 40 hours weeks in the summer. It isn't that bad but it does get a little long. Most do 4-3 but we were doing a two week cycle of 4 (MTWH) on, 4 off, 4 (TWHF) on, 2 off.
Given that 8 hour workdays generally seem to involve a fair amount of faffing, and a fair number of people report diminishing returns beyond about 6 hours, what are those 10 hour days like? Does the expectation of a long weekend get everyone fired up, or do the last couple of hours really drag?
Weirdly, what time I eat lunch was the determinate of the day dragging. Noon or earlier and the day dragged. I'm off this week so I cannot give you a live feel today.
Yeah, it's basically very little off time for 4 days, but multiple 4 day weekends for the summer was worth it. Difference in sunset times would make this problematic in winter.
When employers talk vacation it's based off 8-hour business days. So 3 weeks is 15 days vacation, or 120 hours if your work days aren't 8-hour based like shift work or factories where you may work 4 10hour days per week.
As someone who works for an employer who has only very recently begun embracing proper compensation and benefit packages, articles like this are awesome as they draw attention to how far most US based employers still have to come.
I think it's invaluable to have comprehensive break-downs like this published online for companies with some amount of name recognition-- proof that you can take care of your employees and remain profitable.
When you don't take VC money, you're free to run your company as you like. Basecamp sounds like an awesome place to work for both Jason and his employees.
A lot of companies keep that money in an offshore bank account and don't invest it. A "business" doesn't mean that employees can't participate in the success of the business.
They are reinvesting it, just not in a traditional way. Reading a benefits package such as this gets people like me to consider working at Basecamp, so they end up getting good employees who want to work hard as they know the company is taking care of them.
32 hours of actual work is a lot. Of the people who "work" 60 hours a week I bet a lot of them work only 32 hours or less and do something else for the other 28 hours. With meetings and stuff I am happy if I get 20 hours of work in.
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For some reason, I keep being surprised how a month long vacation is called "sabbatical" in American terms while in Europe everyone gets 4-6 week vacation every year, and it's not that rare to take it all at once.
4 days summer work week is nice.