HubSpot’s no vacation vacation policy

The Boston Globe has published its annual best places to work lists.

It goes without saying that no place I’ve ever worked made the list. Of course, that’s because most of them don’t exist anymore.  Alas and alack.

While in my day, we didn’t have best places to work lists – tut, tut – I don’t think any of my  places of employment would have found their way on to one, anyway.  Too much run amuck meshugas; too much scheming, in-fighting management; too much strategic incoherence; too much self-defeating, nitwit posturing and denial on the slide into oblivion; too much forked tongue communication; too little forked tongue communication. (I don’t want to romanticize The Globe winners, by the way. For all I know, those companies look the same to the people on the inside as mine did to me.)

But all the companies I worked for when I was a full-timer did have one thing in common: great people to work with who made the job fun.  Even at MCI Wang, where I did hard time for 2 years, 7 months, and 18 days as POW # 56314 – and approached each and every day with leaden, existential dread -  I really liked my fellow inmates. (I’m having dinner with one of them this Wednesday, and I can pretty much guarantee that we will be falling out of our chairs laughing throughout the meal.)

Anyway, it was interesting to see what attributes were called out to illustrate why a winning company was such a great place to work. The one that really caught my eye was HubSpot, a local inbound marketing software and services company.

HubSpot really does sound like a great place to work, and if I were a bit younger – okay, okay: half my age -  it would be my absolute beau ideal, with beau ideal bonus points for being able to walk to work.  Even now, content as I am with the freelance life, if they were looking for a part-time, brownie baking, den-mother type who can think and write, well, let’s just say…

Meanwhile, reading about them  makes me kind of wistful for my full-time days. Even though HubSpot might not have been dysfunctional enough to suit what I learned over time was my obvious taste in a workplace, I can picture myself as the poor little match girl, nose pressed up against their window, watching all those kids having fun around the Christmas tree…[while I lit matches and froze to death].

One of the reasons HubSpot made the list was because of their no vacation policy policy.

No filling in the vacation form and watching your tiny cache of vacation days dwindle. No scrounging for comp time when your really deserve it but your company doesn’t acknowledge it. No awarding yourself a mental health day because, damn it, you deserve it. No agonizing about whether to take seven days off rather than six.

Thanks to the Internet and ever-present mobile devices, no one works 9 to 5 any more, according to Mike Volpe, vice president of marketing, so the company did away with its two-week vacation policy in January to compensate employees for all their late-night e-mails and weekend projects.

“We weren’t giving people credit for coming in on a Saturday,’’ Volpe said, “so why were we tracking if they happened to take that following Friday off?"

I think this is a great idea, one that truly reflects the realities for today’s techie “knowledge workers” (if that icky term is at all in use any more).  As has been in the making since the weight of a cellphone dropped below two pounds, the borders between “me time” and “it time” have been all but extinguished.  We check our e-mails at the ball game. We work on the business plan at 3 a.m. when we can’t sleep. We conference in to the weekly Big Important Meeting from the Cape.

In return, we take the afternoon off to go to our kid’s pre-school graduation. We take care of our personal online business while sitting at our desk. We schlep our father to his podiatrist appointment because he can’t drive on a bad foot. (Hell, he probably shouldn’t be driving anyway.)

Of course, I’m guessing  that at a young company like HubSpot, most of the employees are young enough so that work = life, and colleagues = friends. Most employees are no doubt putting in insane hours, but it’s all more or less seamlessly meshed together.

Nonetheless, as a result of HubSpot’s no vacation policy policy:

More people are taking longer trips and coming back refreshed — and ready to work crazy hours all over again.

I suspect that unless those longer trips involve a trek to Annapurna, HubSpot employees stay at least lightly tethered to work during their vakays. Which makes me wonder about the long term impact of never, ever, ever having true, unbridled time away from work. 

There may well be no implications to never stringing together a few days of non-work bliss.

Still, I can’t help but feel that there’s something to be said for time away when you’re absolutely free from it all. 

None of this is particular to HubSpot, of course. It’s just the reality of today’s workplace.

And not that I take all that much of the vaunted unconnected time.

I can’t remember the last time I took a real vacation without my laptop in tow.

Yes, I did leave it at home this past Labor Day when my husband and I spent a long weekend in NYC.  (Just as well: it might have gotten infested with bed bugs.) Of course, it was one of those long weekends when most people really don’t work. And I did have my B-berry. Just in case.

And I spent a few days, sans laptop, at my sister’s in Wellfleet. (Easy enough to do, given that they have a guest PC and wifi.)

So I know just how tempting it is to stay in touch with work, whether it’s full time or freelance. Somehow, it’s become the expectation all the way around.

It will be interesting to see whether HubSpot keeps their no vacation policy intact if the company grows (and ages).

With a small, tight crew, it may be more or less self-policing. Although I do imagine that some resentment creeps in on occasion because X went snowboarding in Patagonia, while Y toiled on... In a larger company, my hunch is this policy might not work. But that’s based on my experience in large companies, which is, well, so yesterday. It can work if HubSpot weeds out the skimmers and abusers, and gets rid of any Simon Legree managers who make it difficult for their people to take time off.

Anyway, it’s an interesting idea.

Come to think of it, it’s also my personal vacation policy.  So it must be good….

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I did a post over on Opinionated Marketing on HubSpot last January. Which reminds me that OM has been inactive for months now, and it’s just sitting there like an abandoned, ghost town mine.  Not that anyone’s in danger of falling down a shaft and breaking their neck, but I really should get over there an slap a few boards up across the mine’s entrance. Metaphorically speaking, and all.