Give Employees Their Time Back

What would you do if your daughters were offered roles in a national touring theater production? Would you quit your job so you could spend months on the road with them? Would you have someone else accompany them? Or would you tell your daughters that they couldn’t participate?

One of our employees, Kristen, might have faced this predicament had she worked at another company. In 2016, her two talented school-aged daughters were offered roles in the musical Annie. The tour would take place over eight months, stopping in over 90 cities throughout North America. The production company required that a parent or guardian accompany the girls. Kristen, who managed a small team at Kronos, wanted to accompany her kids on what would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but she wasn’t sure what that would mean for her job.¹

Kristen didn’t have to worry because Kronos was among the few U.S. companies to offer employees open time off. In 2016, we implemented an open time off policy that featured no preset limit on how many days off employees can take. Employees and managers in the United States and Canada now work together to arrange as much vacation time as employees feel they need, so long as they achieve their individual and business goals. (In the future, we will consider rolling out this policy in additional countries, in accordance with local laws.) Called myTime, the program, along with our general commitment to flexibility, allowed Kristen to accompany her children on the Annie tour while still working full-time. She handled her Kronos responsibilities while her daughters were performing, communicating closely with her team about her schedule.

Many companies seem to want employees to prioritize their jobs above all else. To maximize performance, they try to keep employees in the office for as long as possible, providing all kinds of perks to make that kind of lifestyle possible and even attractive. At Kronos, 94 percent of employees surveyed in 2017 agreed with the statement: “I am able to take time off from work when I think it’s necessary.”² That’s because we empower employees to put their families first, above the company. Our corporate values require this—and it’s great for business. As we’ve observed, productive employees are, first and foremost, engaged employees. If you want to maintain high engagement levels, then you must empower workers to prioritize their families and bring their whole selves to work.

Because we enable Kronites to sustain their relationships at home, they come to work happier, treat their colleagues better, and perform better. They also express gratitude for such a nurturing and encouraging work environment, relieved that they aren’t forced to choose between two vitally important parts of their lives—their careers and their personal relationships. One Kronite whom I’ll call Daniel used myTime to ride his motorcycle cross-country to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. In an e-mail, he expressed his deep loyalty to the company, writing: “Before I was financially invested . . . now you have my heart, too.”

Commenting on her experience of being able to travel with her children, Kristen acknowledged the “great support” she received from Kronos, saying that her kids are “very aware just how lucky we are that I work for Kronos.” They’re not the only ones in luck. Our customers benefit, too, because they get the benefit of Kristen’s and Daniel’s passion and enthusiasm. Multiply that by the thousands of people who work at Kronos, and you understand how a “family-first” policy has helped propel our growth into a billion-dollar company.

MOVING TOWARD FLEXIBILITY

Our myTime program is hardly the first instance in which we’ve encouraged flexibility and healthy work-life balance among our employees. During the 1980s, when my brother Mark was CEO, our general counsel was a working mom. As Pat, our former president, remembers, when Sally went out for maternity leave, Mark personally worked with her to figure out a strategy for her return: “Mark said, ‘Well, how do you want to work this? How many days can you work? We’ll hire someone else to help you.’” I approached this the same way. When highly valued Kronites took leave to have children, we sat down together and created an arrangement that would make coming back to work palatable, sometimes opting for a three-day workweek, at other times allowing team members to work from home some days of the week. Back then, such flexibility was far from the norm, but we valued these employees’ contributions and didn’t want to lose them.

Since then, we’ve institutionalized flexibility by allowing Kronites to work remotely. Many of our employees work from home in some capacity, with the approval of their managers and if the nature of their job allows for it. We don’t have a formal flexible time or work from home policy. Rather, we allow our managers to use their own discretion. If employees need flexibility around when their days begin or end, they can negotiate that with their managers. We’ve also invested in technological infrastructure to facilitate working remotely. In recent years, we started using an internal collaboration platform, as well as a unified communications platform that allows employees to access their Kronos phone line and voice mail from their mobile devices and laptops, no matter where in the world they might be. We even have an internal group on our social collaboration platform that’s dedicated entirely to working remotely. Created by a Kronite who works out of her home, the group offers members advice for staying productive and connected.

With myTime, we’ve taken our longstanding commitment to flexibility and, as Pat (our former president mentioned previously) describes it, “put it on steroids.”³ Our approach emerged initially out of our desire to make ourselves more attractive as an employer. Back in 2014, we had hundreds of open positions and were having a really tough time filling them. If we didn’t become more attractive to prospective Kronites, I felt we wouldn’t be able to grow as I envisioned. One obstacle, it turned out, was our vacation policy. At the time, new Kronites received three weeks of paid vacation each year. Try enticing a veteran employee in her forties to come work for us when she was already receiving four or five weeks or more off elsewhere. Not easy! I asked our team to help me reimagine our vacation policies. After some research, they proposed that we adopt an open vacation policy. I liked it, as I saw instantly that it built on our longstanding “family-first” philosophy. I did my own research, and although I found instances in which companies had unsuccessfully dabbled with open time off policies, I felt confident that it would work for us. We decided to go ahead with myTime, hiring a consultant to help us avoid mistakes that other companies had made with similar policies.

We introduced myTime in 2016, and by all accounts it is a great success. I know of many Kronites who have used their increased flexibility to enhance their lives and their work performance. One of our employees used to save up all of her vacation time to visit her family in India every few years. That left her with no additional time off around the holidays to spend with her family in the United States. Now she can do both and still perform just as well, if not better. As validating as this story is, the data also suggests the value of myTime. In 2014, we were thrilled to discover that 84 percent of our employees thought we were a great employer. That placed us far above average in our industry, where roughly 60 percent of employees feel that way. So imagine our delight at learning that by the end of 2016, after a full year of myTime, our engagement score had risen to an exemplary 87 percent, and that employee turnover—already low compared to industry norms—was also down. A coincidence? I don’t think so. Nor was it a coincidence that we had our best year ever financially in 2016.

After our experience launching myTime, I’m convinced that many companies can benefit from this kind of policy and from flexibility-oriented policies more generally. Here are some best practices based on our experience:

Build a Strong Culture First

One of the best things about myTime is that it is built organically on our preexisting company culture. As I described in Chapter 3, we’ve dedicated ourselves to nurturing an atmosphere at Kronos in which colleagues trust one another, assuming their competence and goodwill. We never could have succeeded with myTime if high levels of trust hadn’t taken root in our organization. After all, in granting employees more latitude over their schedules, we were trusting them to do what it took to get their work done. Now, have some people abused the system? I’m sure they have. But any instances of people taking advantage, if any, have been few and minor. Kronites have again confirmed that our trust in them is warranted.

Our success with myTime also built on the work we’ve done to encourage open and honest communication between managers and employees. As we saw in Chapter 4, we train managers on how to communicate, and our Manager Effectiveness Index (MEI) both measures for it and promotes more conversation among teams. With myTime, our company was formally entrusting employees and managers to coordinate their scheduling needs. If we hadn’t already developed expectations around communication, we couldn’t necessarily count on the immediate success of myTime. Take an honest look at your culture. Does it have what you’ll need to “give people their time back”? If not, try working on these fundamentals first and easing into more flexibility in the workplace before committing to a full-blown open vacation
policy.

Keep Monitoring

Under traditional vacation policies, many companies rigorously track how much vacation employees have accrued and taken. In fact, our products help companies do precisely that. Were we undermining our own products? No! We still track vacation time, not to “keep an eye” on employees, but for the opposite reason: we want to make sure they are actually taking enough time off! We weren’t just offering open time off to make ourselves look good: we truly believe that employees need this time for themselves and their families, and data shows that most Americans don’t take as much vacation as they’re allotted.⁴ What good would our policy be if employees didn’t take more time off? Happily, we’ve confirmed that Kronites are enjoying more vacation under our new policy: they took off an average of 2.6 more days in the first year of the program than they had the previous year. You’ll also want to track engagement, recruitment, and other metrics to make sure your policy is working as intended.

Anticipate Bumps

As wonderful as myTime has been for us, the program’s rollout wasn’t without its challenges. The vast majority of Kronites greeted myTime enthusiastically, but a small minority of people had reservations. Some managers worried that people would take advantage of the policy, or at the very least, that they’d be burdened with endless negotiations regarding employee requests for time off. Wouldn’t it be simpler to have a clear policy? Some longtime employees were upset that they would no longer accrue unused vacation time and receive a bonus payout upon their retirement or when they left the company. And another group of Kronites felt it was unfair that everyone receives the same amount of vacation time. Why should an employee who had put in 20 years with the company receive as much time off as a 23-year-old newbie?

To ease our adoption of myTime, we addressed these concerns as best we could. We provided support to managers, coaching and training them on how to handle requests for time off and encouraging them to counsel their teams to take off more time, not less. As for the other two concerns, we explained the policy to unhappy Kronites on a case-by-case basis. Look, I said to Kronites miffed at giving up their ability to accrue time off, do you think we give out vacation so that you can store it up? Not at all! We give it to you so that you can use it! I understood why these Kronites were upset, and I tried to acknowledge how they felt, but I made no excuses for the new policy. To Kronites who felt upset that myTime didn’t reward their seniority, I tried to reframe the discussion, nudging them to dwell on the freedom the new policy afforded instead of focusing on others. Ultimately, I tried to recalibrate how everyone thought about vacation time. These Kronites were seeing it as a perk. We were treating it as something else: as a means of satisfying the need all employees have for a strong balance in their lives. That imperative outweighed other considerations.

Beyond opposition to myTime, some managers felt reluctant to give Kronites the time off they needed, fearing that it would hurt their businesses or bog their teams down with scheduling difficulties. In these situations, human resources stepped in, advising managers that we had to apply these policies equally where applicable or risk alienating individual employees. If that happened, managers’ own MEI scores would decline. It was in everyone’s interests to implement the new policy in an even and fair manner.

In the vast majority of organizations, flexible time off will represent a significant shift, so you can expect a certain amount of pushback. That’s OK—be steadfast, and you’ll reap the many benefits that Kronos has.

Be Clear About Your Motives

One reason many employees may distrust the idea of open time off is they regard it as a cost-cutting measure, a chance for companies to get out of paying for accrued vacation time when employees leave. Perhaps at some companies it has been, but that had never been our intention. To avoid any association of myTime with cost-cutting, we decided to do something no other company, to our knowledge, was doing: take the money we were saving by not paying departing employees accrued vacation times (about $2 to $3 million per year) and reinvest it in benefits for employees who were staying. We enhanced our 401(k) employer match and created a variety of enticing new programs. Kronos, on a selective basis, now offers college scholarships of $2,500 a year to children of our employees. We also offer student loan repayment assistance, childcare financial assistance, and adoption assistance, as well as a more generous parental leave benefit (maternity leave is fully covered for 12 weeks, and new dads and non–birth-giving moms can take a four-week paid leave, including for adoption). These new benefits enabled us simultaneously to build trust in myTime, further enhance our recruiting profile, and deepen our commitment to a “family-first” philosophy.

Kronites love these new benefits, and they especially love having open time off. Even many who resisted myTime at first now wholeheartedly embrace it. As one of our hourly workers wrote: “I can now attend to my personal business without ‘guilt’ or ‘storing’ days off, and trying to realistically coordinate scheduling too many appointments on a single day, or putting off important doctor’s appointments because I wasn’t able to coordinate [schedules].” The myTime policy did “take a little getting used to,” this employee said, “but . . . with management cooperation, it has worked extremely well for me and my team. We actually communicate MORE now than we did in the past to ensure we have coverage for planned days out.” On the whole, this employee “couldn’t be happier with the flexibility and stress relief” myTime has afforded, and “definitely [counts myTime] as one of the biggest benefits” we offer. Not bad, right?

FAMILY-FRIENDLY LEADERS AND MANAGERS

As critical as flexibility around work-life balance is, you’ll never truly empower employees to put family first unless you personally become involved as a leader or manager. Many employees today are used to working ridiculously hard, and to putting their families second. They might reasonably assume that their employers expect this level of commitment, even if companies move to open time off and affirm family’s primacy. They might feel unsure about whether they really can miss an afternoon meeting to go to their kid’s soccer game, circling back that evening to make up the work. Leaders and managers need to make a company’s family-first philosophy personal, affirming and modeling it with their own words and actions.

For me, it feels natural to give such support because the notion of “family first” is deeply personal. I was privileged to grow up with parents who were unusually committed to family. They came to every one of our sporting events and school activities—no joke, every one! I appreciated it, and took the importance of family for granted. That said, I didn’t always prioritize a healthy work-life balance for myself or my teams. When I was in my twenties and thirties, my work at Kronos was my life, and members of my team saw it the same way. We were mostly single and working in an intense start-up environment. Then, as mentioned earlier in this book, I had an encounter with a team member who expanded my horizons, pointing out that not everyone wanted to make their career at Kronos their entire life. That made an impression, and for years now, especially as I’ve had children of my own, I’ve more openly espoused how important it is to take time out and build strong personal relationships.

As Kronites will tell you, I talk about family constantly. When I chat casually with Kronites (Chapter 2), one of my first questions will usually be about their families. Lest employees think this is only talk, I try to set an example by prioritizing my own family. My daughters are grown now and out of the house, but when they were at home, I would do my best to attend as many of their after-school events as possible. “Mr. Ain,” a girl on one of my daughter’s sports teams once said, “how come you come to, like, all of our games?” I wasn’t there at all of them, but I did attend most, and on many occasions, I was the only parent there. I would sometimes leave work at two in the afternoon, and when I did, I was sure to let my colleagues know where I was going. These days, I do my best to set limits and respect our family time. As CEO, I often can’t help but make myself available on weekends and during vacations. Still, on a typical weekend, I will tune out of work on Friday evening, and stay away until sometime on Sunday, when I’ll spend a number of hours catching up on work. Everyone’s work-life needs are different. This pattern works for me, giving me the time I need to stay engaged with family while still putting my all into my work at Kronos.

I also promote a family-first culture by infusing my decision making with that philosophy whenever appropriate. In 2015, when we first realized that we needed a larger corporate headquarters, we asked a team of Kronites to investigate options. They returned with some suggestions in the Massachusetts towns of Burlington and Waltham. I said a quick no to those locations even though they would have resulted in a much shorter commute for me. We’d been at our location for 17 years. Kronites had made their lives in the area, buying homes and making decisions about their kids’ schooling. If we moved to a site in the area that was 30 or 40 minutes away with traffic, we’d disrupt their home lives. They wouldn’t be able to go to their kids’ 5:30 p.m. softball games, like I had done. Our team eventually suggested a new location that was only three miles from where our offices were then situated. Pulling data, we determined that 83 percent of our employees would have a shorter commute to this new office. We went with that choice because it was better for the families of most Kronites.

THE FAMILY-FIRST CULTURE

At Kronos, employees expect that they’ll have a life, and they encourage their colleagues to make the most of their family time as well. It’s not that balancing work and home is easy at our company—not at all. Our people work extremely hard. They have their busy times when they absolutely must perform on behalf of customers, and they do. But the notion that a healthy work-life balance is doable, that you don’t need to sacrifice one for the other, has become a company norm.

Respect for family has become so entrenched that it has changed new Kronites who joined us from other companies. One employee joined us midcareer and wound up working with the same boss she had had at a previous company. As this employee told us, her boss used to be quite rigid in his expectations. By 8:30 a.m., you had to be at your desk, and if you left your desk, you had to let your colleagues know. “Here,” she said, “he’s completely different,” not as “uptight as he used to be. He’s valuing his [own] family more than he used to . . .” Looking back on it, this employee attributed the change to working in the Kronos culture, and specifically to internalizing the example set by our leaders and managers.

All of our efforts have become a reason for our most valued employees to love their jobs, and hence, to stay with us, even though they have other options. It might seem counterintuitive, but no matter what kind of organization you run, or what size, you can energize and enthuse your workforce by enabling them to devote more energy at home. To convince you most fully of the merits of family-first policies, I’ll leave you with the reflections of one Kronite: “Working from home is such a huge part of what makes working at Kronos so special,” she says. “The ability to manage our workloads around our families and still deliver world-class services and products is quite amazing, and I would not give that up just for ‘more money.’” This Kronite goes on to relate that she lives in Seattle, where “recruiters are constantly on the prowl for good talent. It has never before been so easy to turn down offers! The support we get, the remote work environment, the professional development, and the teams we belong to, all make working for Kronos worth so much more than just the money!”

For this Kronite, for the colleague of hers who responded with an “Amen, sister,” and for many other employees with whom I’ve spoken, the power to put family first while still doing great work engenders true love for our company. Combine that with the other dimensions of a great job described in this book, and your people will be more engaged and dedicated to customers than ever before. I’m no Broadway star, but if you ask me, that really is something to sing about!