Should you force employees to take time off?

Many agency employees feel overworked, yet it can be difficult to convince them to take a vacation from time to time.

As the agency owner, how do you encourage a team member to take a healthy break to recharge their batteries? If they don’t do it on their own, should you force them to take time off?

In this episode, Chip and Gini explore this tricky question, and Gini shares her own experience in this area where things went a bit awry.

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Chip Griffin  

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin, 

Gini Dietrich  

and I’m Gini Dietrich, 

Chip Griffin  

and Gini, I think I’m going to do this show solo next week, you’re going to have to take some time off. 

Gini Dietrich  

Oh, okay. Thanks. 

Chip Griffin  

You’re welcome. We’ll talk more about that right after this. Sadly, I’m not actually giving you that time off. That was…

Gini Dietrich  

Dang it! Well my birthday is coming up. Can I have that day off?

Chip Griffin  

Sure. I mean, whenever you want a day off, you just send me an email and say, Hey, we need to record a different day. So I don’t I don’t know why that would suddenly change.

Gini Dietrich  

Try and get my birthday off. That’s all I’m trying to do.

Chip Griffin  

Feel free to take your birthday. In fact, I don’t even know if I have it on my calendar. I’ll probably have to check that. But I assume that in the Spin Sucks community, there’ll be plenty of people who will chime in and alert me if I’m not paying attention.

Gini Dietrich  

I’m sure. It’s we’re also supposed to record that day. So you’ll know.

Chip Griffin  

Oh, good. Fantastic. I’ll be keeping my eye out for that. Yes. I will not be singing Happy Birthday, though. Thanks. Oh. Nobody wants to hear me do it. But okay. So what we are going to talk about, though, is time off, and particularly the last couple of years, there are a lot of employees and a lot of agencies who haven’t taken much time off in part because what are they going to do with that time off? There’s only so much you can do on a staycation. But the larger point remains, which is you give your employees a certain number of days to take off or you give them unlimited PTO and in the unlimited cases, in fact, we’ve talked about unlimited before. And this is one of the challenges is that oftentimes people take less time off. Yep. When they know it’s unlimited. Yep. But so how do you make sure that your team is recharging their batteries sufficiently? Do you force them to take time off? Do you add incentives of some kind? Yeah, how do you manage this in order to make sure that your team actually is getting the rest that they need?

Gini Dietrich  

So this conversation actually came up in the Spin Sucks community. And the reason it came up is because there’s an agency that’s about 30 employees who’s t...