Join America Back to Work, a weekly podcast, video, and blog series that covers timely and relevant topics affecting the labor market and workforce with industry experts. The series includes recruiting, hiring, retention, employee satisfaction, customer service, background screenings, and more.
From the Experts: Unlimited PTO Is Out
In this week’s episode of America Back to Work, S2Verify co-founder and chief strategy officer, Arnette Heintze, sat down with Rob Whalen, co-founder and CEO of venture-backed ($8.4M) PTO Exchange, the first platform that allows employees to self-direct the value of their unused paid time off (PTO) for other needs and causes.
While building the company, Whalen and his co-founder, Todd Lucas, named their mission: to enable flexibility into those benefits that employees earned but could not use. They also discovered that by enabling this capability and accountability, PTO Exchange created equity and inclusion for workers to be compensated for their accrued productivity creating a better benefit.
The company has been featured in Fast Company (Can I turn my PTO into cash? Sometimes, but that doesn’t mean you should skip vacations), Wired (Would you sell your vacation days for cash?), Wall Street Journal (A Perk to Getting These Jobs: You Pick Your Pay), and more.
During his sit-down with Heintze, Whalen shares his unpopular opinion around unlimited PTO: he doesn’t think it’s a good idea.
He believes that an unlimited PTO policy fails to accomplish what it sets out to do. Instead, it makes PTO less equitable, less fair, and more of a nightmare for managers (interestingly, Whalen thinks a poorly-written California law is to blame).
Listen to the episode to find out what Whalen’s alternative is for unlimited PTO (convertible benefits) and discover the ways that it can help employers improve recruiting and retention in the long run.