 This next talk might just inspire you to relax and let go of some stress. Let's welcome John Fitch, author of Time Off. Now when the world switched to remote work, productivity actually went up, but the number of hours we worked rose even higher. And now I think we're all ready for a good break. That's the thrust of John's work in understanding the value of rest for improving performance. It turns out, rest and recovery are crucial to a healthy life, and as leaders and managers, the best thing we can do for our team's performance is to give them time off to decompress. To find out how that works and how to implement it, let's hear what John has to say. Hello, it's a great honor. My name is John Fitch. I am the co-author of the book Time Off. And since the book has come out, we've helped a lot of organizations rethink the way they look at time off, the way they approach time off, and the way they manage time off. And I'm going to talk to you about that. So this is a construct of making time off a part of the job. If you're to walk away with this, with one analogy, it's to look at your team, look at the people at your company like elite performers. And elite performers like athletes, let's say, they rest as hard as they work. And our book Time Off introduced this concept of a rest ethic. It's important to have a rest ethic as good as your work ethic. Another analogy we use is it's having an exhale to your inhale. That was work. That is rest. So we did a report with Deloitte. We were involved and Jen Fisher and their team worked on this, and it was titled The Disconnect Disconnect. And it's making sure to align your culture and your policies of making sure people have time off. The truth is that our vacation system is broken. Unlimited PTO sounds great on paper and on the surface, but it puts a lot of responsibility onto the individual. And our team and what we've come to see across many organizations is time off can become a deep part of the culture. If the organization and the leaders and the managers take it on as their responsibility. And this is important to prevent burnout, but as our book will show you, you can unlock more creativity, decentralized thinking, decentralized operations, and just in general more creativity with an intentional rest ethic and time off. And all you need to remember is that a lot of unused PTO occurs. And the result of that is a ton of productivity loss, healthcare loss, and enthusiasm lost. And enthusiasm is a rare and precious resource inside of your organization. And leaning more into your intentional time off in your rest ethic will help you increase your enthusiasm again at your company. And the reasons people find it hard to take time off is that there's a culture of showing off how hard you can work. So this is this like busyness, contagious nature. Instead you could replace that with a calm way of being. There's too much work or lack of documentation so you never feel like you can step away. And there is just a feeling of it's hard to justify my time off because I've already got enough to do. So this introduces a few important questions for leadership. First of all, is your team utilizing their time off, their vacation time? Do you track that? Are you aware of their time off? Are you aware of their perceived exertion? And are they trending towards burnout? First of all, can you measure this? And if not, well, that's maybe your first task. And you can also workshop with your team. How does everyone feel around time off right now and how we approach it? Do people have a hard time and why in understanding this? And when they do take time off or they refresh when they come back? And last but not least, is leadership modeling the calm behavior? Do you take time off yourselves? Time off is a part of the work. Just like time off is really important for an elite performer, like an athlete. Well, we're all knowledge athletes. We are intelligent athletes. We are creative athletes. And just like a physical athlete, you incorporate your rest as much as your work. And so you need company, policy, and culture to enable this. And you have to take into consideration your culture before diving deep into any policy, creation, or redesign. Because what works at one company that is very inspiring might not work in the context of your business. But really making sure that your policy changes, they need to match with your culture. And that's an area of workshopping that you'll have to do. So there's a lot of policy options that we've helped teams take on that go beyond unlimited PTO. Look, unlimited PTO can work. It's rare and it can work. But we found that it's very rare for it to work. So other concepts we're seeing are four-day work weeks or just, in general, a reduction of a work week, mandatory time off, which can come in many forms. And I'll talk about that here in a moment. And another tactic is starting to separate things like sick leave from your PTO. So these are different heuristics that you can modify of your current time off policy and management. I will personally say that I'm a fan of letting go, if you have it, of unlimited PTO and getting more forward thinking and intentional around time off. I'll give you a few examples. So this is Simpliflying, who makes it mandatory to take one week off every eight weeks. It's enforced by financial punishment. So there's a good incentive model there. And there's also some reasonable rules to make sure it works with their culture and their bottom line, like, for example, no back-to-back weeks off with a close team. They found out that that would be disruptive. And what's great about this is it takes away the added responsibility of the individual to figure out when are they going to have time off amidst their projects. This now makes it across the whole portfolio of projects and initiatives, a conversation of making sure intentional time off is baked into all the intentional time on. RestUp was an initiative by LinkedIn where they just did an entire week off around spring break time. And here's some evidence of, and some posts of their employees, just very proud and excited that their company was not just saying they should prevent burnout and take time off. They made everyone take time off. And LinkedIn is not alone. Roblox also did this. They did a spring break initiative for everyone at the company. And they wrote an awesome public marketing note, blog post to communicate why this was important to them. These are two great signals of company-wide time off. Chatbooks also has replaced unlimited PTO with mandatory time off. And what's cool about this is they've been iterating on this because the first time you give it a go, of course, there's going to be some improvements naturally. And they're evolving that. For example, they know during the holiday season that their customer support is more intense than usual. So they make sure that anyone that works in that function is just going to have their mandatory time off in a different time than that. And so you can maybe approach it through season. Maybe you can approach it on project timelines. But they're making it a company responsibility to gift people, incentivize people for their awesome time on with awesome time off. Wonderful example here with Chatbooks. We have a profile on our book on Arianna Huffington, media entrepreneur. And what's cool about this example is they got rid of the word vacation and thought about something different called Thrive Time, which is think about it as decompression. So after a really intense push of a project, of an initiative, just like an athlete after intense training, there is intentional time off to decompress, recover, and reflect. And so look across all of your portfolio of intense projects right now, or maybe the ones that were just completed, or the ones that are soon to complete. The people that are wrapping those up are probably exhausted. And what a great gift to give someone after an intentional project. So maybe you can come up with your own version of that. That's more project-oriented, which is it could be across different teams, different sub-teams. So slightly different than company-wide and more project-oriented, which I think is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of this model, and I've seen it work across many, many organizations. Here are some examples of modeling this as leadership, which is really important. Busy and stress is contagious, but so is calm. And Darren at GitLab, I emailed him one time, and I got this lovely auto reply about him taking time off and actually linking out to resources that they have in support of mindfulness and mental health and the nobility of leisure and that rest is productive. This sets an amazing example, who Darren works with internally at GitLab, but also outsiders that are emailing him. There's a few other examples here. Jen Fisher at Deloitte, who is a great friend and collaborator. She also had an out-of-office message that spoke to the value of time off. We're seeing leaders across LinkedIn posting about their proud, rather than being proud of always busy and stressing out and overworking. They're proud of actually taking some intentional time off and stepping away and seeing the value in that and most importantly, promoting it. And you can do this at the company-wide level, like LinkedIn, where they said, hey, office is closed, rest is important, and we hope you get some rest, too. So think about the behavior that you're encouraging through living it yourself. So, you really need to think about your unique culture. What a company-wide time off approach work? If not, understand why. If so, make sure to think through all the nuances there and how you would strategically plan that. If it won't be a company-wide, maybe the project-oriented model of making sure there's decompression staggered in between project kickoffs. Maybe that works for you and you've got to think about that. If we spend so much time workshopping our time on and all the work that we need to do, what happens when we just take an hour with leadership or our teams and workshop, hey, we want to prioritize time off and enable all of you to have quality time off? What's getting in the way? That's a great prompt. Or does anyone have any ideas or other companies that you think do this in an interesting way that we might be able to get inspiration from? It's really fun to workshop how to rest more, trust me. There's three key phases of change that you're going to have to think about by accepting, if it calls to you, this making time off a company responsibility that you're going to have to keep in mind. And the first is permission. And permission is living it yourself. So making sure that you're prioritizing this, having workshops around time off and mental health and burnout, and making sure that it's known that you encourage it, not only culturally but in your policy. And you're going to have to update your language and your taxonomy. You're going to have to think about systems that can empower this so that people feel safe and that they feel like they can actually enjoy their time off. And also that when they come back that it's not going to be crazy. There's a lot here. But by putting it into action, you start giving permission. Then you've got to prioritize because this is going to be new. And it's definitely a counter to a lot of Western culture. So you've got to make sure to prioritize this. This isn't a nice to have. This isn't a we'll get to it later. It's just like thirst and burnout. I make this analogy with burnout and thirst. They say when I used to train a competitive cycling, they said once you're thirsty, you're too late. You could replace that with once you're burnt out, you're too late. So prioritize this and making sure that you're modeling it at the leadership level. You're communicating this, you're investing in this and you're keeping everyone on the team informed and extracting ideas from them on how your organization can get better at intentional time off. So you got to prioritize it. And just because you prioritize it and practice it doesn't mean that your work is done. We're all in the business of iteration and continuous improvement. The same applies here with your rest ethic and time off. So you've got to regularly remind your team of time off. It's great when you come back from time off or in your out of office message to remind people that this is important to your culture that it empowers a buildup of enthusiasm that prevents burnout and increases creativity. And you just it's involves human dignity to make sure that we have intentional rest. And you've got to reassess. So just like I mentioned with the anecdote of chat books after one of your time off experiments, you should reflect on the improvements there and have the next version of it upgraded just like we upgrade software. And you'll have to upgrade your policies. You'll have to upgrade the way you talk about this. It's a moving target and it's never finished. One last thing I would love to show you is the rest ethic time off model. This goes very deep and we're happy to talk with any of you that resonate with this deeper. But most people only do time off and then time on. It's like you're off and you're on. Maybe you maybe throw up a out of office message. Whereas the practice of proper rest ethic time off model involves many more segments. And these are segments for you to our phases. Should I say for you to think about your own instance of it because it's going to look different across organizations. But here we go from the left. We have documentation. If your people of that have knowledge are not documenting their knowledge and I'm not just talking about engineers. Engineers are historically known for great documentation so that if they're away another engineer can access that knowledge of the code and assist, contribute towards it. And most of us I'm guilty of it in the past myself of whether I was in a business development role ahead of design role, advisor role documenting my knowledge because if I'm out, if I'm not available there's a repository of that. So the more you're documenting the more you're investing in the ability to take time off so that when you're away with your well-deserved time off at least your core knowledge is referenceable. Think about that. Am I documenting my knowledge internally as much as a great engineer documents his or her code? Probably could do better. I know I certainly can. So once you have proper documentation then you can start better preparation. Who's going to cover for you? Not just one person. Maybe multiple people are going to cover for you. Make sure that they have access to your knowledge in the documentation. Then if you've properly prepared now you can really be off. You can really have decompression. Others can cover for you. It's not disruptive. It's well-deserved. Then usually people come back to the office after time off and it's back on the treadmill, speed 10, incline 12 and it's intense and you almost dread going back. So you can come up with your own reintegration, reincorporation, reintroduction into the company. This could take on a day or two where you're coming back in, seeing how things went. Maybe your documentation got updated because other people were covering for you and you need that new context. Some epiphanies during your time off, some clarity, clear areas of improvement, some awesome ideas. Let's make sure to document that and to integrate it. The genius that came out of your time off, the good ideas that came out of your time off, don't go wasted and just dissipate. Then finally as you take some time to get brought up to speed, now it's time on again. Rested, enthused and most likely leveled up and now time off, intentional time off can be an improvement function at your organization to help you become more decentralized, to have more redundancy, to be more resilient. So time off is not just, hey we're going to prevent burnout. Having a good rest ethic actually forces you to think about smarter systems and decentralizing knowledge and command and leadership. So it's by getting better at time off, at quality time off, you're going to get better at quality time on and that's a worthy investment. So remember time off is for pros. Athletes schedule in their time off, their coaches take their athletes time off very serious and we are all knowledge and intellectual and creative athletes. So we need to take our rest serious. We need to have a solid rest ethic. So lean into this awesome idea of how do you empower and encourage and in some cases make time off mandatory because you care about your people and you care about them doing their best work and showing up in the best way and time off can be one of your strategies to do so. It's an honor to speak with you. Many of you reach out to me and talk to me about time off or what you just do in your leisure time. If it has to do with cooking or hiking or gardening or martial arts or playing music, those are the things I'm into. So reach out to me about that. I'd love to hear what you do in your noble leisure and if this concept really resonated with you, check out our book time off. And lastly, if you have any ideas or questions that you're intrigued by, you can reach out to us at timeoff.co. We'd be glad to hear from you. And GitLab, thank you. You have been an inspiration to me of the future of work and a more liberating reality for knowledge workers. And you've lived out much of the advice I've shared today. You've validated so much of my concepts and ideas that Max and I put into our book. So you've added to our credibility and it's really an honor to be involved and keep leading the way. Thank you.