For 20 people, you don't need policies at all. But probably you're not planning on being a 20 person company forever, and the more people, the harder it is to change things.

As for vacation, why not - you get 2 weeks vacation as a signing bonus, plus 3 weeks/year. This accrues up to X months. Seems to solve all of the problems. If you want to stick with the no vacation policy, assuming you're the founder, it means that you have to take long, extended vacations. If you want your employees to be comfortable taking two weeks off, you have to take two weeks off and make people know that you're taking two weeks off (and not work those two weeks, at least as far as people can tell). There are always deadlines, always important meetings, and I find it impossible to justify taking an arbitrary amount of time off with no guideline. The point of vacation time isn't trust, it's to set that guideline - I am here to work, but I need to know what the expectations are. You can deal with the outliers as they come up - if one of your good employees wants to take two months off in the summer, you guys'll work something out.

Then I think having no sick day policy ("come to work sick and you're fired") and a flexible work from home policy makes this less about beancounting and more about taking time off to energize. Everyone loses a few days a year to appointments, a cold, a sleepless night, etc., and hates having to take those out of their vacation days (or are forced to lie about being sick).

3 weeks/year is what passes for lots of holiday in the US? Wow. I took 31 days this year (not counting public holidays) and it was less than I'd've liked.

In the US vacation time is in addition to public holidays. Most companies have 10 holiday days off per year. Salaried employees usually get a minimum of two weeks of vacation time on top of that, which often includes sick days. Extra weeks are earned by long-time employees. So you start at 20 days and get to 25 and 30 over some number of years with the same company. It's also often possible to negotiate the starting amount when you're hired, if it's not your first job.

Most good companies/managers, at least in the software industry, also recognize that developers often work overtime and/or odd hours, so when you're sick or can't work for some other reason you can usually "make it up" by working off-hours. That way you can save your vacation time for when you're actually on vacation.

In my multiple corporate jobs, my best recollection is 7 holidays, like so:

    Memorial Day 1
    4th of July 1
    Labor Day 1
    Thanksgiving 1
    Christmas - New Years 3  (one day moves between the
                              two, depending upon the
                              calendar / weekdays for a
                              particular year)

Some places also gave the day after Thanksgiving; however, this was increasingly disappearing (personally observed at more than one location during my tenure). Some (fewer) places also made Christmas Eve and/or New Years Eve a standing holiday; again, this was disappearing from practice.

Paid vacation often started at two weeks -- 10 days. However, depending upon your manager, you could end up consuming a significant portion of that for doctors appointments, home maintenance, managing whatever problem the kids have, etc. (Some managers insist you take every hour out of the office as time off; others are more flexible.)

A fairly standard policy seemed to be to add one week (5 days) of paid vacation after 5 years tenure. Another week at 10 years tenure. Most such increases maxed out at 3 or 4 weeks vacation, no matter the length of tenure.

Sick days were increasingly disappearing; this seemed to be a target of management consultants' recommendations for "streamlining" operations.

Some workplaces were/are somewhat more generous; however, none of that is mandated. (And again, the consultants with their "best practices" seem to have been making inroads on this -- just as they've continued to wedge people into smaller and smaller cubes having lower and fewer walls.)

I mention all this in part because I think many higher level technical people are somewhat sheltered. (Not all, though.) While technical, I worked fairly closely with many people who were not, and the above was not unusual.

>Salaried employees usually get a minimum of two weeks of vacation time on top of that, which often includes sick days. Extra weeks are earned by long-time employees. So you start at 20 days and get to 25 and 30 over some number of years with the same company

I said not counting public holidays, i.e. 31 days holiday + 8 (I think?) days public holidays. If you start at two weeks, isn't that 10 days rather than 20?

And I wouldn't even dream of including sick days in that. When you're sick you get the day off, paid, without affecting your holidays; I think that's a legal requirement, but if it isn't it's certainly industry standard (If you're sick when you've already taken a holiday you can claim another day off in lieu, though that's a little more complex).

The US just seems to overwork immensely from where I stand.

The US just has an attitude more consistent with upstarts/bootstrappers. While it'd be great if we could all afford to work only for 10 months of the year and to pay our employees for 2 months+ of time with no productive output, that's not how it works when you're a small business scraping by. Once you get to the F500, of course, things change, but mandating vacation time makes it really difficult for small companies to afford new hires.

Most people do not "overwork immensely".

Earned vacation is a hedge against an inadequate supply of value from the employee. Many states have specific requirements for the payout of vacation, and if you start someone who turns out to be a deadbeat (or someone who leaves within a few weeks for other reasons, like a competing offer came in) with 4 weeks of vacation, you may end up having to pay him an extra 4 weeks of pay for nothing when you fire him, on top of the time you kept him onboard.

You could have a corporate standard e-mail address ([email protected]) as well as the option of a colloquial one if desired.

As to vacation: I'm not speaking from experience here, but I think creating a culture of vacation could do it. If the founders are seen taking time off (off-the-grid off, not emailing-from-the-poolside off), that could set precedent.

Great idea! I think this is what I will do.