Our Vacation Policy: Unlimited-Ish

Raise your hand if you’ve sat at your desk dreaming of a vacation. (FYI, we’re raising our hands.) When we launched Coast Creative, we didn’t even have to discuss the vacation policy. We all just knew that it was: “Take It.” While we normally share our facts and findings as it relates to marketing, Earth Day inspired us to share about our wanderlusting team of creatives.

We believe life is far too short and far too interesting to limit annual time off to 2 weeks—give or take. Call it what you will—unlimited vacation days, flexible vacation policy, etc—we see this as something that benefits creativity and focuses on what’s important aka team accomplishments. Actually, The Muse summarized our thoughts on the matter perfectly:  We are working to create “a results-driven culture of trust.”

Our Big 3 “Why’s” for Unlimited-Ish Vacation

The Owners

Vincent, Tony and Jonathan all love to travel. And they’ve all done it quite extensively, including months spent abroad for both Vinny and Tony. All three knew they wanted to continue to have the opportunity to have those experiences with this new company, and were determined to offer the same to all of their team members.

And it’s not just talk. In late 2018, our co-president Tony tested the vacation policy by spending two months working remotely while traveling throughout Australia and New Zealand.

The Creativity

We simply don’t believe that creativity is a 9-5 job. Sometimes you’re in the zone for hours and sometimes you need to take a break (or 4). By giving our staff more flexibility in where, how and when they work, they are able to deliver the best product to our clients.

The Balance

Work/Life balance is quite the buzzword, but we genuinely see it as one of the most important things we could do for our team. People want to travel, people need to visit family in other parts of the country, friends get married … life happens and work shouldn’t always come first. By providing staff the chance to take long weekends (working remotely most times) and travel without stressing about “using their vacation days” we believe they are better able to create a life that serves them both professionally and personally. And in our minds a burnt out/checked out employee is more detrimental to our success than a staff member who has taken a few extra days off.

… A Few Final Thoughts

We’ve based time off on trusting our employees to work when they need to and take the time off that they need to. And so far, it’s working well for us. Like most things in a startup, we are constantly changing and evolving and working to improve our process. We’re sure we will make slight adjustments to how our staff works. But we can tell you one thing, when it comes to pushing our team members to get out there and #exploremore, we are all in.