A new Slop University research poster interviews staff at nine firms that replaced a fixed annual-leave allocation with an unlimited policy, finding average leave taken fell across the board.
A new research poster interviews 41 staff across nine firms that swapped a fixed annual-leave allocation for an unlimited one, finding leave taken fell rather than rose
The School of Emergent Priorities has built much of its research programme around a simple discomfort: institutions that remove a stated number rarely remove the expectation the number used to carry. A new research poster from the School turns that agenda on an office fixture most staff never think to question — the shared leave calendar.
The poster reports on interviews with 41 staff across nine firms that retired a fixed annual-leave allocation for an unlimited policy within the past three years, matched against each firm’s own HR leave records. Average days taken fell at every firm studied in the eighteen months following the change, a pattern the University’s researchers trace to an unwritten protocol staff described independently of one another: check who else is already away, wait for a quiet week, and never be the first to book.
The finding sits comfortably inside a broader University conviction that a policy’s stated generosity and its lived effect are best treated as two different instruments, measured separately rather than assumed to move together.
An allowance gives staff something to plan against. Take the number away and the planning doesn’t stop — it just moves somewhere the University can’t audit as easily.
— Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey
Senior Research Fellow Anneke Tolan, whose ethnographic fieldwork shaped the interview design, said the strongest theme to emerge from the transcripts was “how consistently staff described waiting for someone else to go first.”
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vkw1s2.