Would you turn down extra cash for more vacation?

When it comes to rewarding workers, vacation as a bonus makes people feel more human

A QUICK QUESTION: What is more likely to make you feel valued for going above and beyond at work — a bit of extra cash or some extra time off?

Much of the work world relies on monetary bonuses, including overtime pay, to motivate workers — but a new research paper suggests time off might be a better way to go.

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“Receiving vacation significantly increased employees’ feelings of humanness compared to equivalent monetary bonuses,” wrote researchers Alice Lee-Yoon and Sanford Ely DeVoe in the Journal of Managerial Psychology. “Organizations aiming to enhance employee well-being and reinforce humane workplace values might benefit from incorporating time-based rewards into their incentive structures.”

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Approaching the question from the lens of ‘feeling more human’ is an interesting one. They aren’t necessarily asking which form of incentive produced better results, or which one the workers preferred, but the authors believe that feelings of ‘humanness’ were important, because it formed the foundation of a relationship between employee and employer. In one of their experiments, they asked 500 participants how they felt about a job that offered time off as a bonus versus a job offering cash, and which company they felt valued them more. The company offering time off topped the list.

“That difference may sound modest, [but] it represents a meaningful psychological shift,” said DeVoe, speaking to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s the difference between feeling neutral and feeling genuinely seen as a person.”

That can have powerful knock-on implications. “While there have been lots of studies exploring employees’ negative feelings about work, this research does the opposite — it examines the positive feelings employees experience,” wrote UCLA’s Betsy Morris, who noted that “the non-monetary award gives bosses flexibility,” since “time off awards may be given at a manager’s discretion, and don’t have to be part of an HR benefits package.”

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All in all, the researchers suggest it could be a novel way to think about incentives in the post-Covid, RTO era.

“Time, flexibility and work-life quality have become increasingly important, yet many —especially in low-skill roles — lack access to remote or flexible arrangements, raising equity concerns across industries,” wrote Lee-Yoon and DeVoe. “Receiving additional time off increases felt humanness by enhancing psychological segmentation from work, with potential downstream benefits for employee well-being and organizational functioning.” Kieran Delamont