"We wanted to make sure we could give them something really valuable, and what we think is most valuable right now is time for all of us to collectively walk away," said Teuila Hanson, LinkedIn's chief people officer, who joined the company in June.
"I think the reality of the weight of the pandemic really took its toll during those months. That was a heavy time. That is when we were seeing: 'wow there is clear burnout.'" They added a simple open-ended question of just: How are you? That is when we started to see the emerging of themes in and around burnout, lack of self care, struggle with family, people feeling lonely or isolated, so that was really good to just be able to read through the verbatim comments and to really get some of that texture around how people are feeling, how they are doing, what they are missing, what they may be grieving.
The recent survey that we had, things are better, we had a [company-wide] shutdown at the end of the year the last week of December so we saw better results and better comments that people felt refreshed, they felt energized, and I think now that we have a vaccine and, at least in the United States and some other geographies, it looks like there is a path out of this, we are definitely hearing more positive sentiments from our employees. But it's up and down.We looked at our survey results..
The no-meeting days are huge, very beloved. People felt like"Wow, there is power to being able to just lock in and not run from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting."We thought that it would be a good thing for our entire organization to have another global paid week off. We have a global annual shutdown every December, many of our competitors also have a global shutdown at the end of the year.