Will your new workplace really support taking PTO? Ask this question during a job interview

It can be hard to figure out whether a prospective employer really supports work-life balance — until it’s too late.

That’s what happened to Meredith Simmons, a marketing specialist who once took a job with a company that offered unlimited paid time off.

She quickly learned that the policy wasn’t as flexible as she expected. According to an interview with NPR’s show “The Indicator from Planet Money,” Simmons was hired as a remote worker and later asked to relocate to its Indiana office. She took a few days off for the drive, but was interrupted en route when her boss told her she needed to join a meeting immediately, “even though I was only off for five or six days.”

In another instance, Simmons didn’t feel comfortable requesting time off after her mother-in-law died, so she fielded coworker messages during the funeral. “That’s actually what made me think about leaving that company, and I did six months later because it was just like, I’m not getting what I need to take care of myself,” she told The Indicator.

Simmons said she believed the disconnect happened because despite having an official unlimited PTO policy, the company didn’t have a formalized system for requesting or tracking time off, and the rules were murky at best.

Vacation policies aren’t any good if they’re not transparent, clearly communicated and modeled by bosses who take time off, experts say.

But, there are ways to gauge a company’s PTO culture before you join.

Simmons encourages job-seekers to ask about PTO during the hiring process and gauge whether the company is truly support of it.

“What I’ve told people to ask is ask every person in an interview — what was the last vacation you took, and how long were you gone?” Simmons told The Indicator. “If they don’t have a good answer, it’s a pretty good sign people don’t take it. If they don’t light up about where they went, it was probably a stressful experience. And if they don’t have an answer at all, run away.”

Simmons eventually accepted a new job and was asked to start by a certain date because, as the recruiter explained, her new manager would be leaving for a few weeks of vacation, and they wanted to make sure she had enough time to ask them questions ahead of time.

“And I was thinking to myself, wait, is this real that the recruiter knows that the person that’s going to be my manager is going on this vacation?” Simmons said. “I start the job, and my manager does go on vacation. She was gone for three weeks and was truly offline. I was like, OK, this is legitimate. This is great.”

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