Mariya Borisova/Getty Images
Last year, Mathai traveled to Europe for two months. She took 10 days of PTO to start the trip and then spent the remainder of the time working from places like Scotland, Amsterdam, Portugal, and Italy. Because she was in a different time zone, she’d often work 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. local time and spend the morning doing a tour or going to the beach.
“I would live my life in the morning and then in the afternoon, night I would do my work,” she said.
Mathai said before she went, her bosses told her they had total confidence in her that she would get her work done while she was gone.
“It wasn’t a threat. It was truly total confidence,” she said. “So I kind of went there knowing like I want to make them proud. I want to make myself proud and do my work.”
In addition to working from abroad, she said she also takes plenty of full-fledged PTO. Earlier this year, she traveled to India for two weeks with family and didn’t work.
“There’s a lot of encouragement from leadership, from David himself, to take time off,” Mathai said of Barkoe.
Barkoe said a lot of companies have unlimited PTO in theory but that there’s a difference between saying it and doing it. He tries to actively encourage and call people out, in a good way, when they take advantage of Carve’s flexible culture.
“You just got to have the mindset and the willingness to say personal life is part of the work culture,” he said. “Not the other way around, where work culture is part of the personal life.”