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My old job required me to take a minimum block of 2 weeks of vacation every year.

However, I don't think it was for altruistic reasons. In New Zealand, if you don't take your leave it accumulates. You could take no leave for 3 years, and you'd have 12 weeks of annual leave accumulated.

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I've heard that a lot of financial companies require staff to take at least 1 block of leave per year, during which they are forcibly offline and their work is covered by a colleague. If someone is hiding something in their numbers, having someone else take over for a week or two is a really good way to uncover it...

Then if you resign without taking a single day of leave in 5 years, you receive 6 months of pay checks at once.

Which is why they want you to take your leave. It becomes a liability to the company to have that much owing.

Yeah, they would have forced me to take it, but I was the only person who knew how to keep all their legacy systems stable. I eventually managed to upgrade all of them, and resigned a week later after only taking about two weeks of leave over 5 years. I got a very nice final check out of it.

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