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My previous company had instituted the forced holiday once or twice a quarter and it was truly effective at getting people who never take time off to take a break. They tried to discontinue it after the pandemic receded a bit but people protested so they kept it in the end.

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One of my former coworkers went at least a decade without taking a single vacation day. He cashed them in every year. Eventually one year him and his wife went on a vacation and I guess he took a liking to the experience because from that point on he always used up all of his vacation time. All it took was him actually experiencing an actual vacation trip to see the value in them. It really annoyed our manager, from whose budget vacation payouts didn't come, when he no longer had one of his most productive engineers in the office all 52 weeks of the way, especially since the coworker had been with the company long enough to get six weeks per year. Though not completely due to the newly discovered fondness of using vacation days, we did end up increasing headcount around that time and I'm sure it was a contributing factor.

They tried to discontinue it after the pandemic receded

What arbitrary KPI did they point to as a reason for that decision?

Not the person you're replying to but I had the same experience. My company was careful to announce the extra holidays as a special pandemic related wellness thing (subtext: not permanent) whenever they did it, so the discontinuation was just not announcing new ones.

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