An article from the telegraph a couple of years ago makes an interesting point about holiday allowance. Would this make employees err on the side of caution and actually take less holiday? what do you think?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/7945719/Netflix-lets-its-staff-take-as-much-holiday-as-they-want-whenever-they-want-and-it-works.html
5 Responses
horses for courses
I know people who don’t take all their holiday allowance
and I know people who ‘book’ every single day of their 21 days allowable sick leave every year…………..
Humans fall into both theory X and theory Y categories.
If you don’t liek the policies in the company you work for today…..leave……go self employed, that way you can take as much holiday as you can afford and no one else either suffers or has the right to object!
Rus
Self Policing
Doesn’t sound good to me. I love my holidays and need to know how many I have without any grey areas.
Any scheme like this would result in self-policing and we know what happened in China when they all decided they were Policemen!
Humans are a bit mad really and however much the "sandle wearing liberals" think we are being over protected and over legislated against I have been in many situations where "freedom" to do what you like and how you like is accepted…The result…
The greedy ones eat all the sweets
The lazy ones do even less than before
Everyone else is feeling frustrated because the lazy ones and the greedy ones always get away with murder!
the great thing about rules and freedom…..
having clearly defined rules gives you the freedom to get on with it without worrying about whether you can or can’t do something. It also gives you the freedom from someone else’s opinion of what is acceptable or not.
rus
Personally speaking I love what they are trying to do here…
For me this is about the culture they are trying to create; one populated by adults.
I know when I worked for big multinationals I found it a little irritating that when my contract said "37 hours a week, or the hours necessary to do the job" what that actually meant was "you will have to work late when necessary but you will need to take annual leave if you want to exit the building earlier than 5pm"
The approach Netflix are advocating will be difficult in many environments but if you trust employees to do a great job & are serious that ‘adequate performace’ results in severance then why not trust your people to manage their time correctly?
It has the very real possibility of breeding employee loyalty that will save the organisation more money than if everyone took an extra week a year. Given the US normally have exceptionally low annual leave allowances I think it is a stroke of genius that speaks volumes for the confidence they place in their staff.
Would love to know if the policy is still in place today.
Comments
If you read the comments below the article you will see that this company has a poor reputation and a high turnover of staff.
I do think that people perform better when given some freedom to organise their own time but there has to be measures in place to prevent the wolves and the sheep from ruling the farm.