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Unlimited leave? Sounds like a good idea, but ...

Imagine working for an employer who treated you like a grown-up and let you take as many holidays as you liked. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

The trouble with modern work is that it is endless. One is never through with it, which means judging when to take a break is 
very difficult. 
Today File Photo

The trouble with modern work is that it is endless. One is never through with it, which means judging when to take a break is
very difficult.
Today File Photo

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Imagine working for an employer who treated you like a grown-up and let you take as many holidays as you liked. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

This is the deal Sir Richard Branson is extending to his private staff and almost everyone has considered it very lovely indeed.

Last week, he wrote a blog post extolling his smart move and, in the comments below, he was deemed to be showing the way to a better future.

Sir Richard is not the first to introduce such a policy — for years, Netflix has declined to monitor how much time its employees are away from work — but he is the first to see how much good publicity can come from it.

“It is left to the employee alone to decide if and when he or she feels like taking a few hours, a day, a week or a month off,” Sir Richard explained, his words accompanied by a photo of him lolling in a hammock, smartphone in hand, the Caribbean Sea lapping beneath him and the fronds of a palm tree almost touching the locks of his hair.

Alas, there is a catch to all this sunshine and sand. Sir Richard went on to explain that staff would take time off only when they felt “a hundred per cent comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project”.

Suddenly, the deal looks like a staggeringly poor one for the people who run the entrepreneur’s office. In all the decades I have worked, there has never been a single moment when I was 100 per cent comfortable that I was on top of everything. I cannot believe it is any different at Virgin.

The trouble with modern work is that it is endless. You are never through with it, which means judging when to take a break is very difficult indeed. A fixed holiday entitlement tells us it is okay to take a break — even though our work is far from done.

When it comes to holidays, we are pulled in two different directions. The more disaffected we are, the more holidays we want to take; the more ambitious, the more we are inclined to take none at all.

In neither case should the choice be left entirely to us. Those who would rather be on permanent holiday need to be told to come to work; those who can never bring themselves to take a break need to be told to take one.

Pros and Cons of flexible holidays

It is possible the no-fixed-holiday policy may work if we all have a clear idea of what an acceptable duration of time off is like. However, we do not have a clue. It varies not only among people, but also among countries.

In Europe, we like a great amount of time off — particularly in France, where workers take a delightful 30 days off — while in the United States, no one believes in holidays at all. The normal number is 10 days, but only wimps actually take that.

What is thought to be reasonable also varies among sectors — some teachers view anything shorter than three months as an outrage — and even among companies in the same industry.

Given all this, when we take a new job, we need to know what the going rate is. If employers will not give us a hint, we have to work this out ourselves.

A no-fixed-holiday policy does not mean no one is counting, but that we will all start monitoring one another’s holidays obsessively in order to work out how much to allow ourselves. It will take a brave person to book two weeks in the sun if his boss always settles for a long weekend.

Sir Richard said he hopes the scheme would soon be copied by all his subsidiaries. However, here, I spot another catch. Is he really going to tell Virgin stewardesses, who currently are not at liberty to choose their shade of lipstick, that they can take as much time off as they like?

Or did he mean the enlightenment would spread only as far as among managers — which does not sound terribly enlightening at all?

Although the deal itself is a dud, it does have logic on its side. Netflix points out that as we no longer expectpeople to work from 9 to 5 and that we trust them to work from home, it is madness to cling on to the idea of a fixed holiday entitlement. This is quite right.

However, it still does not make the no-fixed-holiday policy a good idea, at least not for employees. Flexible work time has been the worst deal for professional workers — and the best for their employers — that there has ever been.

Productivity soars, not because everyone is happy to be given freedom, but because they find that they never stop working.

Netflix has reported that its choose-your-own-holiday policy has made productivity rise even further. I can believe it and do not approve one bit. This does not mean the traditional way most employers approach holidays — keeping track of all absences — is the right one.

Excessive monitoring is almost always a bad idea. And the notion of an annual entitlement that cannot be carried over, so people end up taking a holiday when it suits no one, makes no sense either.

The answer is simple. Organisations should state how much time off employees are expected to take and leave it to them to take roughly that amount, give or take a day or two, as they see fit.

THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lucy Kellaway is an Associate Editor and management columnist of the Financial Times.

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