Unlimited vacation
For anybody who thinks that the French 35 hours (and the thousands of pages of regulation and laws that come with it) was a social progress, here is an idea coming from Netflix, a Silicon Valley company:
When it comes to vacation, Netflix has a simple policy: take as much as you’d like. Just make sure your work is done.
This is as smart a system as there is when it comes to knowledge workers.
• social pressure becomes the regulator, not a policy (unfair by design, as it is a standard applied to special cases). If you worked like a rockstar on a project, the colleagues will give you 4 weeks of break. If you take 3 weeks after a year of designing the coffee machine stocks management spreadsheet, forgiveness will be long to come. Abuser will be regulated by the workforce.
• allowing people to take time when they can is the best insurance they will work more when it is needed
• treating people as responsible beings is the best way to ensure loyalty and dedication
• and Netflix probably got on the top of the “companies geeks want to work for” with that trick, surpassing Google’s tired “20% of your time for your own project” proposition.
Smart move. Now I would only like to see how this system would fare in a company financially struggling. It could maybe backfire, with people burning out because it is socially unacceptable to take any break in such a situation.
April 16th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
When I worked as a typesetter in a unionized composing room of a daily newspaper the greatest regulator about when I could arrive and leave was my coworkers.
Once, when all my work was done for the day, I set out to leave 10 minutes early. I was stopped by one of my coworkers, who cautioned me that if our employer noticed that I was leaving 10 minutes early—and if this became general practice—they would conclude that they were over-staffed, and eliminate a position.
In a similar vein, I was cautioned against coming up with technical innovations—figuring out how to make the photo-typesetting machine draw boxes around ads instead of having to put them in by hand—because, again, the employer would see this, and respond by cutting back on our hours.
April 16th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
When I worked as a typesetter in a unionized composing room of a daily newspaper the greatest regulator about when I could arrive and leave was my coworkers.
Once, when all my work was done for the day, I set out to leave 10 minutes early. I was stopped by one of my coworkers, who cautioned me that if our employer noticed that I was leaving 10 minutes early—and if this became general practice—they would conclude that they were over-staffed, and eliminate a position.
In a similar vein, I was cautioned against coming up with technical innovations—figuring out how to make the photo-typesetting machine draw boxes around ads instead of having to put them in by hand—because, again, the employer would see this, and respond by cutting back on our hours.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:21 am
That’s the weakness of these systems, it will go as far as the people who co-exist in it. You have been inspired to change jobs it seems :)
It is funny how we are naturally conservative when it comes to work. Think about it, we all know as knowledge workers that presence does not correlate with efficiency, yet we all feel weird when a colleague leaves the office one hour early.
Social inertia at its best, we know something is outdated, yet as we’ve been educated like that we can’t control the feeling.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:21 am
That’s the weakness of these systems, it will go as far as the people who co-exist in it. You have been inspired to change jobs it seems :)
It is funny how we are naturally conservative when it comes to work. Think about it, we all know as knowledge workers that presence does not correlate with efficiency, yet we all feel weird when a colleague leaves the office one hour early.
Social inertia at its best, we know something is outdated, yet as we’ve been educated like that we can’t control the feeling.