Take As Much Vacation As You Want pt. I

Update: This has been written about further in "Take As Much Vacation As You Want pt. II."

The New York Times reports on IBM's vacation policy.

"It's like when you went to college and you didn't have high school teachers nagging you anymore," said Mark L. Hanny, I.B.M.'s vice president of independent software vendor alliances. "Employees like that we put more accountability on them."

I.B.M. is probably the largest company to do away so completely with tracking vacation, although a number of newer, smaller firms have similar policies.

Best Buy has introduced a program called Results Oriented Work Environment for its 4,000 corporate employees, giving them freedom to do their jobs without regard to the hours they put in daily. The freedom, employees say, is changing their lives. They don't know if they work fewer hours-they've stopped counting-but they are more productive.

Motley Fool, the online investment adviser, has, since its founding 13 years ago, let employees take as many paid vacation or sick days as they need; the company's director of human resources, Lee Burbage, said that most of its 180 workers take three to four weeks a year. Netflix, the online DVD distributor, no longer allots specific numbers of vacation days to its 400 salaried employees.

"When you have a work force of fully formed professionals who have been working for much of their life," Patty McCord, the chief talent officer of Netflix, said, "you have a connection between the work you do and how long it takes to do it, so you don't need to have the clock-in and clock-out mentality."

(via the August 31, 2007 edition of the New York Times)