Take As Much Vacation As You Want pt. II

As you may or may not know, Cream Cheese & Caviar is a big proponent of doing and finding your life's work. If you work for someone other than yourself, employers will aid you in your journey in 1 of 2 ways, by either promoting you along your career path internally, or by promoting you along your career path externally.

BusinessWeek published an article ("The Case Against Vacation Policy." 02 July 2008) about an Internet Technology start-up in New York that has chosen the former. A place where employees can "take paid time off for holidays, travel, and rest when they want, without asking permission--just letting managers know as a courtesy." In other words, employees are treated like grown-ups and have no formal vacation policy.

The casual vacation policy doesn't mean unlimited vacation--most people take three to four weeks each year--but there's no pressure to put in a certain number of days or hours as long as the work is getting done.

The key to making the casual vacation policy a success is helping management identify good goals. Everyone understands you have to actually work--no reading Cream Cheese & Caviar--when people take off. And the time off should be real--when you go on vacation, laptops and BlackBerrys should take their own separate vacation.

The concept of counting days and hours is a holdover from the industrial era that makes no sense for information workers who can do their jobs without being at their desks from 8 to 5, Monday through Friday.

The approach isn't unusual for companies of all sizes where much of the work can be done on flexible schedules. One example is Best Buy, where an employee-led movement toward results-only metrics transformed the company's culture.

Patagonia, one of Cream Cheese & Caviar's admired companies, lets workers at its Ventura (Calif.) headquarters surf during the day and offers up to two months of paid leave for employees to work with environmental groups.

As mentioned on Cream Cheese & Caviar before, IBM, Motley Fool, and Netflix are other examples of companies that have done away completely with tracking vacation.

Treating employees like grown-ups helps attract and retain motivated workers; it also keeps turnover low--Bluewolf said that that three people who left recently decided to return; companies can save money by not having bean-counters tracking time; and it also keeps people from burning out.

Source: "The Case Against Vacation Policy." BusinessWeek. 02 July 2008.