A la carte holiday time offer creates unfair dilemma

Imagine working for an employer who treated you like a grown-up and let you take as much holiday time 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 judged it very lovely indeed. Last week, he wrote a blog post extolling his own smart move and, in the comments below it, he was deemed to be showing the way to a better future.

Sir Richard isn't the first to introduce this policy – for years Netflix has declined to monitor how much time its people take off – 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,” he explained, his words accompanied by a photo of him lolling in a hammock, smartphone in hand, the Caribbean lapping beneath him.

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

Poor deal

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 can’t believe it is any different at Virgin.

The trouble with modern work is that it is endless. You are never through it, which means that judging when to take a break is very difficult indeed. A fixed holiday entitlement tells us it is OK 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 holiday we want to take; the more ambitious, the more we’re 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.

It is possible that the no-fixed-holiday policy might work if we all had a clear idea of what an acceptable amount of holiday looked like. But we don’t have a clue. It varies not only between people but between countries.

In Europe, we like a great deal of it – particularly in France where workers take 30 days – while in the US no-one believes in holidays at all. The normal amount is 10 days, but only wimps actually take that.

What is thought reasonable also varies between sectors – some teachers view anything less than three months as an outrage – and even between companies in the same industry.

Given all this, when we take a new job, we need to know what the going rate is. If our employers won’t give us a hint, we have to work it out ourselves. A no-policy rule does not mean that no one is counting, but that we will all start monitoring each other’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 their boss always settles for a long weekend.

Sir Richard says he hopes the scheme will be soon be copied by all his subsidiaries. But here I spot another catch. Is he really going to tell Virgin stewardesses, who currently are not at liberty to choose their own shade of lipstick, that they can take as much time off as they like? Or does he mean that the enlightenment will spread only as far as managers – which doesn’t sound terribly enlightened at all?

Although the deal itself is a dud, it does have logic on its side. Netflix points out that, as we no longer expect people to work 9am to 5pm, and we trust them to work from home, it is madness to cling to the idea of fixed holidays.

This is quite right. But it still doesn’t make it a good idea, at least not for the employee. Flexible working has been the worst deal for professional workers – and the best one for their employers – that there has ever been. Productivity soars, not because everyone is happy to be given freedom, but because they find they never stop working. Netflix reports that its choose-your-own holiday policy has made productivity go up even further. I can quite believe it, and don’t approve one bit.

Excessive monitoring

This doesn’t mean the traditional way most employers approach holiday – keeping a minute track of all absences – is right. 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 holiday when it suits no one – makes no sense, either.

The answer is simple. Companies should state how much holiday people are expected to take, and then leave it up to them to take roughly that amount, give or take a day or two, as they see fit. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014)