I recently added a Delicious feed in a sidebar to the right that features links to some of my latest writing. I would have simply added this story to that list, but the Globe And Mail chose not to put the story online. (Shocking!) So, here's my recent Saturday feature about "unlimited vacation" policies in the workplace. Enjoy.
All the vacation you want - paradise or purgatory?
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Craig Silverman
Earlier this week, Steve Swasey returned from a two-week vacation that saw him, his wife and four kids snorkel in Honduras and climb ancient ruins in Guatemala. Most people would have had to check with their employer in order to book a vacation during the peak holiday season, and two weeks would eat up a decent chunk of their vacation time.
Mr. Swasey, however, is an executive with Netflix the U.S. movie-rental company, where there's no such thing as vacation days. The company offers "unlimited vacation" to its roughly 500 salaried employees.
"We have a high-performance culture," says Mr. Swasey, Netflix's vice-president of communications. "You've got to perform and do the job, so we give employees a lot of freedom and responsibility."
Vacation days were once used to judge the relative generosity of a company. Now, organizations like Netflix view the act of awarding time off based on seniority as an outdated practice that harks back to an era of paternalistic, staid corporations like, say, IBM.
Indeed, Big Blue once did enforce office hours and track vacation time. But starting in the 1990s, it began loosening its necktie. Today, the company has a worldwide policy that proscribes the tracking of vacation days. Want time off? Let your manager know. No need to file a formal request or check how many days you've already taken. It's enough to make the Man in The Grey Flannel Suit weep into his after-work gimlet.
"Employees within IBM Canada are given guidelines that they get three weeks of vacation when they start," says Joanne Moore, the company's employee-benefits manager. "That's the guideline. But there is no policing, and employees are empowered to take vacation when they want."
Both Netflix and IBM view their vacation policies as a reflection of company values and culture. The careers section of Netflix's website lists seven reasons to work there: No. 5 is Rules Annoy Us.
"Rules creep into most companies as they try to prevent errors by less-than-stellar employees," the video company says. "But rules also inhibit creativity and entrepreneurship, leading to a lack of innovation. Over time, this drives a company to being less fun and less successful."
IBM Canada views its policy as a way to empower employees. "Allowing employees to decide when or where to work, in addition to when they take their vacation is part of that," Ms. Moore says.
The message seems to be that if you love and value your employees, set them free. Let them work from home, don't demand they keep traditional hours and stop telling them when they can and can't take time off.
This philosophy was outlined in a recent book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Formerly human-resources managers at Best Buy, where they implemented what they call a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), they now help other companies implement the system. "ROWE means each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as their work gets done," Ms. Thompson says. "That means 8-to-5 holds no meaning any more. I can do my work from wherever I need to, whenever I need to."
Best Buy began adopting ROWE in 2003, and today employees at its U.S. headquarters are free to take time off when needed, as long as they fulfill their duties.
Best Buy Canada implemented parts of the ROWE system, but does not currently offer unlimited paid time off. "I'm not sure that our [program] is quite as sophisticated, and theirs has been in play longer," says Colin Picard, a human-resources adviser for the company. "Right now, our employees are allowed up to two days per week where they can work from home."
The move toward a less-rigid work environment goes with the emergence of technologies that enable workers to untether themselves from a cubicle. (Think of the new Cisco Systems TV ads, featuring Juno star Ellen Page, that celebrate video conferencing.)
Of course, this won't work for every kind of job. Netflix employees who are paid an hourly wage to stuff and mail DVDs to subscribers aren't covered by the unlimited-vacation policy. Nor are the workers putting in shifts at IBM's manufacturing plant in Quebec, or employees at Best Buy's actual retail stores all over the United States.
Ms. Thompson says change is slow in coming because organizations still focus on hours worked, rather than results. She calls vacation "an old benefit," explaining: "It's outdated in a sense that there's a belief that we all need to put in our 40 hours every week and we earn vacation."
She adds, "It's also outdated in terms of the belief that that we all want to separate work from personal time. Today, with people so connected all the time, there's a belief that it's bad to be on vacation and check e-mail."
The view that people shouldn't worry about separating work and personal lives runs counter to the advice of nearly every workplace and stress expert. But Ms. Thompson argues that the issue is control, and the need to give more of it to employees so they can manage life on their terms.
"There is a belief that we need boundaries," she says. "If you think about the old workplace, yeah, we needed them because you were forced to come in every day and stay until 5. ... But when you give people autonomy and control over their lives, that whole idea of separation changes - so that now I decide when I'm going to separate."
Already, in fact, many workers in Canada don't use the vacation days they have. A 2009 Harris/Decima survey commissioned by Expedia.ca found that 24 per cent of employed Canadians don't use all of their vacation days. (The average Canadian worker receives 18.7 of them a year.) The survey also found that 30 per cent of Canadians "feel guilty about taking time off work."
"We have a hard enough time taking vacation when it's given," says Beverly Beuermann-King, a stress and wellness expert based in Ontario. "If it's left up to us to decide, then sometimes external pressures and fears may get in the way.
"Especially over last year, people were afraid to take time off because they were worried about layoffs or other issues."
Mr. Swasey of Netflix says he wasn't afraid to head to Central America for his holiday, though he did take his BlackBerry with him. "I checked it two or three times a week and loved it," he says. "I knew exactly what was going on at work, and yet I didn't feel like I was intruded upon in my vacation. I was able to log in on my own time."
But Ms. Beuermann-King argues people should think about the reasons why they're checking in with the office on vacation. "If you feel like you have to check - that you will miss out or that people will think you are slacking off - then that's where there is a real issue," she says. "You're not really taking a vacation. You're just not physically there."
Indeed, one reason companies give for adopting unlimited vacation policies, or the ROWE system, is that they increase productivity. At Best Buy in the U.S., productivity went up by 35 per cent. So does that mean workers take less vacation when given the "unlimited" option?
"I have no idea," Mr. Swasey says. (IBM Canada also doesn't have that data to share.) "There's no tracking, no record, no accounting. Take what you want or what you need. No one abuses the policy because we've got adults doing adult behaviour."
Ms. Thompson and her colleague have spoken with Canadian companies, but as of now there isn't an official ROWE company in the country. If a recent experience is any indication, it may take a while: She and her co-author were booked to speak in Toronto at a recent conference, but their appearance was cancelled.
"When the people that run the conference learned about what ROWE is, they wouldn't let us come and speak because they didn't want their people to start an uprising."