Happy staff are good for business. And what makes happy staff? Holidays. Virgin boss Richard Branson has followed Netflix's lead and will allow staff to take leave whenever they feel like it, as the business looks to make staff happy.
The move will also fuel positive brand engagement internally and externally, as Virgin staff act as amabssadors for the brand. Would it work in ad land?
Back in 2010 Netflix started to offer employees the opportunity to take leave when they felt like it, which meant no filling out forms or allocated chunks of leave per year.
The offer was made on the implicit understanding that employees wouldn't choose to take a week off when their team was under the pump to deliver a project. The policy was so open that employees didn't even need to track their leave days.
It was seen as an audacious move to fit in with the changing nature of work for the white-collar workers in the sector.
Virgin is following Netflix's lead. In a blog post earlier this week, Branson outlined the policy and the raison d'etre for the shift away from traditional leave arrangements.
"The Netflix initiative had been driven by a growing groundswell of employees asking about how their new technology-controlled time on the job (working at all kinds of hours at home and/or everywhere they receive a business text or email) could be reconciled with the company’s old-fashioned time-off policy," Branson wrote.
"That is to say, if Netflix was no longer able to accurately track employees’ total time on the job, why should it apply a different and outmoded standard to their time away from it?"
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