Richard Branson is to give his staff unlimited holidays and time off whenever they want it.
The BBC reports Branson as saying " there was no need to ask for approval, nor say when they planned to return".
Sounds great, doesn't it? But how would such a scheme affect SME's in the landscape and horticulture industry?
Unpredictable and long periods of poor weather can create a lot of stress when trying to schedule maintenance or plan a landscape build. Allowing staff to take off whenever they want to could create even more problems for bosses of small firms.
Or am I looking at this wrong? Will staff actually stay more loyal to the job and schedule their absences to suit the company's needs?
Branson said:
"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," wrote the billionaire.
"The assumption being that they are only going to do it when they feel 100% comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business - or, for that matter, their careers!"
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If you employ thousands of staff this probably could work ok, as long as no one abuses it, however having working for a large company where staffing was cut to the bone 2 missing staff caused issues, let alone potentialy 2 hundred !.
But for a small business, it could be the death of you, Monday mornings, don't feel like work don't go in, Friday night had a skinfull, don't go in Saturday, sun shining... its a nightmare.
Rob
It's a PR stunt. He has only implemented it with a few 'personal staff'.
Any of us could say that staff could have as much time off as they wanted, as long as it didn't have an impact on the business, knowing full well it's near impossible to have time off which will have no impact on the business.
I'm quite a fan of paying people for work done, rather than the amount of hours they attend, but from an HR perspective it's a nightmare.
Offering more holidays or time off which is managed is one thing but giving staff carte Blanche to come and go as they please is tantamount to disaster.
I agree with Stuart, appears to be a PR stunt, it got him a bit of free publicity so it worked! totally unworkable in a small to medium company, and workers in a large firm would take the p*** in about a week. Next news will be Virgin is on a recruitment drive!
Can you imagine piling on a Virgin 747 with the wife and kids, in excited anticipation of 2 weeks in Florida only to be told "everybody off - the pilot's decided not to come in today!"
Obviously RB wants a few headlines - can't possibly work. We limit our lads when they can have their 28 days anyway. 10 days must be taken over the Christmas period and nothing April and May as there are enough 4 day weeks to stress us out just as everything starts to grow!
Is a Staff free for all the reason Virgin Galactic hasnt taken a single paying customer into space yet, years after they first said they would?
It may be a bit of a stunt but an extremely risky precedent.
Virgin has 50,000 employees worldwide. Branson has now, publicly, declared his intentions (although he has said he will see how it goes with the first 170 employees).
He might be on to something. All the big tech companies - like Google and Apply, for example - already operate very open working conditions. I believe that Google still allows its staff one day each week to work on private projects (and pays them for it:).
I suspect Branson is using more than a little bit of psychology so that staff don't push the company goodwill too far.
It's an interesting experiment.
Thats it, im after a job at Virgin, more time off than the school kids apparently!
Seriously though, lets see how much headline space this project gets if the idea falls flat.Obviously we're talking about global brands here, its a world away from your average landscape/gardening operation, as most of their white collar work is office based, you could in thoery let someone else pick up the slack while another employee is off for the day, i just couldnt see that translate into physical grafting, when x amount of gardens/work has to be done each day and that team is a man down.
Branson's unlimited hols? We'd be too scared of the sack to take them
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2770289/JAN-MOIR-Branson-...
You've got to hand it to him. He knows how to spin a story for PR. The whole story is actually something of nothing, and it's no coincidence he has a new book out soon.