Unlimited vacation time? Be careful what you wish for

Richard Branson “may be the coolest boss on the planet,” according to an American website, and a poll of British company chiefs has just voted the Virgin tycoon “the most admired British business leader of the past 50 years.”

But managers in his com- panies might not be thrilled to receive his latest directive: He wants to abolish fixed holiday entitlements, instead allowing workers to take time out as often and for as long as they please.

Mr. Branson stole the idea from Netflix, the videostreaming service, which realized since it no longer bothered tracking daily working hours (many staff were working irregular schedules, from home or elsewhere), logically there was no longer any point in tracking holiday time.

That was revolutionary, not least because many Americans are accustomed to only two weeks of official time off a year, plus public holidays. In any case, the stressed-out junior executives rarely take their full entitlement for fear of not being seen to be keen.

But Netflix bosses figured what really mattered was not whether employees were at work for set periods, but whether they delivered tasks assigned to them, and whether the whole company worked as efficiently as before — or better.

So Mr. Branson’s new “non-policy,” as he calls it, is employees should decide for themselves the extent and frequency of absence that will still enable them to do their jobs well and their teams to prosper. They just need to tell their bosses when they will be away. It’s an appealing idea, but there is a downside.

For instance, managers will probably find it a nightmare. How will they plan a year ahead if they haven’t the faintest idea how many of their staff are going to turn up in any given week? How can they seriously be expected to drive the company’s productivity upward without knowing how many man-days they are going to have to work with?

And the next question might be: How can they design an employment contract to cope? It will have to be zerohours and target-driven, like old-fashioned piecework. The targets will have to be high, to keep employees on their toes, rather than allow them to be constantly day-dreaming about their next holiday.

In fact, it may turn out to be a lot more challenging for them than the workers’ utopia it sounds — a misjudged holiday and a missed target could lead to a pink slip.

The holiday non-policy would only really work for certain jobs: mostly the middleclass, technology-dependent ones that already involve initiative and responsibility. People who occupy that world are often glued to their mobile devices in any case. Why not blur the distinction and focus purely on results?

This highlights the risk that if the Netflix model really does nurture a more-contented workforce, then everyone who is not on a set-your-own-holidays contract will feel like a second-class citizen, stuck on the assembly line or on the hospital-cleaning night-shift without being able to say, “I’ve met my numbers for this quarter, let’s do another fortnight in Marrakesh.” Equally, many will feel more secure in a familiar system of fixed entitlements, with sufficient weeks off for the holidays they can afford.

As with his unlaunched space travel venture, Mr. Branson’s “non-policy” policy is ahead of its time, a touch whimsical and ridden with problems — but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.