Would you like unlimited vacation days?
If you could take as many vacation days as you want, would you?…
If you could take as many vacation days as you want, would you?
Netflix, the Silicon Valley-based DVD movie subscription service company, has a policy that allows salaried employees to take off as much time as they’d like for vacation. Nobody tracks vacation days at the company, and as long as your manager knows where you are and your work is covered, you can head off to Greece or Brazil for however long you want.
We had an interesting discussion at the morning meeting about how effective this sort of policy could be. Our own Stacey Vanek-Smith says she would be very cautious and scared about having this sort of policy.
“It sounds like this great thing, but I’d imagine there would be all this internal pressure to not take a lot of time off,” she says, pointing out that you wouldn’t want to appear like a slacker compared to other employees.
Still, the flexible policy doesn’t seem to have hurt the company. In July, Netflix reported second-quarter earnings of $43.5 million, compared with $32.4 million earnings for the same period last year. The company also said it added 1 million new subscribers, bringing its total number of subscribers to 15 million.
And even if the ultra-flexible policy were available to workers, it’s not a guarantee that employees would take advantage of it. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that only two-thirds of employees worldwide use all the holidays they are given by their workplace.
About 12,500 people from 24 countries were surveyed, and results show that the French were most likely to use their allotted time off while the Japanese were the least likely to use their vacation time. The survey shows that only 57 percent of Americans would use all their leave.
A list of workers most likely to use all of their leave:
France 89 percent
Argentina 80 percent
Hungary 78 percent
Britain 77 percent
Spain 77 percent
Saudi Arabia 76 percent
Germany 75 percent
Belgium 74 percent
Turkey 74 percent
Indonesia 70 percent
Mexico 67 percent
Russia 67 percent
Italy 66 percent
Poland 66 percent
China 65 percent
Sweden 63 percent
Brazil 59 percent
India 59 percent
Canada 58 percent
United States 57 percent
South Korea 53 percent
Australia 47 percent
South Africa 47 percent
Japan 33 percent
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