With New Age Work Environments like These - Who Needs Holidays and Vacation Packages
That's about the first thing you have on your mind when you apply to a new position in a new company: what are the perks, and what kind of R&R can you hope for? Businesses like to fine-tune their vacation policies down to the last half day, if they can; and if you want to talk about maternity leave or sick leave, you might as well prepare to feel very very small about yourself. But there is a new company trend out there, started by a small social media Internet company called Social Strata. This company doesn't have a vacation policy; it doesn't have a work policy; their policy is that all their employees, all ten or so of them are to take as much paid vacation as they could possibly want. You couldn't find any perk and vacation packages that could rival that anywhere you have worked, now could you?
Now what could be the rationale to that? It's simple, actually. It is actually a philosophy thought up by the anthropologist Jim Collins, and it is all about a general culture in the world of self-control, self-restraint and self-discipline. This philosophy believes that people are not likely to put out their best unless they feel trusted. If you plan to go ahead and hire just about anyone with the right educational qualifications and work experience, this may not work; if you bring in trustworthiness and internal spirituality into the interview equation, this might just work out for you. In any other company or organization on earth, you'd find the most mindbendingly convoluted legal structure put in place to make sure that the human resources are able to be utilized and managed with mistrust, suspicion and fear. There are productivity measurements that formulate human productivity in such a way that they could be reduced to numbers, formulae and percentages. Of course you would be robbed blind if you took in people who weren't as evolved as this concept requires; people would just sign themselves up for three month long vacation packages, and promise themselves to work when the time was right.
But on the other hand, a workplace that is entirely built on trust and respect for your fellow employees and their work ethic, would make it very difficult for any one member to play the fool. A system of unlimited work or leave, often actually does energize people with such a strong sense of purpose, that extraordinary levels of commitment are seen to be made possible. People don't actually withdraw six months of pay, and disappear to sign up for three vacation packages to the Far East, back to back. This system might not even work at a mega-huge corporation where no one really knows one another. This whole philosophy is meant for the small office where everyone has to look the other in the eye every day. In places where a sense of community is less than possible, in places where there are 3000 employees all working on abstruse tasks that no one would want if they weren't forced, perhaps, the rule of fear would bring better results.
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