Vacation time, all the time

SAM RATHE
OPINION EDITOR
@samuel_vaun

The billionaire businessman Richard Branson recently decided to make some changes to his employees’ vacation policies by giving them an unlimited amount.

Yep, that is correct.

All of Branson’s 50,000 employees around the world at Virgin Group now have the ability to take a “holiday,” as he calls it, whenever they so choose.

This is an interesting test Branson is conducting here.

The first concern on everyone’s minds, aside from jealousy, is that the employees will take advantage of the new policy.

But this privilege is not something Branson’s employees are going to throw back in his face, and he feels the same.

It could be that people will be worried about abusing this freedom and end up taking less time off.

The main reason he is doing this is to allow people more freedom to work from their homes.

When asked about the new policy during an interview, Branson had the utmost confidence in his workers’ ability to finish whatever job they were hired to do.

“If they find it fascinating, interesting and they are treated like human beings, they will get their work done,” Branson said.

Branson is right. If someone wants to go work at home so they spend more time with their kids, then they can.

They just have to do their work, and they will. For one, they know they have to, but also their boss was nice enough to trust them to do it outside of the office.

Additionally, this is still a job, so no matter how much vacation time Branson’s employees take, they will still be expected to produce certain things.

Maybe someone gets a bunch of work done early in the week and decides the rest of the weekend they want to work at home and spend time with their kids.

“How can you find time to get to know your children when you are working with the very little holiday time they have in the States,” Branson said.

People have their careers on the line here, and you do not want to mess up when you work somewhere that lets you vacation whenever you want.

I am very interested in how this is going to play out. Depending on whether or not people are responsible with this new policy, other companies might start to follow suit.

Branson is apparently someone who likes to work from home often, and when most of the work is probably done on a computer anyway, why not let people choose what environment best suits them?