Limits on the amount of holiday Virgin employees can take each year are being removed in the hope it will boost morale, creativity and productivity.
Group founder Sir Richard Branson believes that stripping away the company’s holiday policy for his personal staff and allowing them to take breaks when and as often as they wish will have long term benefits for his business.
Staff at Virgin will now be allowed to take time off work without prior warning but are expected to manage this so they stay up to date with all their work.
Sir Richard said the change had been introduced at Virgin’s UK and US parent companies and would be extended to its subsidiaries if it appears to be working well.
He was inspired after reading about a similar strategy introduced by the video streaming company Netflix, The Telegraph reported.
Writing on his Virgin blog, Sir Richard said: “The policy-that-isn’t permits all salaried staff to take off whenever they want for as long as they want.
“There is no need to ask for prior approval and neither the employees themselves nor their managers are asked or expected to keep track of their days away from the office.
“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, the assumption being that they are only going to do it when they feel a hundred per cent 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.”
The less rigid attitude to holidays has evolved due to the increasingly flexible working hours made possible by advances in technology.
Many managers can no longer accurately track how many hours their employees spend on their job due to the ease of remote working and this undermines the old fashioned system of tracking holiday time, Sir Richard explained.
He said the focus should be on how much people get done rather than how much time they spend on it.