Companies in Silicon Valley offer their employees no less than an unlimited amount of paid vacations! In Montreal, Gsoft, a company in information technology, has also taken up the challenge of introducing this sought-out concept to its employees. And it seems to be working great.
A matter of common sense
“I don’t like the terminology behind unlimited vacations,” immediately warns Simon De Baene, a Gsoft founder. “Our employees won’t say ‘Life is beautiful, so I do what I want.’ Rather, they’ll think along the lines of ‘I'm performing well and am responsible enough to know what I am doing to deserve a long vacation’.”
And he is not wrong. In reality, what the Americans call the no holiday policy is mainly a model where the employer delegates the responsibility of balancing life and work to the employee.
Better organization
In addition to willingly empowering their employees, “we realized that managing vacations was taking up too much time for the small business that we are,” says De Baene.
Previously, employees operated under the banked holiday schedule, traditionally used in most company. Once an employee had worked the required 37.5 hours per week, overtime was accumulated in this holiday time bank. “But it was anti-productive and unfair,” says De Baene. “This system encouraged employees to accumulate overtime and penalized those who did the same job in 37 hours.”
Today, employees, on average 28 years old, all have a fixed annual salary; they can leave when they want, as long as their absence does not interfere with their work or their relationship with customers.
Outcome?
One year after this policy took hold, De Baene is satisfied. “It doesn’t change that much when you think about it. It is not everyone who has either the time or the means to travel for months on end!”
As in any experimental phase, the young entrepreneur recognizes there are still cases of “abuse” to be dealt with here and there, but these are usually resolved quickly and with ease.
“The key lies in the recruitment process,” he states. “It takes a dedicated and passionate team with an interest in the organization. It wouldn’t work if employees were individualists.”
Simon admits that this unusual vacation policy works well because their particular field of activity does not require for a specific schedule. It seems more complicated, if not impossible, to generalize the operation to other less creative sectors, as in the case of employees working in factories, for example.
Still, to “empower our employees is definitely the best thing we ever did at Gsoft!”
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