Just as business follows the seasons it follows that team members who are part of the business also have a rhythm. This is called this your personal rhythm. I’m sure each of you can identify certain times in the day when you are most productive. If you’re like me you might be a morning person. I do my best work first thing in the morning – that is when I’m most creative. My low point is usually around lunchtime and then I tend to get a burst of energy in the evening.
Joined Up Business Leaders appreciate that each team member has their own rhythm and so allow flexible working hours. This means that if you are a morning person you can come in early and leave early or if you are more of an evening person you simply don’t come into work until lunchtime and then you work later into the evening.
Operating a flexible work schedule like this means that there must be trust between all parties that the work will get completed. Also, good communication is required by team members to ensure that there is always sufficient coverage within the team to meet the customers’ needs. And, with business becoming more global than ever, there is a distinct business competitive advantage to having office coverage for more than just the traditional work hours, as you can then more easily service the demands of clients across borders.
In addition to the personal rhythm to your day, there is also a personal rhythm to the year. Just like nature goes through the seasons, your own body passes through the seasons – having times when your energy level is high and times when you energy level is low.
Vacations are designed to help team members unplug and rest and recuperate. They are the equivalent of the winter season on the farm. They are required so that team members can come back with more energy and focus. Yet according to a March 2012 survey of 952 employees for the job and career site Glassdoor, some 15% of U.S. employees who are entitled to paid vacation time haven’t used any of it in the past year.
Ignoring vacations is a deadly short-term tactic, harming long-term business health.A division of Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) lost 80% of its revenue, and employees, as burn-out drove people away. Unused vacation days is a simple metric of a company culture that values short-term benefits over long-term performance, and a culture that supports fear over results.
Recently, Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group, instigated a “non-policy” for paid time off. This decision means that all of Virgin’s team members in the company’s main offices in the U.S. and the U.K. now have open-ended access to vacation time. Branson got the idea from Netflix, another early adopter of the vacation non-policy, along with several other tech firms like Zynga, Groupon, Evernote, VMware, Eventbrite, and HubSpot.
Here are three reasons why team members actually get more done when they have open-ended access to vacation time:
- It makes team members less anxious if they have to take time off for family reasons
- It implies trust which breeds responsibility
- It makes people happier and want to work harder
I’d love to hear what policies there are in place at your workplace regarding vacation policy. As always feel free to email me or leave your comments on the facebook page.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
