Take as much holiday time as you want.

Part 5.- You are going to read an article about a company and its employees. For questions 31-36, choose the answer (A, B, C, or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

 

Take as much holiday time as you want.

 

Most organisations treat vacations in the same reluctant way that parents dole out candy to their children. They dispense a certain number of days each year – but once we’ve reached our allotment, no more sweets for us. One US company, however, has quietly pioneered an alternative approach. Netflix Inc. is streaming video and DVD-by-mail service that has amassed 15 million suscribers. At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they’d like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days. In other words, Netflix’s holiday policy is to have no policy at all.

 

Back in the old days – 2004 – Netflix treated holidays the old-fashioned way: it allowed everyone ‘n’ days a year. You either used them up or you tried to get paid for the time you didn’t consume. But eventually some employees recognised that this arrangement was at odds with how they really did their jobs. After all, they were responding to emails at weekends, they were solving problems online at home at night. And, every so often, they would take off an afternoon to ferry a child to the paeditatrician or to check in on an ageing parent. Since Netflx weren’t traccking how many hours people were logging each work day, these employees wondered, why would it track how many holidays were people taking each work year? 

Fair point, said management. As the company explains in its Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture: ‘We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days are worked. Just as we don’t have a 9-to-5 day policy, we don’t need a vacation policy.’ So the company scrapped the formal plan. Today, Netflix’s roughly 600 salaired employees can vacation any time they desire for as long as they want – provided that their managers know where they are and that their work is covered. This ultra-flexible, freedom-intensive approach to holiday time hasn’t exactly hurt the company. Launched in 1999, Netflix is now a highly successful and growing enterprise.

  

Perhaps more importantly, this non-policy yields broader lessons about the modern workplace. For instance, more companies are realising that autonomy isn’t the opposite of accountability – it’s the pathway to it. ‘Rules and policies, and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they’re unencumbered,’ says Steve Swasey, Netflix’s Vice President for corporate communication. ‘If you’re spending a lot of time accounting for the time you’re spending, that’s the time you’re not innovating.’

The same goes for expenses. Employees typically don’t need to get approval to spend money on entertainment, travel or gifts. Instead, the guidance is simpler: act in Netflix’s best interest. It sounds delightfully adult. And it is – in every regard. People who don’t produce are shown the door. ‘Adequate performance,’ the company says, ‘gets a generous severance package.’

 

The idea is that freedom and responsibility, long considered incompatible, actually go together quite well. What’s more, Netflix’s holiday policy reveals the limits of relying on time in managing the modern workforce. In an era when people were turning screws on an assembly line or processing paper in an office, the connection between input and output was right. The more time you spent on a task, the more you produced. But in much white-collar work today, where one good idea can mean orders of magnitude more valuable than a dozen mediocre notes, the link between the time you spend and the results you produce is murkier. Results are what matter. How you got here, or how long it took, is less relevant.

 

Finally, the Netflix technique demonstrates how the starting premises of workplace arrangements can shape behaviour. In his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York University scholar Clay Shirky argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we’re trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren’t watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.

31.- In the first paragraph, the writer emphasises…

A) how popular Netflix’s holiday policy is.

B) how unusual the situation at Netflix is.

C) how important holidays are to employees.

D) how hard it can be to change a holiday policy.

 

32.- Employees at Netflix pointed out that the company’s holiday policy…

A) gave them less time off than they deserved.

B) was fairer for some employees than for others.

C) was not logical in the circumstances.

D) did not reflect the way their jobs had changed.

 

33.- The management of Netflix came to the conclusion that…

A) a happy workforce was the key to future success and growth.

B) employees would be willing to do some work during their holidays.

C) they should introduce both flexible working hours and flexible holidays.

D) employees’ achievements were the company’s top priority.

34.- Steve Swasey express the view that company policies often…

A) prevent employees from being as effective as they could be.

B) result in employees being given the wrong roles.

C) cause confusion among employees because they are so complex.

D) assures that only certain employees can make decision for themselves.

 

35.- The writer says that one way In which the situation at Neflix is ‘adult’ is that…

A) competition among employees is fierce.

B) managers’ expectations of employees are very high.

C) expenses allowed for employees are kept to a minimum.

D) employees are given a lot of help to improve their performance.

  

36.- In the writer’s opinion, Netflix’s approach addresses the modern issue of…

A) employees wanting more responsibility than in the past.

B) wasted time being more damaging than in the past.

C) good ideas taking longer to produce than mediocre ones.

D) outcomes being more important than methods.