Global Breaking News - Monday, December 23, 2024

Unlimited Vacation for All?
It’s a small but growing trend in the United States, as companies like Netflix stop tracking their employees’ days off. Is this a sustainable model, or are rules and regulations still important to protect both workers and employers?
* unlimited = 무제한의/ growing trend = 증가하는 추세(경향)/ sustainable = 지속 가능한

 고용인과 고용주 모두를 보호하기 위해 규례는 여전히 중요한가요?

1. Time Cards Are Passé
We optimize for innovative results instead of inflexible rules, and we believe doing so gives the employees the autonomy to be awesome.

2. Employers Should Set Boundaries
Companies must establish guidelines on what it means to be “on vacation" while also offering retreats, classes and nature programs.

3. Protect Workers With Family Leave
Adopting paid family leave in the United States would go a long way toward helping the modern work force reconcile work and family obligations.

4. Freedom Is Its Own Currency
If you employ highly engaged workers, your biggest problem will probably be burnout as they put too much time into their jobs. Flexibility is smart compensation.

5. Paid Sick Days Should Be the Priority
The real danger to productivity in the workplace is the fact that over 44 million American workers have a tough time taking a single sick day without losing their job.

Sample Essay

Freedom Is Its Own Currency

Many of today’s work policies are holdovers from a bygone era. They came about when the workplace was dominated by hourly employees who clocked in at 9 a.m. and out at 5 p.m., and answered to a rigid managerial hierarchy.

Today, however, organizations are flatter, more matrixed and more global. Many are also dominated by knowledge workers who don’t punch the clock; they work around the clock.

Time is money. In the 1980s, when I ran a nonprofit research outfit, and requests began to flood our office, I replaced part-time grad students with full-time employees. I quickly realized that I could not compete with other employers based on salary. But I could offer an alternative perk: freedom.

I stopped worrying about face time in the office and instead focused on the quality of the research. I hired highly skilled people who were engaged and passionate for the work and then gave them the freedom to do what they loved. If they needed time off, they took it.

As we grew over the next couple of decades we kept the same philosophy and experienced nearly zero turnover, even though these highly skilled employees were being offered more than double the pay from other organizations. Yes, we had a couple of instances in which people abused the policy, and during the dot-com explosion in the '90s we lost our I.T. person for what I am told was a huge increase in pay. So it is not perfect.

That said, if you have knowledge workers who are highly engaged, your biggest problem will probably be their burnout from putting too much time into their jobs -- not their absence because they're taking too much time away.