Richard Branson: private staff can take as much holiday as they like

Sir Richard Branson is to allow staff managing his personal fortune to take as much holiday as they like – no questions asked.

Branson, 64, worth £3bn according to Forbes magazine, said other companies should follow his lead and would benefit from increased productivity if they followed suit.

He said he had introduced the new “non-policy” on holidays for 170 staff in his family offices in the UK and US with immediate effect. Employees can take leave from their jobs when they like without seeking permission, as long as the timing of their break will not have a detrimental impact on the business. Staff benefiting from the new scheme include those working in Branson’s family office, his investment team, marketing, brand and PR teams and the Virgin Unite foundation, but the new rules do not apply to thousands of others working for Virgin companies.

Branson, who started his first Virgin business when he dropped out of school at 16, said he would encourage all Virgin companies in which he holds a stake to follow suit. He said in a blog on Virgin’s website: “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 100% 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!”

Branson said he got the idea when his daughter Holly forwarded him an article about online firm Netflix, which has taken a similar approach.

In the blog, which is an extract from Branson’s new book The Virgin Way, he said Netflix’s success was partly down to its “downright courageous initiative” in throwing away the book “on something very near and dear to the hearts of most workers around the world: their annual vacation day entitlement”.

The Institute of Directors, which represents employers, said it was considering surveying members for their reactions to Branson’s new policy. “Where Branson goes, people will follow,” Christian May, the IoD’s head of campaigns said. “It fits with how work is changing, the old notion of 9am-5pm with three weeks off is increasingly old fashioned. We don’t expect the roll out of libertarian structures across workplaces, but it should be watched with interest.”

But he warned that it would be difficult for many businesses to function properly “if you dont know which staff you have in tomorrow, and they all decided to take the day off”.

More flexible working is already popular at Silicon Valley technology companies. Google allows employees to spend 20% of their working time on projects not directly related to their normal job. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have said the policy led to some of the company’s “most significant advances”. Gmail, Google Transit, Google Talk and Google News are all said to have been generated by Google engineers during so-called “20% time”.

In a recent interview, Page said: “If you really think about the things you need to make yourself happy – housing, security, opportunity for your kids ... it’s not that hard for us to provide those things.

“The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples’ needs is not true.”