Chris Grams

definitely agree, the culture has to be right for this sort of thing to work well. in the hands of the wrong manager, a no-vacations policy becomes a huge issue for the workers themselves, as you've pointed out.

if an org doesn't have the right culture to support a true no vacations policy/non-policy, I think your idea might be exactly the one to implement... *minimum* required vacation days. That'd protect the workers, but still provide some of the autonomy that might help employee engagement.

In my view, company size has a huge bearing on how easy it is to successfully implement this sort of policy (or non-policy, or whatever:).

Company age may be even more important. Companies that have been around a long time typically have entrenched cultures where changes like these are hard to make. In a younger company like Netflix (or Red Hat or New Kind for that matter) it is often much easier (but still has plenty of challenges).

The right way to think about it might be:

Start with the idea that we want to have no policies or almost no policies, then ask yourself which places do we absolutely *have* to create a policy for risk/legal/other reasons. And we only create policies there.

So we default to having no policies rather than having policies. Pretty different strategy than most companies use today, I would think.

I would point out that Netflix is a company with a market cap of around $7 billion and almost 2000 employees. So my guess is they have seen, and figured out ways to address, problems like the one you mentioned.