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Branson's fine print on unlimited leave for staff

 

We should be open to the idea of self-managed holidays, but it won’t work in a climate of anxiety

• 
• • David Boyle
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 September 2014 18.20 BST

'If you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would you ever dare to pack your bags, let alone head off on holiday?' Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features

Half Brazilian, half Austrian, Ricardo Semler runs one of the strangest companies in the world – though perhaps “runs” is the wrong verb. He recently held a party to celebrate 10 years of not making any decisions.

Semco is a Brazilian engineering conglomerate, and over the past two decades Semler has led a dramatic series of experiments to find ways of accessing the enthusiasm of his staff.

They now manage the company themselves. They work in teams without job titles. Like Richard Branson’s much-heralded experiment announced earlier this week, they choose their own holidays and their own hours. However, although Semco is on the syllabus of most of the world’s business schools, few business graduates have copied it. Quite the reverse: iron control by IT system seems to be the trend.

But the salaries, holidays and hours Semco’s employees choose are transparent, and therein lies the power. It isn’t so much the power of self-control but the power of peer control. The most imaginative companies have realised the same thing in recent years: that group pressure may be a good deal more effective at controlling their workforce than an IT system, powered by a top-heavy, heavy-handed human resources department.

It is the same revelation that hit Muhammed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. He realised that peer pressure by borrowers on each other was far more effective at avoiding bad debts than the traditional command-and-not-quite-control.

Branson is only the most recent business leader to grasp this – he got the idea from Netflix – and the power of small teams answerable to each other has done wonders for productivity in companies such as General Electric and WL Gore.

But before we take Branson’s approach at face value, there are a few things we need to think about. Peer control can be pretty ferocious. It can lead people to extremes. Even some of the most disillusioned first world war soldiers, such as Siegfried Sassoon, went back to the trenches willingly – strove to do so, in fact – so as not to let their colleagues down.

I’m self-employed. I have complete control of my holiday entitlement and I still don’t take it. It may be that self-managing teams can also be kinder and more understanding, once you have earned their trust. Given the choice between working in an Amazon warehouse, timed when I go to the loo, and in a self-managed team choosing my own holiday schedule, I know which one I would prefer. But that isn’t to say it would always be comfortable or that there wouldn’t be places where people suffered the consequences of coercive, bullying, group dynamics.

There are two other peculiarities about Branson’s thoughts on the subject, which are taken from his new book The Virgin Way. One is that it applies only to his head office staff in the US and UK – just 170 people. Virgin doesn’t do much except invest and rent out its name to other companies. Behind this apparent empire is a vast database and linked call centres, but not much else. Branson’s company owns just half of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains, and only around a tenth of Virgin Media, a subsidiary of a different company entirely.

He says he will be encouraging them all to use the same idea if it is successful. But the real test is whether similar arrangements are offered to frontline staff bearing his logo, which he barely has the power to do.

The other peculiarity is that Branson seems to be trying to have it both ways. He reveals himself to be not quite the radical, bearded, liberal-minded guy he might occasionally look like.

He rather gives the game away on the company blog when he “assumes” that his staff will only take holidays “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!” This convoluted sentence faces all ways at once. It seems to be saying you can manage your own holiday entitlement – if you dare.

The self-managed holiday idea is a radical experiment and needs testing out. But in Branson’s formulation, it is doomed from the start: if you had to be 100% certain that you were up to date on everything, would ever take a long weekend, let alone head off on holiday?

It is a sentence that seems to emerge from a nervous manager in a bit of a muddle. He is opening the doors of the cage but not quite daring to put down the whip.

Kanwal Bharti's Facebook Like - Nothing here to arrest

The Hindu

 

Mixed signals emanating from the Supreme Court have done little to strengthen efforts to protect free speech online. Last week, the court rightly hauled up the Uttar Pradesh government over its arrest of scholar and writer Kanwal Bharti for his Facebook post criticising the suspension of IAS officer Durga Shakti Nagpal. The same day, however, the SC refused to stay the implementation of the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which require websites to take down objectionable material posted by third-party users within 36 hours of being notified of the need to do so. Although the two incidents which drew the Court’s attention are separate, they point to a larger, systemic problem: the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes offensive online content is the executive. In practice, that means touchy politicians and trigger-happy policemen. Given that the imposition of penal laws falls within the domain of States, it was ill-advised for the Supreme Court to have left the IT Act’s implementation to them without framing clear guidelines. States have seized on this legal vacuum to use the Indian Penal Code and the IT Act to clamp down on dissent.

Kanwal Bharti’s case highlights this problem. The policemen who arrested him were acting on a criminal complaint filed by a close aide of Samajwadi Party (SP) leader and local MLA Azam Khan. Thanks to a simple Facebook post, Mr. Bharti was charged under Sections 153 and 295A of the IPC — the latter, like Section 66A of the IT Act, is a cognizable offence that requires no warrant — for “wanton provocation with intent to cause riots” and insulting religious sentiments. As if these ludicrous charges were not enough, the SP has egged on Muslim clerics in the area to demand the writer be booked under the National Security Act. The Supreme Court’s intervention comes not a moment too soon — but the judiciary needs to realise that Mr. Bharti’s harassment was made possible thanks to the discretion governments exercise in regulating cyberspace. That the court is inclined to view the IT intermediary rules favourably does not bode well for social media sites, on whom the United Progressive Alliance government has launched an assault for their hosting of politically sensitive content. The unfortunate fact remains that the implementation of penal provisions has not been tweaked to reflect the constitutional rights of “netizens” in India. The Supreme Court has a chance to set this record straight: in its verdict on S. 66A, expected later this year, it should strike down the provision while setting a higher bar for invoking penal provisions in the IPC and other statutes against internet content.

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