It’s not just the crummy jobs. Even in workplaces where judgment used to count, people are treated like machines
Autonomy or automatons – the dividing line in the modern workplace.
Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA
Imagine being allowed to take as much paid holiday from work as you liked. All the time in the world, or at least as much as your guilty conscience will allow. A friend has just been offered this juicy-sounding perk by her company, and we mused over just how far it was reasonable to push it. A whole August off sounds tempting, but maybe it would be smarter to spin things out over a succession of long weekends. Or even to keep it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, deployed in case of burnout or rainy Mondays when you just can’t face getting out of bed.
Except none of that will happen, of course. My conscientious friend won’t take a day over what she took before, if that; and the same is true for most people where unlimited holiday has been pioneered (Netflix and Virgin were early adopters). If anything, people often end up taking less time off, not more. Nobody wants to be singled out as the office slacker, so people try to take roughly what everyone else in their team seems to be taking – only the average gets dragged down, by people hungry for promotion, or lacking anyone to cover for them, or otherwise unable to drag themselves away.
In other words, peer pressure does exactly the same job that strict holiday policies used to do, except this way everyone feels slightly better about it. Sometimes, just the knowledge that they could skive if they wanted is enough to stop people wanting to skive at all. It’s nice to feel trusted, treated like a grownup.
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