A few of these implementations failed spectacularly and publicly. Some companies, such as Richard Branson’s Virgin, reacted by adopting similar policies.
Just as we don’t have a 9am-5pm workday policy, we don’t need a vacation policy.” Instead, employees take as much or as few vacation days as they feel they need. The rationale, according to the slide deck, was: “We realized we should focus on what people get done, not on how many days they worked. Netflix’s leaders had decided to stop tracking how many vacation days its employees were taking. Or more specifically, a “no vacation policy” policy. Out of the 128 slides in the document, the one most people remember was about unlimited vacation. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called the deck the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley. The slide deck itself was viewed over 11 million times, and newspapers around the globe picked it up. When Netflix’s founder Reed Hastings published the company’s Reference Guide on our Freedom and Responsibility Culture on SlideShare it made an unexpectedly huge impact.
