Be More Productive. Take Time Off.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect</a><p>They tried increasing light. Result: increased productivity. They tried decreasing light. Result: increased productivity. Eventually they worked out that any change increased productivity. (reminds me of teleported Arthur Dent cautiously checking his body for injury, and encountering pain wherever he felt. Eventually he realized it was his finger that hurt)

I'm not sure if it's a real trend, but I do seem to be hearing more stories of companies worried about employees not taking enough vacation, whereas the traditional concern is the opposite. I'm not 100% sure of the motivation, either. Some could be what this suggests, that employees who take some time off are happier and more productive. Some could be trying to minimize actual burn-out (which is different from just lower productivity). Perhaps other reasons, though. One possibility is that if nobody in a group is taking time off, that may be a proxy for something else, possibly management problems (e.g. a particular group creating a culture of fear), so worth looking into as a kind of institutional debugging. And some could be recruiting, trying to project an image that not only do we give you N weeks of vacation on paper, but we <i>really</i> mean it and expect you to take it.

The concept is really easy to implement with smaller teams. But look at Google.<p>Their "20% time" policy has become 120% time.<p>Scaling these highly creative, productivity inducing policies simply doesn't scale when you reach a certain size. The teams are too large, the goals are too vague, and there's a vacuum of consistency/systematization necessary to keep predictable metrics flowing.<p>I love the idea for smaller, highly profitable per-employee companies, but the big guys, whether through their own ignorance or inability, can't effectively institute something like "take a month off to do whatever project you think is cool."

The funny thing is I think this is a great idea for employees and I'd encourage things like this even amongst my own (though it's just contractors for now!) But for <i>me</i>? I'd always choose to work longer and I love it. Maybe there are key differences between growth stage, finding-their-feet businesses and those comfortably bringing in 6/7 figures a month though ;-)

Insert obligatory "No one will tell me what to do! They're not the boss of me! I love working 15 hour days and why would they want to stop me!" comment, here.

It is good idea but it won't fit all companies. Specially larger companies with more work than the people of 37 Signals. I however think it is important for all companies to celebrate their successes. At SpaceX, Elon gave us a a week off after a successful lunch. This was two years ago. The employees came back refreshed. Celebrating successes is something all companies can do.

Taking time off kind of by definition increases your productivity per hour. I want to hear a case of time off actually increasing total output.

Europe has known this for many many years. A 35 hour work-week and several weeks of vacation time (e.g. in France and The Netherlands) not only creates more jobs, but also results in happier people and additional productivity.

This is essentially the luxury of a successful company. I think they take time off because they are successful. They are not successful because they take time off.

A follow-up post on why the article was in the NY Times: "Connecting the dots: How my opinion made it into the New York Times today" <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3234-connecting-the-dots-how-my-opinion-made-it-into-the-new-york-times-today" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3234-connecting-the-dots-how-...</a>

Here's a reference to a Mumbai(India)-based startup trying the same approach. <a href="http://erpnext.com/open-source-work-culture.html" rel="nofollow">http://erpnext.com/open-source-work-culture.html</a>

I will just note the irony of the NYT posting some 37 Signals propaganda on the same day as they posted "Skilled Work, Without the Worker" <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept...</a>

Radical concepts that sound really good. Unfortunately, productivity is very difficult to measure. Isn't it possible that productivity would have been higher if the 37signals team were working 5 days a week instead of 4? How does one measure this?