I mentioned in my last post about my wife's frequent visits to Starbucks and my infatuation with how their stores live their value proposition. The other day she was purchasing her usual and the Barista handed her this note:
Can you imagine writing a note like this to your clients when you are moving on to a new job or location? Within our company our relationship managers will often contact their clients' when moving on, but at Starbucks are talking about a daily purchase of less then $5. Imagine the number of regular customers that he wrote this card to, remembering them by what they purchased, truly an incredible customer experience. Starbucks truly has built a differentiated client and employee experience.
There is no logical way to seaque into the topic I want to discuss today, other then the connection of relaxing at Starbucks.
I want to talk about the importance of regeneration, specifically the importance in taking a break from your everyday routines. We recently held a workshop with our sales people, taking all of them each out of their market for a full day. While I do know that the team was captivated by the speakers, of which I was one :), the real value came from sharing ideas and looking at their business from outside of the walls that usually define our world.
I would like to extend this thought to the importance of taking a break from work, specifically vacations. The world of defining vacation time is rapidly changing in both large and small organizations. Within our company we have an ever increasing number of people who are either mobile workers or primarily work from home. The use of mobile computers and Blackberry's continues to blur the lines between personal time and work time. Due to this companies need to change some of their work/vacation definitions. Look at a company like Netflix who define the work environment by the tasks that need to be accomplished rather then when and where it is done. As a result, Netflix has designed a new holiday policy - they do not have one. Salaried staff decide how many days off they need each year, the thought is that they do not keep track of when they respond to e-mails on the weekend or the extra time they work so why should they keep track of their time off? How would your attitude towards work change if you were given control over the number of days off you took each year? Remember we still have a retail operation to run and the client impact must be taken into consideration, but anything is possible with colloboration. Netflix is an interesting company with a unique management philosophy not all of which I agree with, however these types of policies certainly prompt thought and discussion. The attached presentation has made the rounds of the internet over the past while and outlines some of their thoughts. This is a long presentation, I would suggest skipping ahead and looking at slides 65 - 71 for the Netflix vacation policy:
I started this post discussing the need for personal renewal and how we should accomplish this. In many professions, such as education, the sabbatical is often a central part of personal development. While very few people possess the personal resources to take a full year off of work (my wife has actually forbid me to stay away from work for 365 straight days, but we can discuss that later), however there are still some things we can learn from a sabatical. All time away from work should be viewed as a time to recharge. We work harder and longer hours then previous generations with multiple demands on our time along with 24/7 communication. Our need to constantly be plugged in does not allow us time to simply think. A vacation or day off should not be consumed with thoughts of work, while work does invade our personal lives it should not consume them. How many times have you heard one of your peers say that they did not start enjoying their time off until the second week when they finally forgot about work. Start treating your time off as a sabattical, still accomplishing something, but make it an adventure. I was introduced to Stefan Sagmiester when a friend mentioned a TED video he had seen. Stefan talks about how he feels that a sabattical is important enough for him that he is willing to extend his expected retirement date so that he can take a year off every few years. When you have a chance, please have a look at this video. Is this something we should each be considering as part of our individual career development?
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