Sir Richard Branson, founder and owner of the British branded Virgin Group, doesn’t think much of American flextime policies. He calls the amount of holidays “horrendous,” while the stingy vacation time bars employees from spending the quality time with their families and children that they need to reenergize.
Sir Richard’s comments came at the 2011 SHRM Annual Conference and Exhibition, which took place from June 26-29, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Branson says that in the U.S, companies seem to believe that employees should work for them full-time or not at all. But many employees would love to have a job where they can job share, work part-time, or take 6 months of leave. Employees are too scared to ask, he says.
With great HR you can build a culture that people want to join. But how do you accomplish that? You get every detail right, he says. Then your staffers are smiling and cheerful and that makes your customers smiling. It’s self-evolving.
He points to the 300 applicants for each open position at his Virgin companies, a testament to the company’s popular work environment.
Some people wonder how Branson can keep going into new businesses and succeed. Branson attributes this to getting the right people to run the new company, and then not second-guessing them. He does admit, however, that all his ventures have not been so successful. For example, he says, when he first started a cola company, his goal was to be the number one cola company in the United States. That company did reach number one…but in Bangladesh.
Still, Branson encourages leadership that dwells not on shortcomings, but on what the company is capable of doing. A bad CEO can destroy the spirit of the company incredibly quickly, Branson says. He looks for leaders who know how to praise, inspire, get out and listen, and then act on the feedback they get.
Every company needs to be a force for good, Branson says. Yes, you have to make money, and yes, you have to please shareholders. But, he says, there are large problems in the world, and you can’t leave the job of solving them to the governments—governments just don’t have the entrepreneurial experience to creatively deal with the problems.