[eru]

Unlimited vacation should come with a mandatory minimum vacation taken per year.

Funny enough, of all places, banks have such rules. You have to take at least two weeks of leave as a single block. That was introduced after rogue traders hid losses from the beancounters by shuffling their positions around every day.

I don't think all banks introduced these measures to the same degree and at the same time. So there might be plenty of data around for some enterprising statistician to tease out the effect on productivity from these natural experiments. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment)

[toomanybeersies]

Can you elaborate on how mandatory holidays stopped rogue traders?

[PeterisP]

The point is to ensure that all tasks are periodically handed off to someone else - i.e., when you're off, the task doesn't wait for you to do it when you get back, a designated replacement has to do it.

It has the following benefits:

* if hiding something requires certain "adjustments" to periodical reports, then having someone else do it would often expose it - the particular rogue trader case, we was falsifying control documents, if someone else would do it a single time, then it would have been detected.

* if a particular customer or portfolio has problems that should have been escalated but haven't; having someone else handle them independently during your vacation would often expose it.

* if you suddenly need to replace someone, because they leave, die or get fired, you have a good understanding on what needs to be handed off, how to do it, and have some people who have done this before. It ensures, so to speak, that you don't have an absurdly low "bus-factor".

In addition, since it's not a one-off event but a policy, it acts as a preventive measure to do things in a manner that can be handed off, because they will have to be handed off, and a preventive measure for fraud because you have an expectation that you will get found out instead of knowing that you are the sole keeper of some information and can "adjust" it as needed.

[eru]

What PeterisP said, and http://www.marketplace.org/2011/12/15/business/easy-street/c...