Boss Offers Employees £40k Salary With Unlimited Holiday And Sick Leave

Do you like your job? No, you say... What if they introduced 'Funky Fridays' when everyone gets to wear Hawaiian shirts? Still no, eh?

What about if they gave you £40k a year plus unlimited holiday and sick leave? Yeah, that's better.

Dean Hall's journey to becoming the boss of dreams started out as a means of standing out from the competition.

As the chief executive of game development firm Rocketwerkz, he knew when he founded the company in 2015 he would need to attract the best talent away from bigger studios if he wanted the business to be a success.

So, what better way to attract the best employees than by offering good pay? That's right, good pay and unlimited holidays.

Instagram/Dean Hall

Explaining his rationale to Stuff, he said: "You can have 30 people working on $20 million or $30m projects so you're putting a lot of trust in them already. If you are trusting them with big projects and large amounts of money, why can't you trust them to manage their time as well? That's the point we started with.

"You come in on December 23 and there's someone sitting at their desk and you say why are you here, why aren't you with your family, and they say they're saving leave up for the school holidays so they can take kids to Fiji. That's dumb.

"From our perspective, we just don't want people worrying up about saving time off. If you want to take a block off and go off to Thailand to find yourself or something, you talk about that with your team."

Instagram/Dean Hall

The New Zealand-based business now has offices in Auckland and Dunedin, though Dean has since refined his unlimited leave policy after it didn't quite go as planned with some junior recruits.

He said: "For many it was their first real job and it went one of two ways. For some it worked fine but others needed structure, to be told the hours they needed to be at work.

"It can take one or two years before they start making value for the company and they need to get there by being at work and hearing what's happening."

But these young p**s-takers didn't derail the gravy train completely, instead, a tiered system is in place. The bottom tier is the same structured system endured the world over, the second entitles employees to unlimited sick leave, and third tier staff still enjoy unlimited leave in all forms.

Hall also allows staff a share of game profits and thinks other companies may want to consider assessing how they allocate leave.

He said: "I don't think you can judge someone's work output by the amount of leave they are taking. Someone who takes a lot of leave could be getting the same amount of work done as someone who's not."

Topics: Awesome, Daily Ladness, Interesting

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey