• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

DayZ creator’s studio Dean Hall offers staff unlimited holidays.

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

Rocketwerkz is responsible for the VR shooter Out of Ammo, and the space station building/management simulator Stationeers. Based in New Zealand, the studio offers its teams unlimited annual leave, and a NZ$80,000 yearly salary.

This is rare for a game development studios – and most businesses in general – but CEO Dean Hall has a fairly basic explanation for why his company offers these benefits.

“You can have 30 people working on $20 million or $30m project so you’re putting a lot of trust in them already,” Hall told Stuff.

“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.”

In fact, Rocketwerkz found that some employees would end up taking fewer holidays compared to before when they had restrictions, which got the company to instate a minimum of four weeks per year.



“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,” he added.

With that in mind, Hall recognises that unlimited holidays are not for everyone. Fresh graduates, for example, do not initially have this benefit as they need some structure early on before they can earn them.

According to the interview, Rocketwerkz has three tiers of employees. The most junior staff follow traditional work hours/leave rules, and the second tier enjoys unlimited sick leave, while those in the third get unlimited annual leave.
 

Krappadizzle

Gold Member
I was just reading an article about other companies that do this.

Apparently there's been a weird disconnect where some staffers will actually take less holiday leave because of these kinds of policies.

They'll feel bad about taking too much time off. I also read that people that have a limited amount of time off(example 20 days a year) feel they have ownership of that time off and are more likely to use it as opposed to not having ownership with unlimited so they don't quantify their time off.

I dunno, I'd love ANY time off. My job doesn't offer ANY vacation pay and they only recently started offering sick leave because the military base I work on requires it.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
There's gotta be a brap brap boomer comic about this.

"Please sit down. I wanted to inform you the company is now offering you unlimited holidays"
"Oh golly, just like the DayZ studio?"
"No, I mean you're fired".

2019-09-16-work-cartoon.jpg
 

PocoJoe

Banned
I was just reading an article about other companies that do this.

Apparently there's been a weird disconnect where some staffers will actually take less holiday leave because of these kinds of policies.

They'll feel bad about taking too much time off. I also read that people that have a limited amount of time off(example 20 days a year) feel they have ownership of that time off and are more likely to use it as opposed to not having ownership with unlimited so they don't quantify their time off.

I dunno, I'd love ANY time off. My job doesn't offer ANY vacation pay and they only recently started offering sick leave because the military base I work on requires it.

Vacations or lack of them at US sound so absurd.

Here at Finland we have something like 3-4 weeks of summer vacation/year for most jobs. Then paid sick days, paid weeks/months for female+male if they have a baby. Paid national holidays here and there.

At high school summer holidays are 3-4 months, and educuation is free.

Even as summer job worker(3months) I got 5 days of paid vacation.
 
Top Bottom