Let’s play ‘Imagine if…’
Imagine if your job offered you unlimited annual leave. As much holiday as you could possibly handle.
Imagine if your boss let you manage yourself, set your own targets, gauge your own success.
Imagine if you worked full time but were only required in the office two days a week, and the others you could work from absolutely anywhere, including, but not limited to, the office.
If you work at Amantha Imber’s company, you don’t have to imagine – this is your working life.
Listen to Amantha talk about the absolutely best thing she ever did for herself as a working mother on the I Don’t Know How She Does It podcast:
Amantha founded a company called Inventium. It’s an innovation consultancy, which sounds like a made-up thing but is actually just the name for a firm who helps companies – some big ones, like Google, in Amantha’s case – think of new ways to do things.
The mother-of-one started her business with the same kind of staff contracts that we all have – one that says you’ll work a 38-hour week, and get four weeks leave per year. In reality, you probably work a lot more. Maybe you love your job. Maybe you don’t think you could get the work done to the standard you’d like to in that time. Maybe you’re overrun, or working on a big project. As Amantha says – you’ll go hard, put in all the overtime, but there won’t be any reward for you.
“There’s this huge discrepancy that we’re capping leave but we’re not capping hours. That sounds really unjust… At the same time, I’d seen a lot of these big tech companies like Linkedin and Netflix give unlimited leave and it made sense.”