Bournemouth based vfx house Outpost has introduced Life Time, an uncapped holiday policy for all employees.
All of the company’s employees will no longer have an upper limit to their annual leave.
The current system for booking holiday in advance and with an awareness of deadlines remains in order to ensure that teams aren’t overburdened, but there is no longer an upper limit to holiday allocation.
Life Time runs alongside Outpost’s overtime policy, in which it pays team members for anti-social working hours beyond 10pm and for any and all hours worked outside of normal working days.
"Within Outpost our strongest attribute is our culture, and for that to be effective the focus has to be on people,” said Leanne Loughran, Talent Manager. “Entrusting freedom around holiday and taking away a rigid allowance only has positive effects internally and fundamentally feeds back into our culture.
"As a collective of talented professionals, the drive is a pure passion and invested interest in what the day job means. What a fantastic way we to be able to reciprocate that by putting trust in our team.
"I believe that by removing the lid on holiday allowance we promote a more focused work ethic, encourage unbridled creative vision and complete mindfulness of the team as a whole."
Outpost Founder and CEO, Duncan McWilliam, said: “At Outpost, we endeavour to make the working life of all of our artists better.
“By opting to remove the restrictions of a capped holiday policy, we are relieving pressure and giving our artists more control over their work/life balance, so that they feel that they can take time off if they need to.”
“No project is immune to last-minute tweaks and changes,” continued McWilliam, “and on the rare occasion that time added drifts into anti-social working hours it’s important that we acknowledge the incredible effort put in by our team.”
This development follows a period of inward investment from Outpost that has seen the facility up its capacity from 80 seats to 150 at its Bournemouth studio.
The studio delivered approximately 1,800 visual effects shots in 2018 across projects that included Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, 22 July, Widows and LEGO’s holiday advertising campaign.
Jon Creamer
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