There are companies where people ignore trash on the floor in the office, leaving it for someone else to pick it up, and there are companies where people in the office lean down to pick up the trash they see, as they would at home. We try hard to be the latter, a company where everyone feels a sense of responsibility to do the right thing to help the company at every juncture.

Picking up the trash is the metaphor for taking care of problems, small and large, and never thinking “that’s not my job.” We don’t have rules about picking up the real (or metaphoric) trash. We try to create a sense of ownership so that this behavior comes naturally.

Our goal is to inspire people more than manage them. We trust our teams to do what they think is best for SimplePlan — giving them lots of freedom, power, and information in support of their decisions. In turn, this generates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline that drives us to do great work that benefits the company.

We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference. So we foster freedom and empowerment wherever we can.

One instance of this is our vacation policy.

Our vacation policy is “take a vacation.” We don’t have any concrete rules around it. Of course, with freedom comes responsibility too. Since you’re free to take leaves, you’re also solely responsible for your role in the project. Partaking too much in the freedom and too little on the responsibilities will just mean we’re not the best fit. We trust our team members to always be mindful of both the positive and negative impacts of vacation time and to make use of this freedom reasonably and with responsibility.