Imagine working for an employer who treated you like a grown-up and let you take as much holiday as you liked. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

This is the deal Sir Richard Branson is extending to his private staff, and almost everyone has judged it very lovely indeed. Last week, he wrote a blog post extolling his own smart move and in the comments below he was deemed to be showing the way to a better future. Sir Richard isn’t the first to introduce this policy – for years Netflix has been declining to monitor how much time its people take off – but he is the first to see how much good publicity can come from it.

“It is left to the employee alone to decide if and when he or she feels like taking a few hours, a day, a week or a month off,” he explained, his words accompanied by a photo of him lolling in a hammock, smartphone in hand, the Caribbean Sea lapping beneath him, and the fronds of a palm tree almost touching the locks of his hair.