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More companies are experimenting with unlimited vacation policies. But is it really all a day at the beach?

Sanket Naik took a six-week trip last year to Thailand and India to see his family, but he didn’t worry about using up all his alloted vacation time.

Naik, senior director of cloud operations at Coupa, a tech startup, doesn’t have to accrue days off, and he didn’t negotiate a plum deal with his employer. The company just gives him and its staff of 100 all the vacation days they want.

“There’s the flexibility to travel or fulfill personal commitments without violating HR policies. We don’t have to count anymore,” he said about Coupa’s vacation policy, which was implemented in January.

Welcome to the world of unlimited vacation days. Coupa is one of a handful of companies, including TheLadders and Netflix, that have decided to offer the perk to employees. 

“This is an unusual benefit and not in the mainstream yet, but more companies seem to be looking at this as an option,” said Steven Miranda, managing director for the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University ILR School.

"It's not a gimmick," said workplace change management consultant Matthew Stegmeier.

“Organizations that have had success with unlimited vacation, such as Netflix and Red Frog Events, rely strongly on accountability,” he said. “Employees must make sure all their responsibilities are covered prior to leaving, which often means counting on a colleague to pick up the slack. As such, excessive vacation usage will be frowned upon as it grates on colleagues.”

Indeed, unlimited vacation doesn’t mean you can spend your life at the beach. Most employers who offer the option still require workers to get permission for the time off from their managers. And many workers who are offered the benefit end up working during those so-called vacation stints.

During his long vacation in Asia, Naik estimates he worked remotely for Coupa for about two to three weeks, using online tools such as Skype and mobile broadband to get his work done.

When asked whether the mixing of work and leisure time takes away from the goal of a vacation, which is to recharge, Naik said, “That’s the reality. Even if you did not have unlimited vacation, you still have to deal with managing your personal time with work time -- a challenge anyone that works in a modern work environment  needs to deal with.”

For Mark Verbeck, Coupa’s chief finance officer, the unlimited vacation policy was about freedom. “We want to empower our people to make the right decisions and be responsible without bogging us down with many pages of policies and rules.”

As for the potential to abuse the system, he said, “If you’re making sure people are getting the job done, then this policy can’t be abused.”

However, Cornell's Miranda said some employees may not take the time off they deserve.

Because there are no specified vacation days, some employees may not take time off, especially if they are worried about their job performance. "If the company has a culture where it's working people to the bone they’ve not eliminated an aspect of forcing people to take time off," he said.

TheLadders, with 200 employees, has had the unlimited vacation-time benefit for three years. The longest period of time anyone has taken off consecutively since it's been offered is about five weeks, said Angela Romano Kuo, vice president of human resources for the company.

“Our salaried employees aren’t given a bank of vacation days; they take what they need,” she said. “If there’s a long weekend or a longer vacation that they want to take, they simply need to get their manager’s approval for the specific time off. Managers will ask the requesting employee for a plan of what will happen to his or her work during the absence, and if they’re confident that the workload will be covered, the request is approved, which it almost always is.”

In the end, she said, “Our employees are responsible for the quality of their work, responsible for the hours they work, so they should also be responsible for the amount of vacation time they use.” 

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It’s no secret that many employees dread performance reviews. What is surprising, however, is that the very people who help promote them in companies dislike them too.

Nearly half of human resources managers don’t think annual performance reviews are accurate appraisals of employee performance, according to a recently released survey by the Society of Human Resource Management and Globoforce, an employee recognition company. 

The poll found that 45 percent of HR leaders thought reviews weren’t good gauges of a worker’s performance, compared to 39 percent last year. The increase points to “a more heightened concern from HR leaders about the shortfalls of traditional performance management,” said Globoforce CEO Eric Mosley. The email survey, taken from December 2011 through January 2012, polled 770 HR professionals who work for companies with 500 or more employees.

“Annual performance reviews continue to be the lightning rod for what’s wrong with traditional performance management,” he added.

The benefits versus the pitfalls of such reviews are part of an ongoing debate in American corporations. But there is no real movement to reassess this often-flawed management tool because it’s been around for years and is so ingrained in the workplace.

Samuel Culbert, author of “Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters,” is calling for the demise of performance reviews.

Culbert, a management professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, is against performance reviews because they can be demoralizing to workers, are not accurate or objective, and they use meaningless metrics.

“If it were God giving me a review that would be fair. But anyone short of God, I don’t think so,” he quipped.

When asked why employers keep administering reviews even though the recent data shows many HR managers aren’t on board, he had a list of reasons.

“Even though they hate getting and giving reviews and know they are bogus, they are comfortable with it,” he explained. “It’s the enemy they know.”

He also believes managers “love the sense of power they get from performance reviews. They like the fact that under the performance review, they are all-knowing. What they say is all that counts. Who doesn’t like that kind of power?”

And in the end, he maintained, it’s the human resources department that gets “much of its power from championing, running and having access to all the reviews. They have a lot of self-interest in preserving this ridiculous, morale-busting and results-damaging practice.”

Globoforce’s Mosley thinks it’s just a matter of habit for most employers, but he said some organizations are looking for alternatives, including “crowdsourcing feedback.”

It’s basically peer-to-peer reviews in real time, he explained. His company provides a web-based solution whereby employees and managers can nominate each other for rewards for a host of things they do at work, everything from helping out on a project to coming up with a new innovation. All that information is documented in a database, and managers can use the data to assess worker performance over a whole year, without forgetting the many contributions employees made, he said.

If crowdsourcing in the review process does catch on, employees will have more than just their boss’ opinion to worry about come review and raise season. It might be time to start playing some office politics.