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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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DST and daylight savings were trending Monday on Twitter, and the theme of many of the tweets had to do with workers’ difficulties adjusting to the time switcheroo.

“Ugh. It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again. Curse you, DST!” tweeted @woyce, a sentiment that summed up emotion about the day.

Many employees are feeling out of sorts and tired because the clocks have sprung ahead an hour, and that’s going to impact productivity; as witnessed by the plethora of workers spending time tweeting about their hatred of DST instead of working.

Making matters worse is the commencement of office pools this week for March Madness, the NCAA Men’s division basketball championship, that is also expected to be an employee time sink.

It’s the perfect storm of non-productivity.

A recent study by Penn State released found that daylight savings leads to more workers slacking off.

The time switch results in a loss of sleep and an uptick in web surfing, maintained D. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. Ferris, along with other researchers, looked at six years of Google data and found that tired employees are more apt to make bad decisions.

“Using existing data that shows that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers said that the lost sleep due to the time change -- an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night -- makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock,” according to a Penn State report on the research.

March Madness will likely contribute to the problem. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., predicted the basketball fever could attract more than 2.5 million visitors on the web per day, and each spending 90 minutes watching the games.

While John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, said the slacking off wouldn’t bring the economy down, he did estimate it could cost employers about $175 million in the first two full days of the basketball tournament.

“Monday could be particularly dreadful on the productivity front,” he noted.

Beyond March Madness and DST, there may be a general falling off of worker efficiency going on the United States.

A Wall Street Journal story Monday reported that Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon has found the productivity spike in 2009  after mass layoffs that made employees fearful of losing their jobs has fallen off. He said there were “clear signs everywhere” that productivity has hit the skids.

So maybe, March Madness and DST are just great excuses to sit back and kick up our heels even more.