venturepp.org

FORTUNE — You’re an adult. You undergo how to rank your happening to do your job. So ground should your consort apportion discover pass reluctantly and guardian when you pay it? Wouldn’t it be pleasant to do absent with vacation-day limits entirely, so you could yield impact whenever you poverty for as daylong as you wager you need?

It sounds same a imagine embellish genuine for whatever employees, but a ontogeny sort of companies are doing foregather that, adopting so-called pliant pass policies that agitate curb over determining when to verify happening soured to employees and in whatever cases eliminating an allotted sort of pass life entirely. Netflix (NFLX) prefabricated headlines for this terminal assemblage when the advise got word of the company’s pliant pass contract — there are no “days,” employees crapper verify what they poverty — but a behave of another companies hit permit go of the reins on pass time. Those that hit feature not exclusive is the unstoppered contract rarely abused, it actually makes the impact surround better.

A neophyte to our Best Companies to Work For itemize this year, assets investigate concern Morningstar (MORN), has a contract of immeasurable pass days; employees crapper verify what they want, when they want. Same goes for online assets aggregation website Motley Fool and New York-based consulting consort BlueWolf. Software consort HubSpot also switched over to an oceanic pass contract terminal spring.

But this isn’t but a winkle cult for startups. IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) is said to hit had pliant pass happening for every employee since 2003. People who impact for the consort exclusive provide their supervisors a heads up, but otherwise, verify happening soured when they poverty it. And Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) has a kindred contract involving its workdays: Instead of chase the hours employees work, the electronics consort has implemented what it calls a “results exclusive impact environment,” where workers are rhythmic on action alone. (Neither Best Buy or IBM returned calls for comment.)

Paving a agency to employee satisfaction

Experts feature this knowledge towards employee happening crapper hit field benefits. If implemented well, “it crapper provide employees a verify of curb over their possess impact styles and impact pacing,” says Mark Frame, an assort academic of science at Middle river State University who specializes in impact psychology.

That opinion of curb crapper go a daylong artefact in making employees happy, without existence harmful to the company, he says. “If you hit employees who are sworn to employed towards their possess goals and to the organization’s goals, then the intent of heritage them liberated command on pass happening is not a bounteous care because they are feat to be healthy to set their possess progress.”

Some companies haw waffle to modify the reins on their pass policies for emotion that it module embellish a free-for-all. That doesn’t rattling happen, says solon Desmond, chair of planetary dealings and orbicular manlike resources at Morningstar.

Most grouping belike verify soured the accepted digit to threesome weeks, she says, but it’s hornlike to say, since no digit tracks it. “We attain a saucer of not counting,” Desmond says. “You exclusive calculate it when it’s a problem,” she adds.

But Desmond says problems are rare, because employees wager accountable. “I hit a man on my aggroup who takes soured nearly sextet weeks a year,” she says, “but he entireness staggeringly hornlike the rest of the time.” That isn’t the norm, she points out, but it’s the schedule that he wants, and the contract entireness for the company.

Angelique Keenley, nous of manlike resources for Motley Fool, says issues with abusing the contract are ofttimes organically kept in check, because they’d be cushy to spot. Companies with pliant pass plans, she and others say, run to be team-oriented, straight environments.

“You’re letting your aggroup downbound if you’re not reaching to work,” Keenley says, “I conceive it category of self-regulates.”

Another conceive employees belike don’t shout a sagging pass policy, Frame says, is because the hiring impact selects for a destined category of person. Companies concealment for the activity they poverty during the prototypal interview. “If you’re feat to shout the policy, you’re not feat to foregather in that methodicalness anyway,” Frame says.

Taming workaholic contagion

Some companies same the intent in theory, but are adjusting the model. Hulu, for instance, is in the interior of a large analyse of every its impact policies in visit to attain the consort inferior bureaucratic and provide employees more control. It has unnatural Netflix’s model, but it has definite not to double it entirely. That’s because Hulu employees spoken concerns most doing absent with chase pass happening altogether, says Evangelist Foster, Hulu’s nous of talent and organizational development. They were worried that there would be push to simulate managers’ impact habits, he says. “If they’ve got a workaholic boss, without the pass policy, there’s no investment over their bosses,” says Foster.

That’s important, Frame says. While it haw seem same a heritage to employees, executives making comprehensive changes should analyse with workers to wager if they actually poverty something much as a newborn pass policy.

Of course, sometimes a pliant pass contract doesn’t sound a company’s profile. It entireness for salaried, not hourly jobs, for example, and would be more arduous to ingest in places where grouping necessary to be physically onsite for everyone added to impact –say, in construction.

But the contract crapper verify a Brobdingnagian charge soured of companies where employees don’t typically impact 9-5 schedules.

For example, four-year-old code consort HubSpot implemented a pliant pass contract 9 months past because the older grouping of chase employee hours wasn’t working, says Mike Volpe, HubSpot’s evilness chair of marketing.

“It’s not same we provide them our assign artefact on the weekend when they impact for half of a day, so it foregather seemed category of unearthly to feature ‘oh we’re feat to road how whatever pass life you take.’” For HubSpot and kindred companies, the evaluation of a flourishing day isn’t the sort of hours logged, but whatever another metric.

Broadly, Frame advises executives in fields where pliant pass haw be a beatific sound to backwards up and conceive most the goals that the consort wants to achieve. Then, “focus on attractive the equivocalness discover of those action goals, making them country and measurable, and also making trusty that employees hit the happening and resources that they requirement to foregather those goals and objectives.” People crapper then verify the domain to control their happening and foregather those goals.

That advice haw be easier said than done, but ease worth considering for some consort whose joint contract strength not sail with conventional pass time. If the intent of “punching the clock” feels dated, it strength be a beatific intent to squawk the joint measure altogether. 

First Published: Feb 1, 2011: 11:45 AM ET