More and more companies in the UK (http://news.sky.com/story/1048375/tech-firms-offering-unlimited-paid-holidays) are abandoning set holidays and adopted the principle of unlimited vacation time. So should you follow suit?

Netflix moved to unlimited vacation time in 2004 and more than a decade later the policy remains(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/7945719/Netflix-lets-its-staff-take-as-much-holiday-as-they-want-whenever-they-want-and-it-works.html). The theory was simple: employees put in so much time on their evenings and weekends that it was unreasonable to apply such rigid thinking to their holidays. Netflix went further – it stopped monitoring the time employees spent on anything and simply focused on the one thing that mattered: results.

Virgin Management, the investment arm of Sir Richard Branson’s, has also adopted unlimited holidays, following in the footsteps of initiatives that have been used in the United States for a long time (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29356627). Branson recognised that his employees often went above and beyond in terms of what they offered, working weekends and evenings to get projects finished.

So with employees giving so much more, the company felt it was simply inappropriate to enforce a limit on the time they take off.

Unlimited vacations are perhaps a way to foster a relationship built on trust instead of rules, and to boost employee engagement within the organisation. Flexible working hours, opportunities to work from home and more are all welcome, but offering unlimited vacation is another step towards showing your employees that you value their wellness and want them to take as much time as they need to recharge their batteries.

It is especially useful in businesses or departments that focus on intense projects that can require long working days, followed by lulls where the business tails off. These are the times when the business as a whole won’t lose by the employee taking time off, but if they come back with a full head of steam ready to tackle the next project then everybody benefits.

Offering total flexibility shows a level of faith in your employees, but it’s more complicated to implement this kind of initiative than you might think. Virgin spent more than a year, with a small pilot scheme to iron out the kinks, before it felt confident enough to roll out the scheme across the company. (http://theconversation.com/branson-unlimited-holiday-plan-for-virgin-blazes-trail-others-should-follow-32180).

For a start, they had to ensure that the employees could and would take full advantage of the offer. It is quite common for employees to actually take less holiday at first as they struggle with the concept of total freedom. Some companies even stand accused of adopting the policy to reduce the vacation time employees take, while simultaneously wiping out compensation for any time taken. (http://time.com/money/4070275/unlimited-vacation-policy/)

You have to make sure the policy is implemented fairly, too. If there are certain staff members you just cannot live without then get used to the idea of bringing in temporary staff, at a higher rate, to cover their absence. Of course an employee must get their work done, but if there is one member of staff you need constantly, then you’ll need cover if you want to employ Unlimited Vacation.

So you have to make sure you get it right and you also have to make sure that your business suits unlimited vacation time. A steady, plodding business that never demands anything more than a 9-5 might not be right for the programme. If, however, you need your staff to burn the midnight oil and work weekends to hit a mission critical deadline, then your business and unlimited vacations might be a perfect fit.

The first part of improving staff retention is to determine whether staff are leaving because of a recruitment issue or because of a human resources issue [http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2015/08/employee-retention-turnover-hr-recruiting-fault]. This can be determined by looking at the reasons people have chosen to leave your company.

Starting with recruitment, one sign that this is at the root of a high staff turnover is that employees frequently cite the company’s culture as being the reason that they left. This will also usually be associated with a high incidence of employees leaving the company for positions that are of similar status and pay. The other major sign that high staff turnover is caused by problems with recruitment is that you often have to fire employees due to the fact that they lack the skills for the job.

The solutions to these recruitment problems lie in making the culture of the company clear in job adverts and during the interview. A more structured, objective interview process can help to screen candidates who might not have the correct skills for the position.

As well as making the company’s culture clear to candidates for positions, it makes sense to ensure that your culture is one where the people that you want to attract can thrive. For example, younger employees increasingly expect to be able to work in a flexible, agile manner with access to a range of interconnected devices [http://www.hrgrapevine.com/markets/hr/article/2015-08-20-hr-must-create-an-office-staff-want-to-work-in-not-avoid].

A sign that high turnover is caused by HR issues is that employees will be leaving in order to progress their careers. This results in your company losing the skills of an employee that you have spent time and money training. Another sign is that particular demographic groups are leaving your company. For example, young parents or people who want to study at college or university. These issues can often be resolved by looking again at your company’s maternity and paternity arrangements. Similarly, opportunities to go part-time in order to accommodate education could help you to retain key skills.

When it comes to career progression, the single most important thing is employee engagement. Managers should talk to employees about where they want to see their career go http://playbook.amanet.org/improve-performance-management-processes/?pcode=XCRP&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=playbook-article. In this way you can ensure that your employees are challenged and are able to constantly develop their skills. This should help with performance management as well as ensuring that they stay for longer at your company.

It’s certainly true that a crucial element of the management process is actually managing the people who work for you, and that devising ways to get the most out of them will undeniably lead to increased productivity and therefore higher revenues and profits. It’s for these solid reasons that the annual performance review has traditionally been used by companies attempting to extract relevant information on all aspects of a worker, from their behaviour and attitude to how well they cooperate with colleagues and how they do their job.

But company owners and management executives are starting to realise, in increasing numbers, that the methodology of conducting such intrusive probes into employees just doesn’t work. It’s seen as a burden that focuses more on the process itself than the people under scrutiny, staff are highly suspicious – and extremely wary – of it and as it’s historically driven, in this faced-paced modern business world, it’s largely perceived as being entirely out of date.

Major companies, from GE (see www.qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift) to Accenture (www.smh.com.au/business/workplace-relations/goodbye-rankings-accenture-gives-annual-performance-reviews-the-flick-20150721-gihn7y.html) and many more, each with many hundreds of thousands of employees around the world, are ditching annual performance reviews and instead utilising a system that is proving to be far more accurate, fairer and much kinder all round. This new process is ‘continuous feedback’, the concept of constantly appraising a worker instead of a sudden interrogation at just one point in the year.

In fact, new research by PwC, the global professional services firm headquartered in London, shows that as many as two-thirds of big companies are changing the way they evaluate their employees’ performance, and that 5% of them are thinking about getting rid of performance reviews and their associated ratings.

“The research shows that the growing frustration from employees and managers with the year-end performance process is leading many organisations to focus on creating a continuous feedback culture to take the emphasis off the year-end appraisal,” PwC said in a note accompanying its research results. (More here: http://pwc.blogs.com/press_room/2015/07/more-companies-planning-to-ditch-end-of-annual-performance-reviews-and-ratings-but-will-employees-be.html.)

Employees are one of a company’s main assets, helping to propel a firm ever forward. Rather than thinking they have to be subjected to a major examination each and every year, as companies everywhere are now discovering, monitoring their progress and performance right around the year is a far more rewarding prospect, for the company and their employees.