Culture changes (no rules, rules style) but employment law

Keith's point notwithstanding:

if we say to an employee they can have as many days off as they like and they abuse this, how can we follow up officially through HR?

What part of "you can have as many days off as you like" is not clear?

Unlimited PTO means you literally cannot abuse it.

What you *can* do is hold them to account for their KPIs and other targets. The whole idea of unlimited PTO is that you don't manage people's presence in the workplace but manage their objectives. If they complete their objectives for the year in two weeks and then knock off for the rest of the year, then there's a problem with your objective setting, not with their use of the unlimited PTO policy!

If someone is taking so much time off that they aren't delivering what you need from them, the answer isn't to stop them taking time off, but to make it clear that, if they don't deliver what you need by X date to Y standard, that they'll be dismissed.

However, I do also need to pick up this point:

Im very much on board with the ideas and really want to help our business to change

That's lovely, but it's not you that needs to be on board, but your Directors, Executives and Owners. And the problem there is that senior leaders often get carried away with being inspired by the examples of their favourite billionaires without realising that those billionaires have an incredibly expert, hard-working and well-compensated team of professionals who make their wild ideas actually work in practice.

If you were to dive into unlimited PTO without a really clear rubric for setting, measuring and responding to performance (with both rewards for excellence and punishments for failures) then there will be tendency for uninformed leaders to blame the PTO for the collapse in productivity rather than recognising that the fault lies in a lack of strategic leadership.

Keith's point notwithstanding:

if we say to an employee they can have as many days off as they like and they abuse this, how can we follow up officially through HR?

What part of "you can have as many days off as you like" is not clear?

Unlimited PTO means you literally cannot abuse it.

What you *can* do is hold them to account for their KPIs and other targets. The whole idea of unlimited PTO is that you don't manage people's presence in the workplace but manage their objectives. If they complete their objectives for the year in two weeks and then knock off for the rest of the year, then there's a problem with your objective setting, not with their use of the unlimited PTO policy!

If someone is taking so much time off that they aren't delivering what you need from them, the answer isn't to stop them taking time off, but to make it clear that, if they don't deliver what you need by X date to Y standard, that they'll be dismissed.

However, I do also need to pick up this point:

Im very much on board with the ideas and really want to help our business to change

That's lovely, but it's not you that needs to be on board, but your Directors, Executives and Owners. And the problem there is that senior leaders often get carried away with being inspired by the examples of their favourite billionaires without realising that those billionaires have an incredibly expert, hard-working and well-compensated team of professionals who make their wild ideas actually work in practice.

If you were to dive into unlimited PTO without a really clear rubric for setting, measuring and responding to performance (with both rewards for excellence and punishments for failures) then there will be tendency for uninformed leaders to blame the PTO for the collapse in productivity rather than recognising that the fault lies in a lack of strategic leadership.