A survey showed that most people with unlimited PTO took less holiday and worked on vacation rather than more time off and more freedom.

There are a number of books and articles on "NO Rules Rules" etc often centring on netflix. They seem to "work" where there is a desirable destination employer that can attract what in teh jargon is a high talent density of emotionally intelligent people (who can give and receive feedback often) and a business that can focus on outputs rather than inputs.

You need a clear unambiguous company culture. Often a generous severance package to allow people to move on etc. ACAS rules (which by and large are largely self evident) become "less" important as people are largely self managing or managing for teh common good and where people go against "natural justice" they get called out by colleagues and peers rather than needing to go to HR or a rule book.

I think its the extreme rather than the norm - at that far end of the bell curve that most organisations cant or wont ever get to

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.

The key point about looking to firms like Netflix, Toyota, Tesla etc is they have all found approaches and solutions which serve their needs, for their environment and market.

Copying their systems/culture almost never works as they are not Netflix, most organisations do not face the technical challenges of a streaming service.

For example, the 5 Why problem solving technique was developed at Toyota and works incredibly well for a highly efficient production environment where root causes can easily be identified but use the same technique to find out why your customers are going to the competition will lead to an exponential list of potential issues.

Hi Hannah
The no rules rules means there are rules, they're just now unspoken expectations. I listed to a talk by a 'desirable' organisation and those rules came at cost ie constant availability dressed up as 'automony'. What type of organisation are you, are you a highly educated, high autonomy, high trust organisation?

These organisations still have to abide by employment law / acas etc and will find themselves up before an ET if they break them.

I think this is also a lot of 'glossy' marketing of doing it our way - they never tell the bad side.