Employees under untracked unlimited PTO policy thrive until HR calls their vacations “excessive” and demands new restrictions their manager has to enforce : ‘Now I have to penalize them for failing to meet expectations that none of us knew existed’

Unlimited PTO always sounds like a dream until someone in HR wakes up and decides to invent limits. For years, the system rolled along just fine: people took time off, work got done, and nobody panicked about "coverage." It felt like the grown-up version of work culture, where trust actually meant something. Then one person logs twenty days of vacation, and suddenly it's treated like a corporate crime scene. HR clutches the policy manual like a holy text and declares it's all gone too far, as if the company will collapse under the weight of one employee catching their breath.

The funny thing about corporate "freedom" is that it comes with invisible strings. HR loves the word unlimited because it looks generous on paper and costs nothing when nobody dares to use it. The moment someone actually enjoys the benefit, it turns into a case study in "excess." Managers who encourage balance are labeled as flexible, and human resources, supposedly for humans, moves to protect the sanctity of schedules.

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Our untracked (unlimited) PTO policy was working fine for our team but now HR is losing their minds about it.

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Corporate culture just sort of lingers in the background, whispering that rest is suspicious and exhaustion is loyalty. Teams that function with trust unsettle HR because peace never looks productive in the metrics. Nothing says modern workplace quite like punishing people for not burning out fast enough. The company could’ve kept a great system running, but instead, it’s busy proving that “unlimited” is just another word for “until someone notices”.
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$I usually take \~25 days a year, sometimes more sometimes less. My manager has always been very liberal so, when I became a manager in the same department, I followed suit.$

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