re: How can one abuse "Unlimited PTO"?

Guessing I'll be in the minority on this, but we switched to unlimited PTO a couple of years ago and it's way better. The PTO that I had accrued up to that point was frozen and will be paid out if I leave. I used to hoard all of my PTO til the end of the year in case I needed it for when I got sick or the kids had to stay home from school or something. Then I'd try to take basically all of December off and end up working through it anyway because there was too much crap to do.

Now, if I need to a day or three to decompress or do something unexpected, I take it and I don't have to care. We have a similarly vague "don't abuse it" rule. My team has pretty black and white performance targets (utilization for consultants), so abuse to me would be not carrying your weight on the team and hitting your targets. That also assumes the time off is being used to goof off and not because of some serious family stuff or for an otherwise "good" reason. At that point, you're not doing your job, which is something I'll fire people for regardless of whether PTO is involved.

ETA: The reason my definition of abuse is vague is because I expect people to be adults and do their job. I don't want to have to make a bunch of rules because you're too stupid to read the room. I pay people way too much to be that braindead.