Happy Thursday, everyone. I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
This week’s workplace news isn’t dramatic, but it is revealing. Across hiring, leadership, and talent strategy, the common thread is pressure quietly moving upward:
📊 More applicants, slower hiring
A new hiring benchmarks report shows employers are receiving significantly more applications per role in 2025, while hiring timelines continue to stretch. The data suggests increased competition for candidates hasn’t translated into faster or easier hiring decisions.
👉 HR Dive🤖 When AI hiring problems escalate to the CEO
Cisco’s CEO became directly involved in recruitment efforts after difficulties hiring AI talent slowed progress. The move highlights how critical skills shortages are increasingly treated as leadership-level issues, not just HR challenges.
👉 HR Grapevine😮 Nearly 40% of senior leaders considered quitting
According to new survey data, almost four in ten top executives say they seriously considered leaving their roles in the past year. Burnout, workload pressure, and misalignment with organisational direction were cited as key drivers.
👉 HR Dive
Which brings us neatly to this week’s main theme: when policies sound generous but rely on unspoken norms, behaviour fills the gap.
🤝 This edition is brought to you by ADP
As HR teams move into 2026, compliance is no longer a background task. It sits at the center of how work gets designed, how technology gets deployed, and how trust is maintained with employees. AI in hiring, expanding pay transparency, and shifting labor laws are turning everyday HR decisions into high-stakes calls.
Join ADP’s legal and compliance leaders for a clear, practical discussion on the compliance trends shaping the year ahead and how HR teams can stay ahead without slowing the business down.
If you want to know how a workplace policy actually works, don’t read the policy. Read how people talk about it on Reddit.
My secret shame is trawling through the RecruitingHell subreddit, where unlimited PTO is talked about constantly. The same question keeps coming up: is unlimited leave a sign of trust, or a neat way to stop people taking time off altogether?
What’s interesting is how consistent the stories are. Different industries, different companies, same outcome. Plenty of flexibility on paper, very little confidence using it in practice. And behavioural science has a lot to say about why policies built on ambiguity so often produce caution instead of freedom.
🧠The behavioural science lens
Unlimited PTO struggles less because of bad intent and more because of very predictable human behaviour. When policies remove structure without replacing it, people are left to infer what’s acceptable. Most of us err on the side of self-preservation.
Ambiguity quietly shifts risk onto the individual: With unlimited PTO, the question stops being “how many days do I have?” and becomes “how much is safe to take here?” In the absence of clear norms, people default to caution, especially in performance-oriented environments. WorldatWork’s analysis explains why unclear norms around unlimited PTO can make employees more cautious about taking leave.
People copy behaviour, not policy: Employees don’t take cues from handbooks. They watch what leaders do. If senior staff rarely take leave, or remain responsive while away, the message is clear: time off is allowed, but not entirely safe. Evidence shows that staying connected during leave undermines recovery and keeps work mentally “on”.
Unlimited choice can stall action: Removing boundaries can make decisions harder, not easier. Classic research on choice overload shows that when options are unlimited, people are less likely to act at all. Without a defined entitlement, taking leave becomes something to justify rather than a default behaviour.
Rest only works when detachment is real: Occupational health research shows that time off improves wellbeing when people can psychologically detach from work. When leave feels conditional or socially risky, people stay mentally connected even while away, shrinking any restorative benefit.
🚀What this means for leaders
Unlimited PTO is not inherently broken. Vague PTO is.
Removing limits without replacing them with structure shifts the emotional and professional risk onto employees. What helps instead:
Set explicit norms: Share average leave taken, minimum expectations, and examples of what “normal” actually looks like. Clarity lowers the personal risk of opting out.
Model time off properly: If leaders take leave but stay visible and responsive, the signal is unmistakable. Time off exists, but it isn’t protected.
Watch for quiet penalties: If deadlines, workload, or performance conversations subtly punish absence, the policy becomes decorative.
Frame leave as capacity protection, not a perk: When rest is positioned as essential to sustainable performance, people feel justified taking it rather than apologetic.
💬 Final thoughts
Unlimited PTO often fails for the same reason many well-intentioned workplace policies do. They assume that removing rules automatically creates freedom.
But we know that humans don’t work that way.
When expectations are unclear, people fill the gap with caution, comparison, and self-protection. And in most organisations, that means working more, not resting better.
Flexibility works best when it’s supported by structure. Without that, unlimited PTO looks generous on paper and quietly disappears in practice.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Frank
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