It may seem silly to think that it will help you change things at work if you treat your staff like they’re your students and you’ve put them in detention.

But that’s exactly what this boss was doing in an effort to get his workers to come in on time.

Read the story to see how it majorly blew up in his face.

Boss says “If you’re 1 minute late I’m docking 15 minutes from your time” gets mad when I don’t work the 15 minutes I was docked for free.

Boss got tired of people walking in at 6:05 or 6:03 when we start at 6:00 AM at our construction job, so he said “If you aren’t standing in front of me at 6 o’clock when we start then I’m docking 15 minutes from your time for the day.”

The next day I accidentally forgot my tape measure in my car and had to walk back across the job site to grab it, made it inside at 6:00. Boss chewed me out and told me he was serious yesterday and docked me 15 minutes.

OP and his coworkers weren’t going to play that game and very bluntly explained why.

So I took all my tools off right there and sat down on a bucket. He asked why I wasn’t getting to work and I said “I’m not getting paid until 6:15 so I’m not doing any work until 6:15. I enjoy what I do but I don’t do it for free.”

“If you’re telling me to work without paying me then that’s against the law. You really wanna open the company and yourself up to that kind of risk?”

He shut up pretty quickly after that and everyone else saw me do it and him cave, so now they weren’t gonna take his **** either.

Over the next few days guys that would have been 1 or 2 minutes late just texted the boss “Hey, sorry boss. Would have been there at 6:02 and gotten docked, so I’ll see you at 6:15 and I’ll get to work then.” and then sat in their cars until 6:15 and came in when their time started.

Check out what this weird flex cost him.

My boss lost a TON of productivity and morale because he decided that losing 15 minutes of productivity per person and feeling like a Big Man was better than losing literally 1 or 2 minutes of productivity.

After a few weeks of that he got chewed out by his boss over the loss of productivity and how bad the docked time sheets were looking.

His boss said it reflected poorly on him as a leader because we were missing deadlines over it and it “Showed that he doesn’t know how to manage his people.”

His little self-implemented policy was gone and we all worked like we were supposed to and caught back up fairly quickly.

Let’s see what people are saying in the comments.

There were tons of stories just like OP’s. It’s frustrating to see how many bosses just don’t get it.

What the… Well, may as well have a nice hot drink.

So people do this to clients, too? I can’t imagine doing that.

Exactly. Solidarity really helps.

It’s weird that they don’t think this through. The repercussions seem so obvious to me.

Nice try, boss.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.