It usually doesn’t work well when people make policies about things they don’t really understand.

Fore example, in today’s story, the travel department at a company decides to start a new policy that they think will save the company a lot of money.

However, nobody in the travel department actually travels, so they don’t really understand the consequences of this new policy.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

New travel policy to save money ends up costing soooo much more. (long)

My company was on a cost saving kick and decided to look for way to shave pennies.

Now they could have looked at the amount of money that was squandered by people jetting all over the country on company time at a huge hourly rate.

(basically the labour spend is always much higher then the cost of the flight, car hire, hotel and food combined).

Or the number of ‘strategizing away days’ that HR etc went on but no, they came for the lowly engineers.

When the company starts counting paperclips, you know that you are about to have some fun.

The company wanted to talk about their car policy.

We were called to a ‘Consultation session’ (read: We are telling you what we decided based on what we think goes on and NOT what actually goes on).

The session was about saving money on hire cars.

In our company if you have to go away from you home site you can use your own car and choose a mileage rate up to about a 40 mile journey, if it is longer then you should have a hire car.

Hire cars are usually dropped off at the office by transporter or you can pick one up at a hire office or you can get a car dropped off at home for a small fee (£14 plus fuel).

The travel department introduced a new policy.

Travel dept. announced that there were to be no more home drop-offs to save money.

The engineers knew how this was going to pan out and said nothing.

The thing to know here about the travel department is that they do not travel, none of the knowledge is from the real-world.

Why point out the flaws when there’s room for malicious compliance?

Travel announced that the new policy was that home drop-offs were to cease, we had to pick up the hire car at the office or at the nearest Hertz rental location.

Sounds simple, all the engineers who travel a lot could instantly see the issues but as we were told that this is the new policy we had to comply.

So we did.

Maliciously.

Here’s how their next business trip started.

I was on a job 300 miles away at the customer site.

I travelled down on the Monday morning (starting at 6am) and back up Thursday (home about 6pm).

Because of the travel time I got the Friday off.

I also lived a 100 mile round trip from the office and my nearest Hertz office was at the airport.

This was not an unusual situation, a lot of people I worked with travelled to client locations.

It used to be much easier.

The weekend arrived.

Usually at some point over the weekend a car is dropped off and the key and paperwork is popped through my letterbox for the princely sum of £14 and no time from me).

Instead, because the hertz office was closed at 6am on the Monday morning, I picked up the car the day before.

Because my wife needed my car while I was away (and therefore could not leave my car parked at the airport) I took a taxi as per company travel policy (£35 and 40mins),.

I picked up the car (about 30 minutes) and drove home (about 30 minutes).

The expenses kept piling up!

On the Thursday evening instead of heading home and getting the car picked up on the Friday, I headed straight to the airport dropped off the car.

I took a taxi back (£40 and about 40 minutes due to busy traffic).

Our expenses are done monthly so by the end of the month I have 3 weeks travel to account for which would have been 3 x £14 plus a small refueling charge for the trip back to the Hertz office.

Instead they got about £200 for taxi fares and an overtime bill of about 4.5 hours at about £80 per hour.

Multiple people turned in similar expense reports.

I was not the only one, some engineers took a taxi into the office to pick up the car (as their spouse ‘needed the car while they were away’), some took a taxi to the nearest Hertz office.

All of us put in our overtime at the end of the month. Travel has no overtime budget and so it all got claimed from the project.

The project labour budget teams went ballistic and went all flaming torches and pitchforks on the travel dept.

The policy didn’t last the day.

It’s amazing how quickly that policy got changed!

This is a great example of people who don’t know what they’re talking about making bad decisions and only realizing they’re bad decisions after the fact.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

When will companies learn to talk to their employees?

This person loved the story.

Another person felt compelled to quote a movie.

Here’s how another person cheated the system.

The travel department clearly didn’t understand travel expenses very well!

Why does that seem like a recurring theme?

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.