When you work for a company, you will find that there are always people who try to take advantage of the systems in place to work less or get paid more.

What would you do if one person was not working their full hours, so the HR team decided to implement a new time tracking policy for everyone rather than address the one problem employee?

That is what happened at the workplace in this story, so everyone followed the new rules carefully, which earned them extra days off each month.

HR didn’t want to have an awkward conversation with a couple of people so we all get extra days off.

The company I worked for had a quite old-fashioned attitude to the workplace.

The workforce was divided into ‘boiler suits’ and ‘suits’ or ‘workshops’ and ‘office’

They regarded office as educated, professional and honest and workshop as stupid, lazy, and petty thieves.

This was not a view I agreed with, I had come from a company where everyone from janitor to general manager were treated the same and could have an input.

If something went wrong in design or manufacturing it was often the guy working the machine or fitted the parts who spotted it and came up with the correction.

In my new place the office would not accept input from workshop unless they really really had to.

Workshop had to clock and account for every minute whereas office were on the honor system, we were trusted to input our own hours and we usually just entered our 8 hours per day despite usually working more.

Sometimes a lot more because we were professional in our work ethic.

In my old place everyone clocked, it was no big deal but suggesting that it happen here was like suggesting that office workers were untrustworthy.

I think we’ve all worked with someone like this.

Then there was Bob.

Bob turned up about 8:30 and left about 3:30 and somehow still managed to log 8 hours per day.

We had a half-hour lunch break (we could extend it but had to log it and work the time back) he took long lunches of about an hour or so.

He was also a heavy smoker and about 3 to 4 times an hour Bob would pop outside for a smoke.

Everyone knew about Bob, including HR.

We knew that Bob was on a shaky peg for a while because his working hours were getting shorter and shorter while still being charged at 8 hours.

Something had to give.

This should be easy, but will HR actually do it?

HR had an easy job; have a word with Bob and get him to work the hours he claimed, put him on an RA (Remedial Action plan) or else fire him for mis-accounting hours.

Instead HR decided to instigate a new policy that everyone on site would clock and would have to account for their hours on site.

At no point did HR actually talk to anyone in the office, they just seemed to come up with this plan based on what they think went on.

Engineering were generally happy with this although a few did grumble about honor and trust.

HR just shrugged their shoulders and shifted the blame on to the European Working Time Directive and said that it was the new normal, nothing we can do… honest.

You don’t lie to engineers because we like rules and sure enough some of the engineering team researched it and found out that HR were just using EU law to railroad through a new process.

We did need to record worked hours but nowhere did it say we had to use an electronic clocking system to do it.

The old system fulfilled the requirement of the law just fine.

I wonder how much this cost the company.

The new clocking machines were fitted in every entrance to the office block, we were all given swipe cards and training on using the new system.

We could have pointed it out to HR and indeed some people tried but the decision had already been made and they pushed ahead with it.

We all knew what was coming and we continued on as normal waiting for the end of the month.

At the end of the month the project billing controllers went nuts.

While one or two people were genuinely stealing time from the company the rest of us were under-accounting for our time.

Engineering were on a flexible working day, as long as we did core hours and did our 8 hours then we were OK, anything over 8 hours was banked and at the end of the month was either paid as over time or flexi time.

I normally started at 7am but I was usually in by 6:40 and we worked to the job so I could leave at 3:30 but it was often closer to 4.

Most of us were the same but we usually just rounded to an 8 hour day.

Suddenly the projects lost 3-4 hours of free overtime per person per week with an office of around 300 people that is a load of time and that had to be paid as OT or banked as flexi as per our contract.

One or two managers suggested the we just adjust our time to the previous hours but falsifying clocking hours was gross misconduct and a sackable offense so they went back in their box pretty quickly.

HR told us to log our time accurately and so we did.

That really worked out well for everyone!

HR refused to back down because “EU law” which we knew that this was rubbish and so the productivity figures went down, in some cases by over 10%, costs went up as we had to be credited with all the extra time and so we all got at least a flexi-day per month that we never had before.

Thanks HR!

All you needed to do was to have a word with Smoky Bob and his like and all would be well but because you wanted to avoid an awkward conversation, so we all get extra holidays.

Wow, HR laziness really benefitted everyone in this case.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think about this situation.

Yes, say thank you to HR.

This commenter is wise.

Working for free is not normal!

Yup, HR are the true hero’s.

This commenter wonders why they worked so much for free.

HR is the real hero of the story.

They just couldn’t see it at the time.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.