Sometimes when office policies work against their employees, the employees retaliate!

This guy shares how employees at his company retaliated against a new vacation policy at his office. Instead of being able to roll over vacation time to the next year, employees were told they had to use their vacation time within the year.

They weren’t happy about it, but they found a great way to use this new policy to their advantage!

Check out the full story!

Can’t carry over time to the next year? Ok, that works.

I worked at a company that had a lot of people that had worked a long time there.

It was pretty common for new chemistry or chemical engineering grads to come in as their first job after college.

At 20 years they got 6 weeks (30 days of vacation).

Some people liked to work and simply rolled vacation days into the next year. The max you could ever carry over was 45 days.

This is where it starts getting rough…

At some point some bean counter figured out that the 45 days were a liability to the company. (If you are selling a chunk of a company off and those people have 6 weeks of vacation and another 9 weeks in the bank, that’s 15 weeks of time that the new owner could be on the hook for.)

So they decided and put out a proclamation that there would be no carryover from one year to the next.

Much unhappiness swept the company. Lots of people tried to plan how they were going to use it.

One of the key people I worked with came up in October and said they are going on vacation, and how much they liked working with me.

This guy wasn’t sure about the vacation so much.

Which was kind of odd, so I pressed a little on why this sounded like a “forever good-bye” and not a “see you in a week”.

So I got told (under strict confidence) that they had found a new job.

New job started in 2 weeks. They had enough vacation days to cover them to Jan 1, and the next years vacation and holidays covered the first two months of the following year. So they were done.

I wished them well and they were gone.

But they were not as good as I am at keeping secrets.

UH OH!

There were suddenly a number of key people, also with 6 weeks vacation and large vacation bank that were gone.

Lots of unhappy people in HR. HR could not say no to the close out vacations since they had decreed the rollover freeze.

But HR decreed “You must return to work to be able to collect the vacation in the next year.”

Turns out most of the people got jobs in very cool companies, they all scheduled a vacation day so they could “come back to work for a day”.

This sounds amazing!

They came back en masse. Co-workers scheduled them all into meetings, so they had things to do on the day. (It was mostly a party day with an all day food fest).

As an added bonus, senior management had indeed planned to split off a division, and the sale fell through because of all the people that had bailed out.

YIKES! That sounds like a huge blow to the company!

Why didn’t the company’s HR see that coming?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user suggests what policy could work at this company.

This user shares how things were at his dad’s workplace!

This user shares the policy of his previous workplace.

This user knows it is always tit for tat!

This user shares how things were at their old workplace.

That was a secret worth sharing!

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.