Good supervisors respect both time and their employees, but some bosses can’t manage to do either.

When one supervisor cracked down on an efficient overtime setup, her actions backfired in a costly and completely avoidable way.

But like all too many supervisors, she didn’t learn her lesson.

Read on for the full story!

Remove incentive for overtime? Guess we’ll operate normal office hours.

After leaving university, I was an engineer in a vehicle testing lab.

My lab was a vehicle dynamometer, which could be driven by a robot—robotic legs operating the car pedals so the car drives and stops. The robot keeps driving up to set speeds and stopping over and over and over.

So we put “miles” on components and confirm they’re OK.

This type of work requires around-the-clock care, which led to an overtime policy for employees.

So, policy when running robot driving is that I need to carry out a safety checklist of items every 24 hours of running.

This takes about 20 minutes. If I don’t stop the system, it times out and brings everything to a stop automatically.

The company at the time had a minimum 3-hour overtime logging policy—if you’re asked to come in on a weekend, you log 3 hours’ pay OT as soon as you’re in the door.

It was working well for a while… until a new manager came in.

This worked well for me and, in my opinion, the company. I get 3 hours OT each day; the company gets 48 hours of progress.

This was a long-running policy and everyone was happy.

I inherited a new manager and she HATED this. Thought I was stealing from the company and should only get paid for each minute I was on site.

She worked tirelessly to adjust the policy so this employee could no longer benefit from it.

After a month or two, she convinced the directors to remove this policy for me if I wasn’t working 3 hours.

Don’t know how, but she then found it “disappointing” that I wouldn’t drive 30 minutes each way for 20 minutes of overtime on Saturday or Sundays.

At the time, I was paid £11.44 per hour (Saturday being 1.5x and Sunday 2x). So no, I’m not giving up 2 hours on Saturday for £10.

So this employee just decided to adjust their working schedule.

It’s OK though, I’ll leave it running on Friday night and kick it off on Monday. 👍

I left without them ever reinstating it, but always sent the many annoyed customers in her direction when being quizzed on why we lost two days of running over the weekend.

As usual, this toxic manager shouldn’t have stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.

Did Reddit agree?

This commenter is quick to share a similar story.

There’s no length managers won’t go to make working conditions worse for everyone!

When exemplary performance isn’t rewarded, performance goes down across the board. Shocker.

A heavy-handed approach can do more harm than good.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.