It can be tough to accept a new manager’s way of doing things when you’ve been working the same way for a long time.

Sure, sometimes these new approaches, from a fresh set of eyes, can actually rejuvenate a tired or dated approach and benefit the team in the long run.

But sometimes the new approaches are so pointless that employees truly resent having to adopt them.

And when the team in this story are forced to adopt a new rule that proves their new manager has no knowledge of their routines nor their culture, they team up to show him just how wrong he is.

Read on to find out what happened.

You want to fix our working hours? Our contracts have something to say about that…

Early last year, we had a new manager take over the department. He previously headed another IT department in Germany, but moved to Switzerland to take the role in ours.

Our team is spread over Switzerland, Spain, and Mexico, with second line in Spain and Mexico, and third line in Switzerland and Spain.

It was a few months before he started making changes and they were mostly small: we had to record how much time we spent on tickets, provide weekly updates on our changes and projects, and our monthly department meeting became fortnightly.

It meant a bit more bureaucracy here and there, but it was mostly fine; nothing excessive. But, about six months in, he made a change that none of us really liked.

Read on to find out what change was such an issue for the employees.

While Switzerland and Spain are both in the same timezone, in reality, our times don’t really line up. Employees in Switzerland will start at any time between 07:00 and 08:30, while Spain can start later than 09:00.

Lunch in Switzerland is often from 11:30 to 12:30, while Spain will wait until 13:00 or later. Home time in Switzerland ranges from 15:30 to 17:30, while the team in Spain will often be online until 18:00.

This means that meetings between the third line teams usually take place between 09:00 to 11:30, and 14:00 to 16:00, i.e. about 4.5 hours a day. Outside of those times, you risk people not having started yet, having already gone home, or being out for lunch.

This is what our new manager didn’t like.

So the manager decided to make a change.

While he couldn’t really do much about lunch times, he saw the opportunity to align our start and end times.

After reviewing people’s calendars, he determined that enforcing an 08:00 to 17:00 working day would cause the least amount of disruption to our schedules. This would increase the number of hours where we’re all available by two per day, or ten per week.

When he told us about the change, none of us were happy. Even those that wouldn’t be impacted, because it already aligned with their usual start and finish times, were annoyed on behalf of those who would be impacted.

When we asked why the change was being made, we were simply told it was about us all being online together more.

With this new schedule in mind, the employees decided to speak up.

Some people complained that it would impact out of work commitments and we were told he would make allowances, but only temporarily.

One guy said that he only takes a 30 minute lunch break, so this would mean he goes over his weekly hours. The manager said he would look into that.

Then an older member of the team asked if he had run it by HR. The manager said no, this isn’t something he needs to run by HR. The same guy then asked if we would have to start recording our hours. The manager said no, this has nothing to do with recording hours.

Turns out the manager made a mistake here.

Let’s see why this mistake posed such a problem.

You see, in Switzerland, by law, employees need to record their working hours and employers need to retain records to ensure compliance with labour laws.

There are, however, a few exceptions. Smaller companies can simply record the number of hours worked each day. Meanwhile, senior employees can be exempted from logging their hours if they meet a certain salary threshold, and their role allows for autonomy in the hours worked.

All the engineers on the team based in Switzerland had signed this waiver. It wasn’t uncommon for us to work eleven hours on one day, and then five hours on the next. It wasn’t uncommon for us to work thirty hours in one week, then fifty hours the next.

We never recorded these hours. We never explicitly told our team leaders or manager. It was simply understood that some days (or weeks) would be busy and, as we managed our own time, we would make up for it later. We were trusted to manage our own time. And, if we didn’t sign the waiver to exclude us from logging our hours, it would create a mess for overtime, time off in lieu, etc.

However, this was where the law could have potentially got tricky for the company.

One of the conditions for signing this waiver was that we were free to determine the majority of our working hours, which courts had clarified was defined as 50%. If we are contracted to work forty hours a week, then our employer can fix twenty of those hours, and we can choose when to take the other 20.

The manager had now fixed 100% of our hours. We were no longer eligible for the exception granted to us.

For us, we could continue working the dictated hours and, legally, we would be fine.

But, if someone reported our employer to the government, the company could be fined and potentially be forced to log all employees’ working hours, or lose the ability to file working time waivers, i.e. engineers couldn’t work out of hours to perform maintenance and updates. The impact to the company could be huge.

And the employees decided to take action.

So the guy that asked the question went straight to HR and informed them of the manager’s new policy. HR, recognising the legal risk that such a policy could create for the company, went straight to the manager’s director. The policy was put on hold later that day.

On the Friday of the same week, another meeting was held. The manager apologised for not familiarising himself with Swiss labour laws before implementing the policy and instead decided to implement a new one, which would be legally compliant.

Spain would continue with the 08:00 to 17:00 working hours. For Switzerland, 50% of our working hours would be fixed: 08:00 to 10:00 and 15:00 to 17:00. In short, the first and last two hours of the day were fixed, and we’d have to fill in the rest with our free hours.

It was dubious at best. I looked at my calendar for Monday and saw I had a meeting at 11:00 and another one at 15:00, so I quickly pinged a message to the two people on the 11:00 meeting.

Together, the international employees made some cunning plans.

Then Monday came around.

At 06:00 I logged in and saw the two other members of the team I’d spoken to on Friday were logged in from home. I dropped them a message to say hi.

Our plan was to work until 10:00 and then log off until 11:00 when we had a meeting together with some of the team in Spain, take lunch from 11:30 to 13:30, then finish at 17:00. Two people arrived in the office at 07:00, having planned to take a two-hour lunch break in the city.

The rest of the team based in Switzerland (another four people) logged in at 08:00 and quickly hear what the other half of the team were doing. One was working from home so wanted to be done as soon as possible, and one had an appointment at 17:30, so had to stick to the manager’s implied schedule.

As for everyone else? They followed the manager’s timings to their advantage.

But the other two that were in the office had free time that evening. At 11:30, they left the office, returning just before 15:00, having spent the afternoon on a boat sailing around Lake Zurich.

At 17:00, they both left the office and clocked up the rest of their hours working from home.

On Tuesday, the fixed hours for the teams in both Switzerland and Spain were scrapped. The manager left the department a few months later.

When you arrive in a business as a new manager, it seems to be quite tempting to change everything to show that you’re having an impact.

But this is merely an illusion and often makes things worse in the long run, as this manager found out.

Because for every ridiculous rule you put in place, there are employees ready to outsmart it.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit thought about this.

This person agreed that the new rules did nothing besides making the new manager feel like he’d had an impact.

While others spoke of the nightmare managers like him present for HR.

This Redditor, meanwhile, empathised with the tough situation the employees were in.

If something seems super obvious but isn’t being implemented, there’s probably a reason why.

The cultural differences between Spain and Switzerland were a hurdle too far for this manager, and he’s quite likely learned one very important lesson for all brand new managers entering an unfamiliar workplace:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (not yet, anyway).

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.