Sometimes corporate policy makes sense, benefits the company and employees, and everyone can get on board with it.

Other times, the opposite is true.

And in the company in this story, the overtime policy made absolutely no sense at all.

So of course, the employees learned to exploit it to their advantage.

Read on to find out how this started causing problems.

Corporate overtime policy leads to less coverage

My department is technically “on call” while not being paid a shift premium for it, although we do get other perks instead so it isn’t a huge deal.

The company make a small effort to try and call the people with the least amount of overtime first, and this is relevant.

But we eventually found out that if we answer the call and are unable or refuse to come in, that time gets added to our overtime chart as if we’d actually worked it, and thus we’d be less likely to get overtime in the future.

This really annoyed the money-hungry vultures.

And they figured out something else too.

On the other hand, if we don’t answer and let it go to voicemail, our spot in the overtime chart is unchanged. I’m sure you can see where this is going.

For some reason, half the department is no longer answering emergency calls, and nobody seems to know why.

And being a corporate environment, asking the employees directly affected is only going to happen after multiple rounds of consultants are tasked with finding out why hell froze over twice, and several conflicting committees are formed to investigate the issue while sabotaging each other competing for limited resources.

Wow, this really is the case of exploiting a glitch in the system.

It kind of sucks that this system is quite fair, and now the employees are working out how to play it.

This likely means that, when corporate eventually figure it out, the new system will be worse for everyone.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this.

This person thought the policy was ridiculous.

While others were unclear on why exactly it was causing a problem for the company.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought that this was the only inevitable outcome.

The truth is, these employees should be paid overtime – then they’d be incentivised to take the call, but in a different way.

It’s the company’s fault that they’re not getting the overtime work done: if they actually paid the workers their worth, they would have no problem at all.

Some workers might be jumping at the opportunity for paid overtime. But instead, they chose this.

It’s all on them, really.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.