Corporate cost-cutting can look smart on paper, but it’s often disastrous in practice.

When HR froze vacation rollovers without thinking through the consequences, a wave of key staff quietly planned their exits.

And it’s the company that ended up paying the price.

Keep reading for 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 who had been there a long time.

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

Up until this point, employees enjoyed using their vacation time how they pleased.

At 20 years, employees got six weeks (30 days) of vacation.

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

But eventually, the company decided this was too big of a risk.

At some point, some jerk figured out that those 45 days were a liability to the company.

If you’re selling off a chunk of a company and those employees have six weeks of vacation plus another nine weeks banked, that’s 15 weeks of time the new owner could be on the hook for.

So they put a very unpopular policy into place.

So management decided to put out a proclamation: 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 their vacation.

Turns out, employees would rather leave than feel cheated out of their PTO.

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

That was kind of odd, so I pressed a little on why this sounded like a “forever goodbye” instead of a “see you in a week.”

I was told, under strict confidence, that they had found a new job.

The new job started in two weeks.

The departing employees had a plan.

They had enough vacation days to cover them through January 1, and the next year’s 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.

Soon, others began to catch on, which angered HR.

Suddenly, a number of other key people — also with six weeks of vacation and large vacation banks — were gone.

HR was not happy.

HR couldn’t say no to closing out the vacations since they had decreed the rollover freeze.

That’s when HR added another catch to try and thwart these employees.

So HR issued another decree: “You must return to work to be able to collect the vacation in the next year.”

Turns out most of those people had landed jobs at very cool companies.

But still, the employees found a way to outsmart them.

They all scheduled a single vacation day so they could “come back to work for a day.”

They came back en masse.

This really wasn’t a very productive day, though.

Co-workers scheduled them all into meetings so they would technically have things to do that day.

In reality, it was mostly a party day with an all-day food fest.

Finally, management was forced to face the consequences.

As an added bonus, senior management had indeed planned to split off a division.

The sale fell through because so many key people had bailed out.

Looks like management’s little bright idea didn’t work out so well in practice.

What did Reddit have to say?

There’s really a better way to handle all of this.

When management hurts their employees, employees often find ways to fight back.

Employers need to know there’s certain things their workers just won’t tolerate.

No one likes the idea of losing hard-earned PTO.

The company tried to cut liabilities, so the employees cut ties altogether!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.