Working from home gives employees more freedom, but not everyone uses it responsibly.

When a remote worker noticed her coworker was sandbagging during business hours and making up for it with unauthorized evening and weekend work, making her look unproductive by comparison, she took the whole thing to HR.

But when the board cracked down on unauthorized overtime, she became the most unpopular person on the team.

Keep reading for the full story.

AITA for going to HR about my coworker?

Before the pandemic happened, my job was not able to be done remotely.

We didn’t have laptops or mobile phones (only PCs and desk phones) and we had no way to access our email and voicemail outside of our office. We also had no way to access any of the other computer systems we needed to do our jobs. This included managers too.

Obviously the shutdown changed everything.

Suddenly, remote work was the standard.

We were given laptops with Zoom and a phone app (since we couldn’t bring our desk phones home) and now we can do our work through the VPN on our laptops.

My team is me, my coworker, and our manager. My coworker and I have the same title and duties.

But soon their working styles began to diverge.

When we got sent home, I noticed my coworker would do work and send emails in the evening. Our jobs are 9am to 5pm only — no evenings, weekends, or holidays.

At first I didn’t care because I thought it didn’t affect me at all. But I have realized it does.

This has had unintended consequences for this employee.

During our work hours, my coworker barely does any work, and anything done is always in the afternoon and not the morning.

So I am left scrambling to do things.

They suspect their coworker’s motivations are entirely self serving.

When my coworker does work in the evenings and on weekends, it is way more productive because no one else is working (internally or our clients), so there is no pressure or urgency and it’s quieter and easier to get stuff done.

Basically, my coworker was pushing out and getting way more work done than me because of the lack of pressure and no one else working.

I got spoken to about my productivity compared to my coworker by my manager’s manager.

The employee decides it’s time to have a talk with HR.

I took what I knew to HR. My manager is close to retirement and is known to be coasting (a replacement starts after New Year’s, so I am just waiting), so I felt like HR was the best bet.

I also found out someone in another division was doing the same thing as my coworker.

So leadership decided to act.

Now the board sent a memo stating that all work and systems will not be accessible except during working hours, and the rest of the time you won’t be able to log in. No exceptions.

Also, my coworker and the other person were paid for the “extra” hours they worked to avoid trouble from the labor board over unpaid overtime.

A warning was given that anyone caught trying to access the system outside of work hours or work overtime will be fired.

Obviously, the coworker isn’t pleased with this.

My coworker is furious.

I mentioned what I was going to do to someone who is a friend of mine outside of work, but it turned out that person was the other one who was doing the same thing as my coworker and told my coworker.

Now the employee is feeling the heat.

Both of them are angry at me, and so are a few others who weren’t even doing what they were. They all said I should have just minded my own business.

I did — until I got in trouble for not being as productive as my coworker.

Lots of people are mad at me.

My manager’s manager apologized and gave me a paid day off for speaking to me about my productivity.

I didn’t do the same thing as my coworker because not helping our clients would have had real-world consequences for them, and they aren’t corporate or rich, so I didn’t want to do that to them.

This employee didn’t deserve to take all the heat.

What did Reddit have to say?

At the end of the day, this selfish coworker deserved to be disciplined.

The company also deserves to take a little blame for this.

Sometimes a non-traditional approach is the best approach.

The real world catches up to everyone eventually.

Sometimes doing the right thing ruffles a few feathers.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.