Sometimes companies don’t realize how valuable someone is until their desk is empty.

So when HR blocked an employee from doing their job from home despite a health condition and years of flexibility, the employee decided to take their skills elsewhere.

And what happened after their exit proved just how much work they had quietly been carrying.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

No WFH? Find 4 people to do my job.

This story comes from my previous job, about five years ago.

I have to preface this with the fact that I have a health condition that pops up on an unpredictable but occasional basis.

It means that I’m not able to drive, but I can still usually work fine from home.

When he first got into the job, it wasn’t what he expected.

I was working as an engineer, not in my field, but in a sort of general work management position.

When I got the job, it originally started as very self-contained, and I was the only staff member in a very small but necessary area.

No one told me when I started that there would be out-of-hours work at home.

Regardless, he was able to come up with a solution with his boss.

But my manager and I came to a basic agreement that I’d do the occasional out-of-hours work, and they’d let me work from home when my health required it.

Skip forward a couple of years.

While the company was never great to work for, I had pretty much been left alone.

Not everyone was so lucky, though.

My fellow colleagues, on the other hand, had it rough.

New management had come in and decided that they didn’t need local people to do the work, so they fired most of them.

This was despite the fact that most of management was FIFO for some reason.

Then HR decided to stick their nose where it didn’t belong.

And so our fly-in HR rep decided that I was no longer allowed to work from home due to “the liability if I fell over and broke my leg at home.”

I told him that I would no longer be able to do the out-of-hours work either.

He simply said I’d have to come into the office to do it.

So I went job hunting.

Luckily, this wasn’t too hard of a process.

A mate of mine reached out with a job in my field, and I got it.

I gave my two weeks’ notice over Christmas.

So instead of having two weeks to train my replacement, I had one due to the Christmas shutdown.

This wasn’t an easy task.

And there was nobody left in the business who knew what I did.

I’d been on such a rotating suite of managers that barely knew I existed.

And my current manager was leaving at the same time I was.

They also had no idea of the sheer volume of work.

Oh, and did I mention that I’d been taking on extra duties aside from my initial job?

This being the kind of company that just heaps stuff on people, I’d ended up with additional work from other areas.

I didn’t train anyone in this, as they didn’t provide anyone for me to train.

This was a very common phenomenon in this business— not bothering with handover.

I happily jaunted off to my new job, which I’m still in and love.

The new hire, on the other hand.

But I have friends still with the company, so I kept up on the gossip.

My replacement couldn’t keep up with my original job and kept texting me for about a year for advice on how to do it.

They ended up employing three other people to deal with it, plus all the other tasks I’d acquired.

Sounds like management didn’t appreciate the good employee they already had.

What did Reddit think?

This commenter dealt with a very similar situation.

This is a tell tale sign of bad leadership.

This really didn’t put the new hire or the ex-employee in a good position.

Management deserved all the trouble that came their way.

Turns out, rigidity is an expensive policy!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.