Imagine working for a company where you have an annual all hands meeting at a location outside of your actual office building. Imagine being in this meeting, and you’re told that the overtime policy has changed. Would you listen and nod along making a mental note for the future, or would you check your watch to see how many hours you had already spent at that meeting that day?

In this story, an employee shares a story where this exact scenario happens, and it also happens that the company expects the employees to help clean up the venue where the meeting was held.

Guess what? That would involve working overtime, which they were just told they could only work under certain circumstances.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out. It’s pretty satisfying.

No payed overtime without a project

Happened about 5 years ago.

In my company we have to write up our houres and write up wich project they are for.

Of cause there allways is some stuff to do, that is not part of a customers project. We also have nothing like an union (we “could” create one, but similar companies with one mostly have worse conditions than we have, so no need to unionize for us)

The rule about overtime changed.

At that time once a year we had a gathering of the whole company to do the necessary QM courses to get a neccessary certficate and to get importand informations (mostly on administrativ stuff).

That year at the end of the gathering we got imformed, that overtime without a customer project to pay for it, will no longer be allowed or payed.

This made most of us unhappy, cause most of the stuff outside of projects was stuff the company forced us to do for qm reasons or to make the jobs of the billing department (that worked totally without projects) easier.

We had some discussions, but management was clear: NO OVERTIME OUTSIDE OF PROJECTS (that can be billed to a customer). They then ended the official part.

It seems this company really tries to pinch pennies.

The gathering was in a rented location since our HQ was too small to fit all employees in (lot of guys working outside).

Part of the cheap price for renting was a deal to clean up the place in the end or pay a strangely high price for the cleaning.

So in the end a manager (let’s call him Mike) asked everyone to carry chairs and tables back into the storrage and help sweeping the floor. (Would have been very fast if everyone took his own chair)

That is where the malicious compliance kicked in.

One employee spoke up.

This gathering was a non-project activity and our daily worktime was over.

One of the engineers (let’s call him Def) asked loud, so everyone could hear it: “On what project will this go?”

Mike:”This is no project.”

Def:”Well, we have been here from [start time] till now, so our daily worktime is full and you just made clear, we are not allowed to do overtime outside of a project or did I get you wrong?”

The rules were clear, so they did what they had to do.

Mike:”We made that clear no overtime outside of projects.”

Def: “Than I cannot help you cleaning, that would be overtime outside of a project and you do not allow that, sorry.”

Mike: …

Def stood up and went out. Next half of the other enginees stood up and started to go, followed by the rest, the technicians and most other employees and in the end everyone of the employees who work on projects went out.

The rules changed again.

Only managers and the people from billing/accounting were left and had to clean up everything alone (rumors are it took them 1-2 houres).

Fallout/Aftermath:

Next week all employees got an e-mail informing them: when you only work off project one day the non-project overtime should be clocked in on the next day and the project work of that day will be the (payed) overtime.

Management did not punish Def or anyone else and it was again a good place to work (most of the time).

That was almost too quick and easy! Complying with the overtime change was the perfect way to get the policy to change again.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a team that agreed to work overtime, but then not everyone showed up, leaving the rest holding the bag.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

It worked out well! They learned from their mistake.

Exactly!

The timing is hilarious!

One person argues the case for unionizing.

The timing couldn’t have been better! It’s so hilarious that they made a rule and then immediately asked the employees to break the rule. I’m sure they thought the employees would just put the chairs away and help clean up without actually claiming overtime, but that wouldn’t be fair. I’m so glad that employee spoke up and that the rule changed back almost immediately.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who just let clients complain after her boss refused to approve overtime.