Imagine working at a large corporation. I’ve been in that world before, and I can’t say I miss anything about it.

In this story, we hear about a corporation’s overtime policy and how there’s a glitch in the system. The employees quickly figured out the glitch and how to avoid it, but management is clueless about what’s going on.

You’d think the obvious answer would be for management to ask the employees what’s going on, but in a corporation there’s often a huge gap between what’s obvious and what actually happens.

Keep reading for all the details.

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.

This is an interesting system.

Well, 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, which really annoyed the money-hungry vultures.

Whereas, 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.

OP guesses at the ordeal it will take for management to understand what is happening.

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.

Communication is key, but corporate culture doesn’t always seem to understand that.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who rejects a low contract offer and leaves the company instead.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person is confused.

Another person clarifies.

This person thinks the policy is silly.

Another person suggests a potentially better way to handle overtime.

This really doesn’t sound like the best overtime system. There has to be a better way. I’m not sure that a group text and a free for all is the answer, but it might be better than the system they have now.

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