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Managers don’t always think through their decisions very well. Sometimes they don’t understand the problem until there are negative consequences.

For example, in this story, a manager tells the employees they can no longer work overtime. But there is still just as much work to do, and it’s not like the company hired more employees. How will all the work get done unless the employees work overtime?

The employees comply and stop working overtime.

Let’s see how that works out.

New manager takes away OT and working through lunch? Good luck!

I worked for a large brokerage firm as an hourly employee.

Every day, I worked through lunch and did at least 1 OT hour in order to handle the heavy workload my team received.

The extra hour of OT was beyond normal business hours, but I would also get another 45 mins of OT for working through lunch.

Not only me, but the three other people on my team did this as well.

They didn’t mind working overtime.

We were all fine with it, as the OT pay really helped us out and we were able to leave work with our tasks for the day completely finished. T

he tasks were super repetitive so there was really no fear of burnout from us.

The thing about working as an hourly employee at this company was that we would have to clock out for lunch for at least 15 minutes even if we worked through the determined hour of it.

Again this was completely cool with us all, as the overtime pay more than made up for 15 minutes of lost pay each day.

A new manager often means change.

This system worked really well for about 2 years, but then we got a new manager.

He was the tough, make everything as efficient as possible kind of guy and we knew that he was going to come after our overtime pay.

The best part about him becoming the manager is that he knew absolutely nothing about the jobs we do. He was completely clueless about the department as a whole actually and how high our workflows were.

Taking away overtime sounds good in theory.

Three weeks into this new manager starting, he calls a meeting for us all and says that no matter what, we should be taking an hour lunch each day and should be doing no overtime.

While it seems like a nice thing for him to do to give us a break, he clearly was coming after our overtime pay.

I had questions, such as how he expected everything to get done everyday without the working through lunch and overtime we put in.

His response was “We hired you all for 40 hour work weeks, so that is what you will work for. Anything more is practically stealing from the company.” So there goes our OT pay.

You can’t expect employees to get the same amount of work done when you force them to work fewer hours.

From that day forward, I took the hour long lunch and made sure to have at least one other teammate tag along.

I also began leaving precisely on time every single day once my time was completed regardless of how much work still had to be done.

As you may have guessed, things started to back up big time.

Our manager started to sweat asking why we were so backed up, and I sat there saying that we can only do so much in a 40 hour week.

But things changed again.

This continued for about 2-3 months, and then we randomly received an email from our boss’s boss saying that overtime was allowed again and that 1 hour lunch breaks were no longer mandatory but that they recommend we still do.

Instead of hiring more people to help with the backup of tasks, giving overtime to people who were already trained was clearly the better option in this situation (and it was also much cheaper).

At least someone in management had some sense before it got too out of hand.

I guess someone higher up than the new manager understood the problem and knew that changing the rules back would be the best solution.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person urges OP to take breaks.

Another person complains about managers who don’t understand the job.

This person agrees with the manager.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who is shocked to learn how little he has to do to keep his cushy remote job.

Another person thinks the manager sounds great.

It seems like most people who commented sided with the manager. The only problem is that there aren’t enough employees to get the work done without working overtime. It’s too bad to overwork the employees and expect them to work through their breaks, but the employees who work at this particular company don’t seem to mind.

While breaks and no overtime would be ideal, some employees would rather have the overtime pay.