If you were working overtime, would you prefer to be paid for the overtime in cold, hard cash, or would you want to be compensated with time off?

In this story, one company switches how they compensate their employees for overtime. They go from paying them to giving them time off.

Most of the employees are upset about this change, but one employee notices a huge problem considering how they are calculating the time off and how much overtime he is accumulating by being on call on the weekends.

Keep reading to see how he convinces the company to rethink their change in overtime payments.

Don’t want to pay me overtime? I don’t think that will work the way you think it will

Background

Many years ago I worked for a large multinational Software/Hardware/Consulting place that you will have heard of, we’ll call them $employer.

On this particular assignment I was a a small cog in a 300+ person project to run many of the IT systems of a major telecoms company.

Here’s some more context about OP’s job.

My particular responsibility was Application Support for the customer care area.

This covered an internal web-app that the client’s helpdesk used to look up customer details, do upgrades, refunds, address changes etc, as well as the public FAQ website and the email ticketing system used to communicate with their customers.

Most of this software was written by the ~15 person dev team that sat a few short steps away from my desk, who were largely great to work with.

I joined just as the first very small release went live, and with each new release they added more features and more helpdesk people. So at the start, there were two of us supporting this app, with the idea that as more releases and features were added and the workload increased, they would add more people to the team to help out.

But instead, there were fewer people.

Workload increases

So after a few months we’ve had the first two software releases, the number of users is ramping up and we are having more and more tickets to deal with.

At this point though, the other guy on the team whispered in a few managers ears and got transferred to one of the other workstreams but no-one thought to replace him with anyone else. So now it was just me doing all the support by myself, which had the inevitable consequence of wait times for tickets going up.

As an example, I had a very nice lady from one of the other support teams come over and politely ask me when I might get a chance to look at the ticket she has raised.

Here’s how the conversation went.

The conversation went something like this:

PoliteLady: Hi there, I have a question about a ticket assigned to you.

UraniumSnail: Sure, what’s the ticket number?

PoliteLady: 123456. We need you to implement it before we can add . Do you think you can look at it in the next few days?

He looks it up.

UraniumSnail: Ah, it’s a Sev3

(“Sev” meaning “Severity”, where Sev1 is a system outage, Sev2 is Urgent but not critical, Sev3 is basically the default and Sev4 is “Nice to have”)

I then do some maths in my head, thinking of all the other things higher priority than a Sev3 and reply:

UraniumSnail: 4 weeks.

PoliteLady:

But it could take even longer.

UraniumSnail: That’s if there are no Sev1 outages for the next month and no-one raises any more Sev2’s. Oh and we are averaging 3 Sev1’s per week right now.

PoliteLady: Oh. Is there anyone else I can talk to?

UraniumSnail: No sorry, it’s just me, that’s why it will take 4 weeks.

PoliteLady:

The reality, of course, is that I would never get to look at a Sev3, which I think she realised.

But the workday wasn’t over when OP went home.

On call rota

Since there were public facing elements to the system, we also had an on-call rota in case of out of hours problems. There was a shared support phone, which I think was a Nokia 3310 – whose ringtone still gives me PTSD when I hear it.

The rota consisted of me and the guy who left for the other team, as he still wanted to pull in some extra cash.

You see for all it’s failings $employer actually had a really good overtime setup, which included the on-call time.

He made a lot of extra money with this on-call situation.

We’d alternate each week, starting on Monday evening and then being on call for all the time we were not in the office until the following Monday.

So if I was in the office for 8 hours, then I’d be on call for 16, then work for 8, back on call for 16 etc. So doing a ~40 hour week I’d be on call for about 128 hours.

We’d get paid 1/4 of our hourly rate for being on call, but then there’s a bonus multiplier depending on if its a regular work night, weekend or bank holiday. So I was basically doubling my salary thanks to the on-call gravy train.

I mean, the 2am call outs were not much fun, especially when you have to work for 5 hours to get the system back up again, then come back in the next day to deal with the fallout, but the money was good and I was young.

Being on-call was all the overtime OP could handle.

I wasn’t really doing much overtime other than the on call and call-outs, as when you are repeatedly called out in the middle of the night you don’t much feel like going the extra mile the rest of the time.

I was doing enough that we very rarely had an outage during the day, but didn’t have time to do anything proactive or think about long term improvements, I could only just keep my head above water.

I think the number of Sev2’s was actually increasing over time, and dealing with a Sev3 was only a dream.

I’d occasionally have a meeting with one of the three Service Managers I reported to, who’d moan a little about the number of old open tickets, but I’d just ask them what my priority should be and they’d concede I was doing the right thing.

And yes, I reported to three Managers, which worked about as well as you’d expect, but that’s for another time.

Something’s up!

Email from Management

I arrive to work one day and I’m stopped by one of the support people from another team:

SupportPerson: Have you seen the announcement?

UraniumSnail: What announcement?

SupportPerson: Check your email.

It’s not good news.

This happens at least three times before I’ve even got to my desk.

I’m now intrigued and slightly fearful about what I might find. Has the project been canned? Are we going to get the project away day that has been rumoured for months?

My laptop has never taken so long to boot up, but when it does the news is not good.

Overtime payments are over. Starting in two months time, all overtime will be compensated by Time Off In Lieu (TOIL). Yeah that acronym is apt.

But it might actually be good news.

No more doubling of my salary, no more nice holidays, no more… wait a sec.

I’ve just reached the bit where they explain how the amount of TOIL is calculated from the amount of overtime.

That can’t be right.

I go to the spreadsheet I use to track my hours and start making some edits based on the email. Edits complete, I start trying out some numbers.

Well, well, what do we have here. A plan is forming.

Suddenly, OP decides to work a little bit of overtime.

The Compliance

For the next month, I do just a little bit of overtime each day. Sometimes an hour, sometimes more. If we have a bad week for Sev1’s and call-outs, then I don’t do as much, but if we have a quiet week then I’m staying after hours every night.

A week or two into my new regime I have a meeting with a Service Manager, and they are now a bit happier as the ticket queue has actually gone down for the first time in ages.

I say nothing about the TOIL, and as the meeting is ending they are actually surprised I didn’t bring it up, as they have been getting an earful from all the other support people.

He doesn’t let on that he’s up to something.

I play it down, and say that I haven’t really thought about it yet but I’m sure it’ll be fine.

The meeting ends with them thanking me about taking it so calmly.

I just smile.

After working like this for a month, it’s now time for phase 2 of the plan.

Phase 2 involved showing a manager a spreadsheet.

I book a meeting with one of the Service Managers, and bring my laptop with the overtime spreadsheet. The meeting goes something like this:

UraniumSnail: I have some concerns about the upcoming TOIL change.

ServiceManager: Do you? What are they?

UraniumSnail: Well I track my hours in this spreadsheet so that it’s easier to submit my overtime payments, and I thought I’d update it to support the new TOIL process.

ServiceManager: Ok…

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It takes a while for the manager to understand the problem.

UraniumSnail: Well if you look at my hours for the past month, and look at the weeks when I’m on call, then the amount of Time Off that the project will owe me is calculated as this much

ServiceManager: Right…? What’s the problem?

UraniumSnail: Do you not see the issue? For this week where I’m on call, I’m owed 41 hours of time off, but I’m only contracted to work 37 hours per week.

ServiceManager: What does that mean?

OP breaks it down.

UraniumSnail: It means, that for any week that I’m on call I’d have to take the entire next week off work, paid for by the project. No work would get done on my workstream. No tickets would be completed, no Change Requests and no root cause analyses will be done. We’d only be able to do half the number of tickets that we currently do, and that’s already pretty low.

ServiceManager: Erm…

UraniumSnail: Not only that, but the extra few hours over my contracted hours will gradually add up, so that at some point I won’t even be able to be on call for the full week.

ServiceManager: Take me through the maths again.

OP knew exactly what he was doing and knew he couldn’t get in trouble.

Yes, you see for the previous month I’d been making sure that I’d done just enough overtime clearing down tickets that the amount of TOIL I would be owed under the new system would be more than my contracted hours.

The Service Managers couldn’t complain about the extra hours as they wanted the ticket queue to go down, and the Project Managers couldn’t complain as this was their idea in the first place.

The Service Manager said to “leave it with him” and the meeting ended.

The compliance was effective!

The aftermath

Two weeks later an email came out from Management saying that the TOIL change was being “postponed”.

I’d like to think that it was all my doing, but it may have also been the fact that many of the support people were talking about getting their names off the various on-call rotas, as it wasn’t really worth doing just for time off.

Management couldn’t just make the TOIL rates worse either, as they were mandated by the company, so they didn’t really have a choice but to back off once they were shown the numbers.

And he finally had some help.

As for my workstream, the Service Managers seemed to get the hint as within a few months the team had grown from just me to 4 of us.

I finally had the time to do preventative maintenance, as well as spending more time talking with the Development team.

This eventually allowed me to move to a role that was 50/50 support and development, which started me on the path to being a full time software developer.

The on-call gravy train chugged along for another couple of years, until the whole company watered it down from 1/4 to 1/10th of the hours. The project never switched to TOIL.

Complying was very effective! Although it kind of would’ve been cool if he was able to just be on call and never actually have to work during the week!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person is in a similar situation.

Another person shares their overtime story.

This would’ve been even better!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who thought HR was doing them a favor, only to realize they were really saving the company money.

Another person would’ve stockpiled the TOIL!

I kind of like that last comment’s suggestion, but I’m not sure if he really could’ve pulled it off. Imagine accruing enough time off that you don’t have to work for 25 years! That would be insane!

It sounds like it worked out well for OP, though. He was able to keep the extra money for being on-call instead of having the whole week off work, and he was able to increase his skill set when his department gained a few extra employees.

Well done! If only all malicious compliance stories were this successful!