Management Demanded Strict Clock-In Discipline. Staff Responded by Clocking Out With the Same Precision
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Managers should be careful when they demand strict work hours from salaried employees.
One company ordered every engineer to be sitting at their desk exactly at 8:30.
Instead of arguing, the veteran employees started following the clock in both directions.
Yeah that policy didn’t last long.
Want strict work hours? Ok, can do.
I used to work in a mid-sized company in the engineering department.
One of the managers started to get upset because if he walked around at exactly 8:30 (our start time) everyone was not in their seats.
He felt that engineers were being too lax with their time.
The edict went out that all engineers had to be in their seats exactly at start time.
He refused to comply.
I told my boss that I was not planning on complying because I was a salaried professional and expected to be treated as such and that if they didn’t trust me to put in an honest week’s work then they should fire me instead of micro-manage me.
The older (and much wiser) engineers took a different approach.
They all showed up 5 minutes early to make sure they were in their seats at 8:30, but also set an alarm for 5pm and would literally drop everything they were doing exactly at 5pm and leave the building.
They literally would not work a second past 5pm.
Is the manager having a meeting that was supposed to end at 5 but is running a little late? No, at 5pm a series of alarms would go off and everyone would stand up in the middle of the meeting to leave.
Does operations need technical support at 4:55? They have exactly 5 minutes on the phone with the engineer before he will have to get off the phone.
Is someone trying to discuss a work-related issue at 8:28? Better wait a couple minutes because no one in the engineering department is answering work-related questions for another 2 minutes.
Needless to say the policy didn’t last very long.
He’s right that the employees who decided to comply really were wiser. Sometimes complying with a silly policy is the perfect way to get it changed.
Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.
An engineer weighs in.
Another person shares their observation of engineers.
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Refusing to let employees work from home ended up being expensive for this company.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a tech support worker who told a manager a computer needed replaced, only to be told no thanks.
A software engineer shares their experience.
The engineers arrived before 8:30, refused to work a minute early, and walked out exactly at 5.
Once meetings and support calls started ending mid-conversation, management quickly dropped the strict schedule.
They wanted clock-watchers, and boy did they get them.
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