This didn’t happen to me, but a former employer told me the story. A major Japanese company realized that every engineer was buying reference books on the company’s dime. So they decided to try to discourage it and open a reference library. So far so good. The trouble came when the cost accountants decided that every division of the company–including the library–must be profitable. So they had to charge each engineer’s division money to look at a reference book. So the divisions discouraged the engineers from doing that. The use of the library declined, the charges had to be raised and eventually they were in a death spiral while the divisions went back to their old practice of buying books for their engineers. It wasn’t the initial decision that was stupid, but their cost accounting.
One day in the mid 1990’s there was a huge snow storm that blanketed the East Coast with a couple of feet of snow. I drove through it and made my way to work, only to be told by the security guards that the site had been closed. I wisely scanned my employee badge in the reader before leaving.
When the office reopened we were all told that Corporate had made the following baffling decision: all exempt employees (salaried) would be paid for the snow day, while all nonexempt (hourly) employees would not be paid for the hours.
If an hourly employee had reported for work, they would receive 4 hours pay (my scan of the badge earned me 4 hours pay), otherwise they had to use a vacation day if they wanted to be paid.
All this did was piss off every hourly worker on the site, and bring along a substantial quantity of the salaried workers for the ride in a show of solidarity.
That spring and summer, it was common knowledge that every hourly worker took a “sick day” or two. I remember one fine day in May when I stopped by Shipping and asked “Hey, where’s Joe?” to which the other guys chuckled “Snow day!” in unison.
I used to work for a company for which (among other things) I had to arrange for the printing of office letterhead. A year’s worth would cost a few hundred dollars, tops. One day, because the company was losing money, the CFO decided to save money by having me send this job out for competitive bids. Now, normally that wouldn’t be a problem, except that I’d already sent out the purchase order. “Cancel it!” he said. I told him that at this point in the process, the work had already been done. The letterhead was at the printer, finished and ready to deliver. “Cancel it anyway!” Even when I explained that meant we wouldn’t get the letterhead and we’d still have to pay the printer, he still insisted.
I submitted the job for competitive bids. (Meanwhile, people were complaining because they didn’t have letterhead.) The winner was the usual printer, for the usual price. We got the letterhead, which is probably what they’d already printed. So the letterhead’s cost doubled that year.
There is a large discount brokerage house. They had many moderately highly paid ($60-90K fraud and compliance specialists in house. Now SF and NYC are the centers for that sort of worker. All the experienced workers in the field are there and in a few other urban centers.)
The bean counters in HR decided to move those jobs to Denver. Of course, almost no one moved with them. The HR people said they could get* plenty of applicants.* Sure= “applicants”. Not experienced experts.
so much.
I had a similar thing at one of my jobs. She had SUCH an attitude too. You felt like Oliver. “Please, ma’am. Can I have some more?” For just a single pen. I worked at another business in the same industry later and we had a free-for-all closet. Pens whenever I wanted! It was heaven. If I needed something special, our normally-awful office manager would actually comply. Then I changed locations within the company and my new supervisor would GRILL me. “Why do you need red felt tip?” “Well, I have to write vertically and everyone else uses blue or black ink and my notations have to be distinct, so… isn’t it kind of obvious?” Like… really? An entire box costs, what… $5? $10? And lasts me a year? How much money are we wasting on both our salaries having this discussion right now? I begrudgingly get the pens and be admonished to be careful with them, like she was doing a personal favor to me for giving me the supplies I needed to do my job.
I worked for Large Box Retailer. I wasn’t a cashier, but sometimes I’d run the register. I was called up to ring and had to ask one of the supervisors for a pen so a customer could write a check or sign a credit card slip or something. I was told “Large Box Retailer does not provide you with pens.” Well, then Large Box Retailer expects non-cash customers to pay by … psychic brainwaves? This was in the 90s, so pre-apps and most people weren’t comfortable using debit at the register yet. I’m sure this did save them a lot of money (ten registers a store, 2000 stores) but it was also extremely bad customer service when you could do nothing but stare blankly at a customer and say “Sorry, I have to go look for a pen,” when they whip out the checkbook.
I bet I know the name of the firm.
When I was a teenager, my first job was at a craft store (like a Michael’s or smaller Hobby Lobby, but an independently owned franchise). One of my jobs was to build displays and shelves. The owner had coffee cans full of nails he’d pulled from previous projects and from pallets. The used nails were, of course, bent all to hell and back. The owner had me straighten and reuse them. Even as a 15 year old, making minimum wage ($3.15/hr IIRC), I thought, “Ya know, you’re probably paying me more to try to straighten these than you would to just go buy a few miserable pounds of nails.”
Fun fact: once a nail has been bent into the shape of a question mark, even if it’s painstakingly tapped straight again, it will bend again reaaaaally easily when you try to hammer it into wood. A lot of people don’t know that.
I worked for a company that had a purchasing policy that allowed any employee to submit P.O.s for their own needs - a software company and anything short of a new computer was fine. All on the honor policy and it was not abused - people self-policed.
After an acquisition, the word came down that line management approval was needed for even minor purchases. A distrustful and hated policy so managers just approved requests. However employees had stopped self-policing, submitted requests for more stuff and costs went up.
The hammer came down on managers to be more strict and costs came back down but everyone’s morale suffered.
Back in the late '80s I was a producer for a computer game startup company. We we pioneering multimedia games on CDs and needed a prototype to show to venture capitalists. I asked my boss what the schedule and budget were, and she said, “As soon as possible, for as little as possible”. She told me if she gave me a budget, I would just spend it all. So I spent as much as I wanted and it took as long as I needed.
I worked for a large company with multiple branches around the US. We had about 30 people in our location, sales staff, support staff and engineers.
In order to save money, the company decided to do away with the receptionist position, who also acted as the office manager. Probably the lowest paid job in the branch. Instead of having one person that handled incoming calls, mailing packages, ordering lunches, reordering supplies and other small jobs that kept the office running, we all had to do our own, and we all had to take time to answer the bell that rang whenever an incoming phone call went to the front desk (either someone calling in to the general office number, or pressing *1 when they got a voicemail).
So we all were spending our time explaining that no, this wasn’t the IRS (one of our numbers was 1 digit off of an IRS #, and an IRS publication had been misprinted), in handing out mail, and in figuring out how to order another box of pens.
Dumb-asses.
At one of my places of employment we were able to go to the shipping department (why shipping, I don’t know) and request batteries. Nothing fancy like watch batteries, but AA, AAA, C, 9 volts, etc. were all available at the asking. The work place was half offices, half labs with ~500 people, most of them very technical (probably 30% PhDs). Being what we were, we went though a lot of batteries and not just for our wireless keyboards and mice. I can imagine that this company battery store was expensive, at least a few hundred a month if not more than a thousand. Anyway, some mid level manager decided to cut this off and stopped the shipping lead (again, why he supplied the batteries, I don’t know) from stocking batteries.
Being a large employer in a smallish town, we had a line of credit at the local hardware store. Any employee could go to the hardware store, show their company ID, and take any reasonable purchase (<$50) at no charge. We were required to bring give the receipt to our accounts payable guy with a note on what it was for so he could charge it correctly. After the batteries were gone, it became common for people, and very expensive people at that, to take 30 minutes out of their day to drive over to the hardware store to get a AAA battery for their mouse or laser pointer. Many of them would also stop at kick ass coffee shop or even the great micro brewery that was in the same neighborhood since they had made the drive. The costs had to have been astronomical.
Luckily, this state didn’t last long. When the lab director found out what happened a month or two later he corrected both the mistake and the manager responsible.
I spent many years as a computer consultant, moving around to lots of big companies. I have dozens of these stories. Many re-occur at various companies,
The office-supplies cabinet as vault idea. This seemed to happen at lots of places. Every time, the time used by highly-paid employees looking for the office manager to get one new pen cost way more than the savings in supply costs.
One extreme example, the supplies manager even kept a tally or each employee, and how many supplies they had used, and sometimes she refused to issue another pen or pad of paper, because that employee had ‘used too many’. Some other departments (without the office-supplies famine) used to bribe the computer programming staff: ‘move our programming project to the head of the priority list, and we’ll slip you 2 boxes of pens and one of markers’. That couldn’t be good for the schedule (to say nothing of the effect on morale).
Another financial company, just down the street, had a much better system. About August, the office manager sent a memo to all employees, saying: “Buy your school supplies at our corporate volume discount prices!” with an order form with prices attached. Employees submitted an order for the supplies they wanted, and the office boy delivered boxes of the ordered supplies to each employee’s desk just before Labor Day/school starting. Minimal supplies shrinkage, and employees were happy about getting school supplies at a discount. Much better morale there.
The cut utility costs effort: Several companies tried to save by cutting the number of florescent tubes in the light fixtures. Like SCR4 mentioned, it never seemed to reduce electricity use. Probably because employees brought in desk lamps, to get enough light to do their work. And most of them used incandescent bulbs.
Another company thought employees were using too much water in the washroom. So they hired a plumber to put flow reducers in the toilets. (The plumbers bill would have paid for months of water bills.) And now it took 2 or 3 flushes to empty the toilets – water usage went up!
The playing games with year-end paychecks idea seemed to be used often. Lots of managers asked staff to not report overtime hours in late December, but submit them in January. This was usually not to save the company money, but to make the manager come in under-budget at year-end.
When I was a self-employed consultant, the manager once told (not asked) me he was going to hold my December invoice until January to submit it for payment. No problem for me – I knew our contract specified a higher rate for the next year. (And it carefully specified “invoices paid after December 31st” – I was no novice at this contracting.)
One friend did quite well from this. She worked for years for the railroad, as a part-time, temporary worker. The union contract specified that any part-timer who worked 80 hours or more in a pay period must be hired as a full-time employee (and join the union). The railroad wanted to avoid this, so they had a special computer program to warn managers when a part-timer reached 70 hours; then they would be laid off for the rest of the pay period.
One year, her boss, trying to meet his budget goals for the year, held off on entering her December hours until in January. So he didn’t notice when she went to 92 hours that pay period. But she knew, and as soon as she got her first January paycheck, she was showing that to the union steward, and paying her first months’ union dues. The benefits, job security, and eventually pension that she got was the best Christmas present she ever got, she said.
The eliminate support staff idea. Countless companies have done this. I’ve never seen the savings in elimination a $10/hour office boy to deliver faxes, computer printouts, mail to programmers at their desks, and instead have those $30 and $40/hour professionals interrupt their work to walk across the floor to the printer. And often, run into a friend, and spend several minutes talking there.
My first real job was at a Octoplex movie theatre. The first week was fine, then some beancounter decided to save money and get cheaper garbage bags. Not only were the inferior bags not soda tight, most of the time they were not popcorn tight. There were no barrels-on-wheels, so we left snail trails of Cinemuck ™ behind us every time we cleaned a theatre. The carpet cleaner guys made a fortune steam cleaning the rugs to get the sticky soda and ground in popcorn out of the carpets.
My company has eliminated paper hand towels in restrooms. Mind you, this has been done to “save trees” because, you know, my company cares so much for the environment. Also, individual desk garbage cans have been eliminated and replaced with a jumbo-sized one located a good 5-minute walk away. Trash accumulates on the desk until we get the time to do the trash-walk, but hey, the company saved a few dollars.
Our company recently remodeled the entire office at great expense, adding several new conference rooms with big wall-mounted monitors. Because we’re a creative place, there’s an on-going poll to give the new conference rooms creative names. All good so far.
Problem is, the monitors in the new conference rooms don’t work, because someone decided they shouldn’t be set up and added to our network until they could be identified by the official conference room names. So, to save the expense of paying an IT guy to do that twice – maybe $500 – we have to huddle around someone’s laptop whenever we have meetings in our new, spare-no-expense conference rooms.
You can’t connect the laptop directly to the monitor?
The monitors aren’t even initialized yet (or whatever). I don’t know exactly what the process is, just that all we can get on the monitors is the manufacturer’s logo and a prompt to start set-up.
This wasn’t the most egregious example, but a recent one that was pretty short-sighted. My last company approved a conference for me, and all travel had to be coordinated through their internal travel department.
They would not approve a hotel in the area of the conference center, because it was more expensive than one “a little further out” that they had a relationship with. Thing was, the only way to get to the conference center from the hotel was via the freeway, so I spent $60/day on taxis to and from the conference, and $75 each way to get to and from the airport because that hotel had no airport shuttle. Any savings from the nightly rate was eaten up by ground transportation.
I think this was supposed to be cost-saving: One place where my husband worked, you weren’t allowed to order room service. But you were reimbursed for your meals. So if he didn’t want to go out for food, he’d order room service, but pay for it separately and get a separate receipt. It never showed up on his room bill, and the company never questioned the meal receipt. Weird…