I’ll start. Mines rather low on the unreasonable scale, but obviously someone in management thought it was a good idea.
Working an IT help desk one time where there was a policy that if you had 8 hours on the clock you also had to have 8 hours recorded in ticket times. Apparently bathroom and misc breaks aren’t actually a thing no matter what the law says.
Tales of malicious compliance with said policies are also welcome.
Working at a large grocery store and you were not allowed a bandaid if you cut yourself. One day I was on the checkout till, with blood running down my finger, trying to ring in a customers groceries. I was told I could go and buy myself a box of bandaids but thought “nope, I’ll just bleed on people instead”. Eventually another employee went into the forbidden first aid kit and got me a bandaid.
A person on the night cleaning crew was observed eating a sandwich in the bathroom over by the sinks when an executive walked in. So his response was to send out a company wide memo telling people not to eat their lunch in the bathroom. We joked about taking people out to lunch and then heading towards the bathroom for weeks.
I worked for a company that had an insane weirdo who worshipped Halloween, and ran a parade behind the building every year at that time. Everyone was “encouraged” to participate. But if you did not, this person would pay you a visit to ask why you were not dressing up, at least, and taking part.
I was just a low-level team leader so I could blow it off without much more than insulting this person and incurring her stink-eye for a while, but I know management were pressured into dressing up and partaking in the whole thing, lest they seem “un-teamlike”. I know they were embarrassed.
Worked at a telecom outfit a million years ago headed by a moron CEO who would come in every few weeks with some new brainstorm inspired by the throwaway marginalia in his glossy C-suite magazines.
Example one: He announced one day that blue pens were banned. This was because he’d read that blue ink was traditionally used for printer corrections because classic photocopy machines couldn’t see it and wouldn’t reproduce it. Therefore, we were never again to use blue-ink pens in the office, because whatever we wrote might not xerox correctly. (His story is within frisbee distance of actual facts, but this was his warped version. Let it go.) He actually had the exec-level admins roam the whole company confiscating blue pens.
Example two: He also read somewhere that some nonzero value figure could be assigned to paper clips that were used to secure material that was then permanently filed, which meant those clips were “lost to re-use” and thus constituted waste. His solution? Paper clips were banned. (You may note a theme.) They were removed from the supply closet and were never to be re-ordered. If you had a stack of papers to keep together, you stapled it, or used a folder. If material came into the office with a paper clip on it, we were directed to immediately remove the clip and staple the sheaf together. The gap in his directive was in the subsequent disposal of said clips, and a thriving underground trade quickly sprung up. One guy cornered the market; he had a bucket under his desk with all the paper clips he’d managed to accumulate.
The company went bankrupt a year or so after I got fed up and bailed. I’m sure you’re surprised.
I worked for a company many years ago that had an unofficial policy of… well, I’ll let you try to figure it out.
This was an assisted living facility so we peons usually worked a 4 on, 2 off schedule. 4 days on, 2 days off. This naturally led to some people needing to request days off in the middle of the week. There was no such thing as vacation time so TPTB would allow one worker to trade shifts with another. There was a nice clear form that both parties needed to fill out to make it all official.
So lets say person A wanted a specific day off and person B was willing to pick up that shift. A and B would fill out the requisite paperwork and then B would officially be on the schedule for that shift. Seemed straightforward.
But here’s the kicker. If B didn’t show up for that shift – the shift they had agreed in writing to cover – A would be written up for failing to work “their” shift. And if B did cover the shift as agreed but it put B into overtime, than B and A would get written up.
This practice was well-known but I have no idea if it was actually spelled out in writing. We all knew about it so the practical effect was that nobody ever traded shifts. Ever. We would request days off months in advance and if they weren’t granted well then hard luck. Nobody was willing to chance not having coverage.
Funny, management was always bitching about the turnover, too.
Fuck that place. I’m told the management company went defunct some years after I left. Good riddance.
So the employer provided a first aid kit that was available to employees. A kit that employees were forbidden from using it, even for need things like… first aid. Instead employees were required to go purchase whatever first aid items were required using their own scratch? Because the occasional use of first aid supplies was somehow costing too much money, I assume?
Personally I’d be tempted to file a worker’s comp claim for ever stubbed toe and paper cut. Show them just how much money they’re saving by not providing a few generic Band-Aids to employees who actually need them. But I’m petty like that.
Been there, suffered that. The corporate version of this is United Way donation campaigns, which, thankfully, I have not had the misfortune of being subjected to.
The most inane one was how they used to determine our production for overtime hours.
In my job, we get applications, and my job is to evaluate these applications, and then either approve it (called “allowance” in the jargon), or write a report detailing any defects in the application, and soliciting an amendment to correct the defects. In my experience, probably 95%+ of applications require such a report, very few are allowable in the condition they are first submitted.
The deadline to respond to a report was, at the time, six months, and just about every applicant took the full six months to reply - down to the day, in most cases.
Now, in our normal work, we are required to produce an action every so many hours, an action being writing a report or allowing an application. For overtime, though, they wanted to see an increase in allowances in the month I claimed the overtime.
But of course, if you think about how my work is structured, almost any work I do today won’t produce an additional allowance for at least six months.
Now, most people would just game the system, and report an allowance based off a previous report from six months earlier as an overtime allowance, which kind of defeated the purpose. So their system for overtime pretty much required lying to justify your overtime hours.
They’ve fixed it since then, thankfully, but it was like that for several years before they figured it out.
Shortly before I was fired under mysterious and probably unethical circumstances in 2010 from a job I half-expected to retire from, we were told in a department meeting that upper management ordered that each department select several people as designated snitches - in other words, if someone takes 32 minutes for lunch, tell on them, that kind of thing. This wasn’t the exact words they used, but you get the idea.
I was later talking about it in the cafeteria with two other pharmacists, and we all agreed on exactly who they would choose to do this, and they would more than happily go along with it - 2 people definitely, possibly a 3rd. One of them was a person who was impossible to fire, or even discipline, for reasons I never figured out (oh, wait).
Yeah, they did me a favor in the long run.
30 years ago I worked in a shop that converted paper maps to GIS.
The shop ran 24/7. Being a 24/7 shop, TPTB supplied free coffee. A damn good idea to keep people awake at what could be a very boring job. But then they decided to put in one of those 25 cents a cup vending machines that spit out horrible coffee and take away free coffee.
A really really stupid idea. Ya want alert workers? Or less productivity? Stupid bean counters, this probably saved them $50 a month.
You are describing my brother’s workplace. My bro got demoted over 20 years ago for not showing up for a graveyard shift that someone else agreed, in writing, to cover. Bro asked for coverage because his wife was being induced and his parents were arriving in town the next day. His baby was being born when he got the call that he had to come in. He said, nope. He had followed the rules. He is still in that demoted position. Company has new owners who are actually paying attention to what went on. Bro is getting promoted again and the raise he hasn’t received in twelve years (depressed industry, so there’s that). He says he’s still retiring on his schedule, not theirs.
Travel accounting horror stories could probably be its own thread. Hell, maybe even its own forum.
At one job, you were pretty much forced to lie on your expense report to get fully compensated.
Rules like - you are allowed $15 each for breakfast and lunch and $25 for dinner, but no more than $50 per day. No, you cannot eat the free hotel breakfast, spend $10 on fast food at lunch, then $26 on dinner for a total of $36 (which is less than $50) for the day. You would get your ass reamed for overspending $1 on dinner and your reimbursement check would stiff you the dollar.
However, there was a huge loophole. No receipts needed for any expense under $15. So we ended up reporting a lot of $14.95 taxi rides and $14.99 breakfasts while eating the free hotel spread. One software developer came up with an Excel spreadsheet where you could enter your real expenses, and it would shift the numbers around into different categories until every thing was under the limits and you still got paid back everything.
This huge headache and time suck could have been eliminated by ditching Reasonable&Actual and going to a per diem system, but no way in hell was upper management who could approve their own expense reports going to go for that.
Speaking of travel policies, we use SAP Concur for travel and expense management. A few weeks ago, I had to book a hotel for a trip about four hours away by car. The “most preferred hotel” for that company location is a Hilton Garden Inn and it’s about three miles from the location. But when I tried to book it, I received a warning that the rate exceeded the standard for that hotel and that I would have to provide a justification for exceeding the standard. Just for fun, I tried booking the Sheraton Hotel instead as it’s even closer to the company location. No warning received, although the Sheraton would have cost $300 versus $182 for the Hilton. Oh, and the warning was because the rate for the Hilton exceeded the expected rate by a whole dollar. So either justify spending an extra dollar or book a hotel costing a hundred dollars a night more and not have to provide any justification.
(I try to be a good steward of company funds, so I stayed at the cheaper Hilton.)
You’re a much better person than I am. Company travel rules introduced me to the concept of malicious compliance, and I got a lot of practice at that job.
The radio broadcasting business is rather casual, but I worked for a radio station that required all male employees (sales, announcers and engineering) to wear a dress shirt, tie, dress pants and a sport coat (or suit) while in the building during business hours. I worked weekends and sometimes stopped in on a weekday to pick up my paycheck. I actually had to put on that get-up for a two-minute visit lest I be spotted by management. Legend had it that one hapless newsman who trudged a couple of miles through heavy snow to get there for his shift was sent home because he hadn’t worn a tie.
Back when my mom was a teacher, the policy in case of a bomb threat was for the teachers to evacuate all of the students… and then the teachers were to go back inside to look for the bomb. Because of course they know what all of their students’ lunchboxes and bookbags look like, so they would easily recognize an item that didn’t belong.
And people wonder why we still need teachers’ unions.
That reminded me of my last work trip to San Diego. They’d started trying to cut expenses since my previous trip. So of course I couldn’t stay in the nice hotel suggested by the conference, that was right next to the convention center. They booked me into the crappy hotel that was damn near on the other side of the city.
And of course, taxi fares there and back every day were more than the difference between the nice hotel and the crappy one.
Well over 40 years ago, I was a Kelly Girl. The job I remember to this day was to sit in front of the file cabinets, open each file, remove all paper clips and then staple the documents together on opposite sides of the neighbors. This was to save room in the file cabinets. They paid me to spend three days doing this. I didn’t care, I was getting paid. The ladies who actually used the file cabinets were furious at the stupid idea and they were right, it was a stupid decision and they really did need more file cabinets.
A poster on another website is a retired schoolteacher, and she’s told the story many times of the superintendent who extended the business-attire dress code to any time teachers left the house. And yes, he relied on snitches to tell him if they saw someone out in public in non-business attire, and he didn’t last very long for this and other reasons.
IIRC, this was in the 1990s, too.
We used to take photographs of things in the workplace so we would have a record of their appearance. My boss decided we needed to economize so he told us to take less photos. That was too vague to be an actual policy so we asked him to provide some guidelines; what situations should we take photos of and what situations should we not (and thereby not have a record of)?
You could see him sweating. He didn’t want to commit to telling us we didn’t need to take photos in a specific situation because it might later turn out we should have taken a photo.
Then he got it. He looked at us and told us we should only take photos in situations where we would need photographic evidence later on.