Boss Came Down On His Employees for What He Thought Was Time Manipulation. It Didn’t Go Well.

Don’t you just love it when a boss tries to implement a new policy at work that EVERYONE knows will fail miserably…and then that’s exactly what happens?!?!

You better believe it!

That’s the good stuff!

And this story will make all of you very happy.

Take a look at what this worker had to say.

“I work in a small startup company of around 12 people. It’s a very good atmosphere in the office and everyone pulls their weight and is super motivated.

There’s one problem…

However, our boss likes to micromanage us, even though he has no expertise in any of our fields (Marketing/Design/Accounting/…). Especially us in Marketing and Design suffer a lot from that, since he will make changes to our strategies/posts/website, sometimes without telling us, and then gets upset at US when the customer feedback is bad and we arent reaching our predicted goals.

So recently, he told us that the reason he thinks we aren’t seeing enough results is because we are manipulating our hours and not actually putting in the work we should. Until then we each wrote down our hours manually in an excel sheet, but with the new time tracking tool, he would see how long we were working down to the minute.

We also could only log in on our desk PCs (and previously approved homeoffice devices), but not mobile because “if you are not at your desk, it is not work”.

He was in for a big surprise.

After our initial shock passed and our boss left for the day, our manager called for a meeting and we came up with a plan. We would do as he says, in the most “just following the rules way” possible.

We would not engage in work related conversations with him unless we are sitting at our desks and are clocked in.

Any questions by him which are asked after we are clocked out will only be answered once we clock in again the following day.

This was gonna be fun!

Every phone call, textmessage or otherwise work related things outside of the office would only be answered once there was an option for us to clock in, either next day in office, or for some of us on our homeoffice device.

Since we no longer have the option to “shift” time manually, all workminutes and hours would be clocked exactly when they took place (sidenote: in my country, weekends pay better, sundays have to be paid double and working after 8PM warrants additional financial benefits by law.

Previously, if we needed to post something real quick or had a question, we would just add the weekend hours or late time to the upcoming monday. Basically out of good will. But no more of that!)

We would stop any independent activity (like posting on social media or writing an email) and would send him EVERYTHING to approve before following through.

I think he learned his lesson…

After about a week, our boss was so fed up with this, he gave us the option to clock in from our mobile devices, so he could get a more immediate response to his questions. However, this of course led to us clocking in ways more frequently (since, as I said, he likes to micromanage, and is therefor asking a LOT of questions).

I’m happy to report that as of 2024, we have abolished the system again and regained most of our independence, and even though our boss is still mad about how we exploited the system, it brought the team closer together and homepully taught him a lesson.”

Let’s see how people reacted on Reddit.

This person said they were just following directions.

Another Reddit user nailed it.

This reader said they were holding their boss accountable.

Another person doesn’t think this was a positive thing for them.

And this reader said the boss didn’t learn anything from this.

Well, that didn’t work out…

Nice try, though!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.