The policy is you can only work from home when it benefits the company, not you.
As a middle manager in a corporate hellscape, one of my few joys in life is setting logic traps for HR and making them choose between admitting company policy is bullshit or directly instructing me to violate labor laws.
Doing the Lord’s work there, Sonny!
I would love an example, but can accept you can’t produce one without compromising yourself.
The current argument I’m involved in is about an online platform that people can use to give recognition to each other. HR is telling me to give my team negative performance reviews for not using it regularly.
They love to remind me that there’s an app that everyone can install on their phone. The thing is, my team aren’t allowed to use their phones at work. So, the goal is to get them to tell me in writing that using this online platform is mandatory and that my hourly staff has to do it off the clock or face repercussions which is illegal.
if it’s the latter, just get it in writing.
That’s the goal.
Theres something enormously satisfying about asking the question “And are you willing to give me that in writing?”
Then watching them squirm as something in their brain goes full Ackbar “ITS A TRAP!”
A previous job of mine wanted people in my team to volunteer for being on call overnight for a week at a time.
No-one did, so they forced us. I emailed all managers involved including HR I said that I would like to opt-out for various reasons like family, mental and physical health, and also that the pay was in no way adequate for what they wanted. Again they pushed, so I replied with I’ll do it but would be unavailable most afternoons and evenings with my kids and things they have on. That I also won’t be able to answer after going to sleep because I take my mental health very seriously and need quality sleep to function.
So the first night I slept peacefully as I normally do as I have my phone set to go to DND automatically. I got called in because I didn’t answer a call that came in last night, I asked when it was, about midnight, and said well that’s because I was asleep.
Go to the next 2 mangers up, say the same thing and they say that I need to answer. I explain the email stating that I would be unable to answer calls at many times including when asleep and how no-one replied with that being a problem. One of the managers was like, wait up, you flagged this; yup; can you send me the email chain; yup. Got removed and told I wouldn’t need to worry about doing it anymore.
It found a new job shortly after that.
I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.
They’ll hire remote drivers from India soon enough.
I’ve traveled in India - there’s no way that would produce anything but piles of dead children. My money’s on being replaced by AI first.
The same AI that was doing those Amazon go stores?