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Wanted to see if your company had some rules that you find "stupid or dumb", its not a debate of wether we think its right or wrong.
Here's two that i find pretty stupid.
1. Executive and upper management can walk in and out through the front entrance, which only requires a badge to get into the building. Lower class employees have to walk through the back door and must badge in and out of the building (lunch or walking in). All employees that have access to these doors are salaried, but only "lower class" are watched when it comes to badging out (since you don't badge out if your a top level employee). They are also allowed to park in the front of the building, while others have to park on the side and walk down to the back entrance .
2. If you are bringing personal property, you need to fill out a form at security and notify them if you are bringing the property back home. This applies for any "technology" items outside of your phone, iPod and wallet.
What's some strange or dumb things have you seen before as company rules?
The last toxic company I worked for had lots of odd rules. You couldn't use your cellphone in the office. HR would monitor all internet time and proactively email your manager with that information.
One thing I did agree with was you were not allowed to access your work email remotely or through a cell phone, they strongly felt that no one should work after 5pm when they closed for the day, locked the doors and put the alarm on. They also offered flextime which was pretty good.
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My last job had subjective lunch hour rules. Some staff people had an hour lunch period while others had a half hour. It sucked for me because I don't eat lunch so I ended up having to be "available" nine hours a day while others only had to give up 8 1/2 hours.
One of my previous employers decided to require "volunteer work". They allowed the Monday-Friday workers to do their "volunteer work" during normal work hours. They wanted us shift staff workers to do it unpaid on our days off. BTW- it was volunteer work only at company designated activity. If you volunteered somewhere else it didn't count. If you didn't "volunteer" would be used against you in determining the bonus.
We have a lot of dumb ones, but the really dumb things happen when two rules collide, such as:
a. Failure to follow the written rules can result in termination.
b. Failure to follow supervisory direction can result in termination.
c. Supervisor directs you to not follow the written rules resulting in termination if you follow the direction and termination if you don't.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,563 posts, read 81,147,605 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 11thHour
I had a job in college that had the following line in the job description:
"..and any other duties as assigned."
Haha. No. Lesson learned, never again.
That has been in every job description I have ever done, and is currently in the job descriptions of all 2,000 employees where I work currently. It's just standard language to cover anything that might come up, and is rarely invoked.mi think I have used it once in the last 6 years as a manager here.
Our only dumb rule is no microwave popcorn, because someone complained about the smell.
Wanted to see if your company had some rules that you find "stupid or dumb", its not a debate of wether we think its right or wrong.
Here's two that i find pretty stupid.
1. Executive and upper management can walk in and out through the front entrance, which only requires a badge to get into the building. Lower class employees have to walk through the back door and must badge in and out of the building (lunch or walking in). All employees that have access to these doors are salaried, but only "lower class" are watched when it comes to badging out (since you don't badge out if your a top level employee). They are also allowed to park in the front of the building, while others have to park on the side and walk down to the back entrance .
2. If you are bringing personal property, you need to fill out a form at security and notify them if you are bringing the property back home. This applies for any "technology" items outside of your phone, iPod and wallet.
What's some strange or dumb things have you seen before as company rules?
We briefly had a rule that all e-mail attachments must be opened, no matter how suspicious they looked, because it "might be a customer trying to get in touch with us!" This rule was rescinded after a week of everyone constantly getting viruses.
One company where I worked several years apparently prided itself on having pointless rules and policies. I think they established and enforced them, just to show all the employees the power they had over them. Here's a couple of them: Although everyone was underpaid, except for the owners, they told us we should make a contribution of a percentage of our pay to the United Way. But we were to give the money to them, so they could give it in a lump sum, to the UW. That way, they got credit for it, not us as individuals. They implied that if we didn't comply, things would not go well for our future employment there. I never gave them a penny and I don't think any of the other workers in my small department did either.
No. 2: They had a rule against a married couple being employed by them. The only justification for this was to say that it would result in a duplication of benefits. That was silly, as in fact, it might have saved them some costs on benefits. One employee, one set of benefits. How would a married couple get more than their share of benefits? One of my co-workers had to resign, after marrying a woman in another department. I wonder what they would have done, if two employees had shacked-up? For several months, a woman in a different department and I were steadily seeing each other. But we never came near each other on the job and were both tight-lipped about it. But several times, we were both reminded of the rule about married couples, by higher-ups in the business. How had they even known, unless they were spying on our private lives?
But several years later, two outstanding employees, well-known in their field, were both recruited separately to come there and work. They became the two best performers they'd ever had. Then, they got married and the idiot owners tried to force one to resign, which of course, would have caused both to resign and take one of the many outstanding offers they had to go to similar, but larger companies in big cities. But these people fought it and took the owners to court. Of course they won and the policy had to be dropped. They became even more well-known because of it and then took the offer to go to one of the best companies in the world in their field, at several times as much pay.
Last edited by Steve McDonald; 08-01-2016 at 09:45 PM..
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