Interesting Company Policies
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I was just wondering what interesting company policies people had encountered at their work. (it's a slow afternoon here) For example, at one time the company I work for enacted a policy that said "all time shall be rounded to the 1/2 hour", personal time was to be rounded up and casual time was to be rounded down. What this meant was if you came in 45 minutes late, you recorded that as 1 hour late (personal time), and if you worked 45 min extra (casual time to make up for coming in late) you recorded it as 30 min casual time, so you still had to make up 30 min. Our ethics hotline was jammed with complaints about the policy and how it required us to mis-charge our time. The policy was quickly pulled. Joe Q
We had an appraisal system at one place where you had to put in: 3 things the employee should start doing 3 things the employee should keep doing 3 things the employee should stop doing I.e. - three negative actions were required! Being ever so slightly stubborn I only put third category items in if they were justified. Elaine (slightly compliant fluffy tigress)
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Not really a policy, but a couple of weeks ago we had an ISO9001 audit, and our quality manager sent an email with an attached shortcut to our network drive with our procedures and work instructions on it, saying that if the auditors asked us if we knew where to find our procedures, to show them that shortcut, and if they asked any more questions, refer them to her... Our ethics line received a couple of calls about that one :)
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
Having done IS9001 development this deserves a very out of date custard pie. Straight from a very cold fridge.
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I was just wondering what interesting company policies people had encountered at their work. (it's a slow afternoon here) For example, at one time the company I work for enacted a policy that said "all time shall be rounded to the 1/2 hour", personal time was to be rounded up and casual time was to be rounded down. What this meant was if you came in 45 minutes late, you recorded that as 1 hour late (personal time), and if you worked 45 min extra (casual time to make up for coming in late) you recorded it as 30 min casual time, so you still had to make up 30 min. Our ethics hotline was jammed with complaints about the policy and how it required us to mis-charge our time. The policy was quickly pulled. Joe Q
Over 15 and that policy is against federal law. Pre correction : U.S. Federal Law
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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At my last job the policies weren't odd, but they were not applied fairly. I got reprimanded for looking at CNN.com (non work related) and my boss spent half the day downloading illegal songs. Even if you tried to turn someone in, it would kick you in the butt. If you remember the Creepy Guy sent me an email and all it said was, "SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEER" Well, the number of each letter may be off, but you get the idea. Sent it to my boss, who sent it to HR who wrote me up because I had two unauthorized emails. Both to my husband. Yeah, I'm sure no one else has ever done that. The one thing at that company that I believe is illegal is they had a separate smoking policy for manufacturing versus non-manufacturing. Office workers could not smoke at all during working hours, but manufacturing could smoke during their breaks. I work for a large company now and we also have an ethics hotline/website. There are posters around about it as well so I don't know if ethics have been an issue in the past or if it's a newer thing that they are trying to promote.
I like java style curly braces{ //Its no secret } A while ago one of my work mates pointed out, quite kindly, how my braces didn't fit that mandatory style guide the company uses. He did this by typing the following code: (Typed from memory not exactly what was typed but close)
private Int64 Foo()
{
int SomeVariable = 0;
string someString = "45";
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.Append(someString + SomeVariable.ToString());
return Int32.Parse(sb.ToString());
}Needless to say I got to keep my braces.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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I was just wondering what interesting company policies people had encountered at their work. (it's a slow afternoon here) For example, at one time the company I work for enacted a policy that said "all time shall be rounded to the 1/2 hour", personal time was to be rounded up and casual time was to be rounded down. What this meant was if you came in 45 minutes late, you recorded that as 1 hour late (personal time), and if you worked 45 min extra (casual time to make up for coming in late) you recorded it as 30 min casual time, so you still had to make up 30 min. Our ethics hotline was jammed with complaints about the policy and how it required us to mis-charge our time. The policy was quickly pulled. Joe Q
At one company they sent out an email stating you could no longer listen to music. (Apparently, they noticed a huge amount of traffic going through a port in the firewall. Someone had set up a Kazaa server somehow gotten some ports opened in the firewall.) That caused an uproar, so they modified the policy to be that you can only listen to music on private devices, such as MP3 and CD players. The next day, they modified the policy again to allow people to use their computers to listen to music but only as long as it was on a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. Some, including myself, pointed out that our music was legal and actually had the receipts and/or CDs to prove it. The company then said you could store music you legally own on your computer and listen to it, but you couldn't share it. Then someone pointed out that iTunes allows you to legally share your music collection. So they allowed iTunes. That was ambiguous, since most the music on iTunes were clearly just copied from personal CDs. Finally, they just said that if they found any copyrighted material on your computer that you didn't own or weren't licensed to use, you'd be fired. (In a related vein; at one company when people left, before IT came visiting I cleaned off their computers to ensure files were checked in or the checkins cancelled and to copy any test or experimental projects to source control. One guy was fired for coming to work drunk on more than one occasion. When I cleaned off his system, I found he had written about a dozen lines of code in the previous three months and had thousands of dollars of high end pirated software on his system, including a top-of-the-line sound editor. What's really strange is that he clearly hadn't been using most of it. Never could figure out what he was thinking.) -- modified at 21:01 Tuesday 14th November, 2006
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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Having done IS9001 development this deserves a very out of date custard pie. Straight from a very cold fridge.
Trollslayer wrote:
this deserves a very out of date custard pie. Straight from a very cold fridge.
Perhaps lukewarm would work quite nicely too. You know, left out in the sun for a few days kind of warm :)
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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I was just wondering what interesting company policies people had encountered at their work. (it's a slow afternoon here) For example, at one time the company I work for enacted a policy that said "all time shall be rounded to the 1/2 hour", personal time was to be rounded up and casual time was to be rounded down. What this meant was if you came in 45 minutes late, you recorded that as 1 hour late (personal time), and if you worked 45 min extra (casual time to make up for coming in late) you recorded it as 30 min casual time, so you still had to make up 30 min. Our ethics hotline was jammed with complaints about the policy and how it required us to mis-charge our time. The policy was quickly pulled. Joe Q
Larry Dalton, Directory of ICom-IT[^] Software, that not so subtly insisted you had to be a Baptist to be human, and that gays and women and muslims were evil. Fortunately I was none, but at least two of my colleagues were either of the latter two, and I just don't want to know what would have happened if anyone was gay.
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A company my wife worked for had (has?) the policy that you had to read your company email, but on your own time, and of course you couldn't read it from home, you had to be in the office, sitting at your desk, but you don't get paid to do it. I'm sure it didn't apply to anyone above peon.
You mean there was sombody above peon> FT, get a job with a small company. I tried the large one (again) earlier this year, and it sucked (again).
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A couple of good ones here...
- Apparently, you can only speak to the HR department on your own time.
- Speaking privately to one of the directors, instead of addresing concerns to your direct chain of command, is a sure-fire way to have your career turn to shit overnight - regardless of what the conversation was about.
- You are not allowed to wear headphones to listen to music. You are also not allowed to attach "unauthorized" (ie. personal) speakers to your computer. You are, however, permitted to bring a boombox and use that for listening to music. So, I hook this ugly-ass, oversized boombox to my computer (using one of those cassette tape adapters) and play my MP3's on it, for everyone to hear. :doh:
And yes, this is a government institution... :sigh:
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Miszou wrote:
Speaking privately to one of the directors, instead of addresing concerns to your direct chain of command, is a sure-fire way to have your career turn to sh*t overnight - regardless of what the conversation was about.
At the little society I mentioned previously, someone mentioned to the company owner that no overtime was paid, so suddenly the little man that worked for him cut even paid overtime.
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Larry Dalton, Directory of ICom-IT[^] Software, that not so subtly insisted you had to be a Baptist to be human, and that gays and women and muslims were evil. Fortunately I was none, but at least two of my colleagues were either of the latter two, and I just don't want to know what would have happened if anyone was gay.
What about my one boss that sold me a stolen car, that didn't work, then complained when it made me late and insisted that if I was fired for being late again, I give the car back? I did give the car back anyway after avoiding being fired for that reason, and was screwed over with the R9k I had already paid my CIO for a stolen car! I forgot to mention that this guy wasn't the little bigoted boss of a little start-up, he was tne CIO of one of SA's biggest four banks.
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Having done IS9001 development this deserves a very out of date custard pie. Straight from a very cold fridge.
Trollslayer wrote:
Having done IS9001 development this deserves a very out of date custard pie. Straight from a very cold fridge.
...and preferably followed up by the emptying of a jug of iced water (with ice cubes, naturally) over the head of the offender. ;P
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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A company my wife worked for had (has?) the policy that you had to read your company email, but on your own time, and of course you couldn't read it from home, you had to be in the office, sitting at your desk, but you don't get paid to do it. I'm sure it didn't apply to anyone above peon.
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Joe Q wrote:
company ethics coordinator
??? really, your time policies are your worst problems...
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We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
Linkify!|Fold With Us!Probably not the worst, but the scrutinized and reviewed item. They get hard data on whether you're there are not (we have to badge in and out), it's something they can look at and have hard evidence. They just wanted to get more work and pay us less...bottom line.
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We had an appraisal system at one place where you had to put in: 3 things the employee should start doing 3 things the employee should keep doing 3 things the employee should stop doing I.e. - three negative actions were required! Being ever so slightly stubborn I only put third category items in if they were justified. Elaine (slightly compliant fluffy tigress)
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Over 15 and that policy is against federal law. Pre correction : U.S. Federal Law
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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I was just wondering what interesting company policies people had encountered at their work. (it's a slow afternoon here) For example, at one time the company I work for enacted a policy that said "all time shall be rounded to the 1/2 hour", personal time was to be rounded up and casual time was to be rounded down. What this meant was if you came in 45 minutes late, you recorded that as 1 hour late (personal time), and if you worked 45 min extra (casual time to make up for coming in late) you recorded it as 30 min casual time, so you still had to make up 30 min. Our ethics hotline was jammed with complaints about the policy and how it required us to mis-charge our time. The policy was quickly pulled. Joe Q
We got a new Corporate Policy Manual where I work, and here's part of the email I sent to the boss, objecting to two specific clauses in the manual. Under "Concealed Weapons Policy": "Company does not allow any ... employee ... to possess, use, conceal, carry or maintain a concealed weapon or handgun [in any area] used in connection with Company business". If we go by *the letter* of that restriction, that means we can't have weapons at home in the event that we need to work from home. I have firearms at home (and I've worked on Company stuff at home), but I'm not ready to give up my 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms, and I'm positive that nobody (even the Company) can legally infringe that right. Working from a private home should be added as an exception to that section. Common sense may dictate to some that a private home doesn't fall under this clause, but I think you have to write it down. --------------------------------------------------- Under "Search, Inspection, and Investigation Policy": I agree that the "expectation of privacy" stops at the front door to company offices. But a person that has taken normal precautions to maintain his privacy, that is, precautions customarily taken by those seeking to exclude others, is usually a significant factor in determining legitimacy of expectation. In other words, I have an expectation of privacy where my car is concerned because it's locked, and I am the exclusive key holder. If an item is not laying in plain sight, the inspecting party has no probable cause to conduct a search. Finally, since access to the Company parking lot is not controlled (anyone can pull in and park there, as opposed to a site such as a military or a controlled access facility), and since the parking lot is shared with other businesses, the legitimacy of a search of privately owned vehicles by Company officials is further diluted. As such, it could be proven that this policy infringes my 4th Amendment rights.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
We got a new Corporate Policy Manual where I work, and here's part of the email I sent to the boss, objecting to two specific clauses in the manual. Under "Concealed Weapons Policy": "Company does not allow any ... employee ... to possess, use, conceal, carry or maintain a concealed weapon or handgun [in any area] used in connection with Company business". If we go by *the letter* of that restriction, that means we can't have weapons at home in the event that we need to work from home. I have firearms at home (and I've worked on Company stuff at home), but I'm not ready to give up my 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms, and I'm positive that nobody (even the Company) can legally infringe that right. Working from a private home should be added as an exception to that section. Common sense may dictate to some that a private home doesn't fall under this clause, but I think you have to write it down. --------------------------------------------------- Under "Search, Inspection, and Investigation Policy": I agree that the "expectation of privacy" stops at the front door to company offices. But a person that has taken normal precautions to maintain his privacy, that is, precautions customarily taken by those seeking to exclude others, is usually a significant factor in determining legitimacy of expectation. In other words, I have an expectation of privacy where my car is concerned because it's locked, and I am the exclusive key holder. If an item is not laying in plain sight, the inspecting party has no probable cause to conduct a search. Finally, since access to the Company parking lot is not controlled (anyone can pull in and park there, as opposed to a site such as a military or a controlled access facility), and since the parking lot is shared with other businesses, the legitimacy of a search of privately owned vehicles by Company officials is further diluted. As such, it could be proven that this policy infringes my 4th Amendment rights.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001We have policies written like that too. Sometimes, they seem to be written as if this (the company) is the only place we ever go and that we are property of the company. My boss has said you’re supposed to use common sense when applying these policies. I asked if the company, when applying these policies, would use common sense. He just laughed. Then I pointed out two examples in the past 4 years that were let go due to the application to the letter of policies. In reality, the people were walked out because HR and their bosses were tired of dealing with them. But it shows that common sense is not necessarily applied. Our HR has said the policies have to be written that way for the protection of the company. I asked about the individual and they said they don’t really deal with people; they deal with policies dealing with people. I suggested they change their name to IR (Inhuman Resources). The HR rep didn’t laugh…but I did!
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It's interesting that HR, upper management, and even the ethics office reviewed it and saw nothing wrong with it.
Not really. If that was the case only unethical companies would face lawsuits.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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Probably not the worst, but the scrutinized and reviewed item. They get hard data on whether you're there are not (we have to badge in and out), it's something they can look at and have hard evidence. They just wanted to get more work and pay us less...bottom line.
I meant to write "are not your worst problems" :doh: I'm on "no pay, no comp for extra hours". :sigh:
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Velopers, Develprs, Developers!
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
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