There is no shortage of stories online consisting of a misguided middle manager who establishes a blanket “No overtime” policy that ends up getting maliciously complied with by some worker or group of workers to the tune of disastrous results. Still, as evidenced by the volume of stories out there, there are still supervisors out there seeking to cut the cost of labor by banning overtime, blind to the fact that overtime is happening because their teams are spread too thin and chronically understaffed.
It’s probably wisest at this point to never implement any policy that strictly forbids workers from working overtime. Instead, set the expectation that any necessary overtime will be worked before forcing those overtime workers to jump through as many hoops as possible in order to claim it to make the process as painful as possible so that they just won’t be bothered. Of course, you’ll then end up with workers maliciously complying with this by taking as long as possible to fill out that extensive paperwork, at which point you can just threaten their livelihood and their jobs to keep them in line… After all, what do you, a power-hungry, budget-focused middle manager, care about things like business ethics or team morale?
