Our company updated us to a particularly stupid set of policies regarding overtime late last year.
- First I have to fill out an online form . . . name, cubicle number, date of overtime, reason for overtime, charge code, cost centre, name of manager, name of team lead, name of director of engineering.
- Then my supervisor needs to digitally OK the form.
- Then I need to print the form out and get it signed by me, my manager, my team lead, the director of engineering.
- The printed and signed document must be digitally scanned and placed in a directory on the network.
At this point I am authorized to work the overtime, so I do. At the end of the following week:
- I have to fill out my time sheet, indicating that I worked overtime.
- My time sheet must be digitally signed by my manager.
- Then, the time sheet must be printed out and physically signed by me, my manager, my team lead, the director of engineering.
- The printed and signed time sheet must be digitally scanned and placed in a directory on the network.
- They physical copies of both the time sheet and overtime authorization request must be given to an administrative assistant.
- The administrative assistant collates all the documents and takes them down to payroll, who make a note about it and pay out the overtime a week or two later.
I'd estimate the whole process takes about 40 minutes of my time (due to printing stuff, chasing down people for signatures, scanning, etc) every time that I work overtime. Checking the online directory where we have to put the digital files I notice that there are 385 approved overtime requests for this year . . . so if it takes everyone else about as long as me, that works out to 256 hours so far this year spent just requesting overtime.
The beauty of the new policy is . . . if you work from home at any point during a week, according to corporate policy you are not allowed to do more than 4 hours of overtime in that week. (Kinda dumb in it's own right . . . either you trust me to work from home, or you think I'm going to abuse the system and ban me from working from home. What is this half assed trust?) But you still have to go through the whole policy for requesting overtime. Most people in our company work from home occasionally.
We're losing about 25% of our overtime time to overtime requests.