I tended to be more flexible, especially for the particularly competent and productive people on my team. For example, one guy wanted to take a college class to finish his degree, but it meant he wouldn't get to work until 10 am twice a week. He was a reliable person who had been at the company several years, and he said he was willing to stay until 6:30 pm on those days. Was I okay with that? Of course I was. But you know it led to another manager whining to me about their people complaining or (more likely) "reporting" him for coming in late. Eyeroll.
Damn, this reminds me of a previous job. We were supposed to work in shifts starting at 7am or 8am. That was kind of grandfathered in from older times when we were actually doing a lot of support work, but it didn't really make much sense anymore. I was working on a few projects with a global team (people in Europe and US East Coast, when I was in California).
And so I had a million early-morning calls, often back-to-back starting at 6am, often earlier, several days a week. Of course, I was taking them from home, and at first, my manager just said to ping him when I knew I wouldn't make it to the office at the start of our "shift".
That happened like 3 or 4 times a week. And he told me that I had to come in on time, because other people would "see me coming in late and complain or think I was treated differently", and to "keep the peace" (another of his words was "status quo"). I'm not even sure that was true, or if he was trying to avoid that possibility. I said I can't, when I have calls from 6am to 9am, how can I be in the office at 8am?
He told me to come in at 6am to take the call, or earlier so I could be ready at 6am.
I didn't. Told him that when they all came in to work, I had already been working for 2 or 3 hours, it was easy to verify since I was online all that time (and I wasn't exactly alone in those calls). And it was unfair that I would be the one punished because I was working at 6am.
After several months I also told him it was HIS job to make sure people in HIS team understood what was going on and stopped acting like toddlers. That I wasn't going to come in before 6am almost every day just to make his life easier. I also wasn't going to ask 5-10 people in Europe and India to stay at work an hour or two later because I had to commute.
That lasted about 2 years. At some point, he pissed me off so much that I started billing those hours, because of course there was no way I could leave early before the end of the official shift. People would have seen me leave!
He never did anything about it. Never tried to help me organize my day better, never put his foot down to explain the situation to the rest of the team. Never took any action against me, because at the end of the day, he knew I was right, I was doing my job, my project stakeholders were happy and not shy about saying it, and there was no-one else to do that specific project.
OTOH I also never got a promotion lol.
Another one of my teammates was in the same situation, but his team leader didn't care.
Worst manager I ever left.