Never understood some corporate leadership. At a previous job I ran the IT department (pre-pandemic), was essentially the CTO at the company as I reported to the board of directors and CEO as they were my superiors. Anyways corporate policy as far as time off was considered included something called comp days. Comp days were awarded to people within your department who worked in excess of 45 hours per week and could be taken at any time, this was company wide. So I restructured the IT department to essentially always, always have comp days.
As people know corporate IT is a 24/7 operation. So first thing I do is skew the schedule a bit. Instead of assigning hours, I informed desktop support that we needed onsite coverage between 7am and 7pm, then asked who wanted to be the early person, could leave early, and who was the late person, could arrive “late”. I then asked managers the schedule they had the systems engineers/admins and network engineers/admins on. When they replied “company time”, 8am-6pm, I also scrapped that schedule since most work they do are “after hours” since less people are on the system. As such if they need to make documented changes to the system, work the following day remotely. Also implemented the no Monday morning meetings, no Friday afternoon meetings, also if you called a meeting over lunch hour you are required to provide a hot lunch to all attendees (except in an “all-hands” situation); this alone killed most meetings.
I mandated that all IT team members have VPN access, our voip phone service app installed on their phones & laptops and the after hours service desk on-call phone would be rotated among all IT staff (including me), not just the “desktop guys”.
Another change was I implemented mental health days, or days that you knew that if you reported into the office you wouldn’t get anything done and “just didn’t have it in you” to be at work. These days you needed to be available remotely, but it also was understood that you may not respond to requests either. These mental health days are where the comp days went. There was some pushback initially regarding this policy, but within a month most people seemed to adjust to them well enough.
Another policy implemented was time off for “life” have a doctors appointment? Dental appointment? Have to pick up or drop off kids? Fine do those things, work will be here when you are available again as this “time off” wouldn’t be taken from pto or sick days. Some managers left after the policy changes I implemented as they claimed they couldn’t do their jobs. Fine, promote from within and hire for those positions vacated by those promoted.
For 7 years these policies worked wonders, we were never short staffed, we only had 2 “all hands” situations where senior staff was averaging 147 hour weeks while giving mid and junior staff recovery time. The IT department was used as a model for other departments to increase productivity, increase worker satisfaction, all while minimising cost increases to the company.
Then, a new CEO was hired.
This new CEO was more “traditional” he equated “butts in seats” to worker productivity and rescinded all previous policy changes, implemented strict 7am-6pm in office working hours across all departments.
Most of the senior IT staff left within a month after his policies went into effect. I was able to negotiate healthy severance packages for each of them. I also asked mid and junior staff if they were going to be moving on as well. And informed them that I was also leaving in a couple months. As expected there was a flood of mid and junior staff leaving who I was also able to get some severance packages.
During my exit interview a month later I informed the new CEO that his policies are what decimated the IT department as well as other departments, people enjoyed working for an organisation that understood its workers, that is why we had as much talent as we did. But now, now it was a shell of its former self. I made sure my replacement had all the information they needed and left the company after securing my own severance package.
Last I heard of that company was that they closed two of their USA offices, then were sold to their former competitor, the company now exists in name only as a division of their former rival.
I still keep in touch with many of the people that worked for me, I have given them copies of the policies that they worked under which they have since implemented hybrids of at their current companies. And occasionally we get together for a BBQ or crawfish boil. Funny how one change can make or break a company.
Anyways now looking for the next place that likes disruption.