I work for a landscaping company in the Mid-West. We do snow removal in the winter. We have about 150 properties we service for snow that range from residential homes to apartment buildings to commercial businesses. Generally we go out around 4:00 am and work for between 5 and 8 hours on snow days. There's 6 crews. It's hard, labor intensive work, generally involving shoveling our asses off and driving all around the city in icy conditions. It's cold, it's wet, it SUCKS.
We got the message during a night storm to be out and at our first property at 4:00 am the next morning. I looked at the weather forecast and saw that the storm would be over by 11:00 pm. I got to thinking and realized that if my crew got going at 11:00 pm and worked through the night, we could be done by 8:00 am and then we'd have the whole next day to take off. I texted the guys on my crew and we all agreed. I also contacted my boss around 10:00 pm to let him know what we were doing. I received no response, as I assumed he was asleep, but I figured I'd get a response by 3:00 am when he got up for his day. I should also mention that we use an app with all our properties on it, and once we finish servicing a property, we mark the job complete.
My crew crushed it and was done by 7:00 am. While driving back to the shop to drop off our work truck we all felt awesome. Most of us would be home before 8:00 am, and I could take a nap and relax the rest of the day. Then the message came in from my boss.
“Hey, I got your text last night and I see that you've finished your route. Great job! Since you guys are free, I'm going to add some more properties to your day to take a load off the other crews. Thanks again!”
That's when I learned, a valuable lesson. Doing extra work without incentives is basically the dumbest thing you can do. All your employer will do is take advantage of you.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg for this company, but I'll save that for another post.