I'm sitting in on a routine training session for newly hired sales reps about how to claim the mileage they drive in their personal cars for work. It's an easy reimbursement calculation: $ = (Oe – Os)0.55 ; where Oe is the Odometer at end of workday and Os is the Odometer at start of workday (in km).
HR was also sitting in for their first time and started commenting with unprecedented new rules, like “Let's say between sales calls you go to pick up something personal at the post office. You need to stop the odometer calculation first and start it up again when you're back on the job.”
Every sales rep's head cocked sideways as they sensed the red flag. You could almost hear the trust shattering. It's one of the perks of working in the field that you get to run the occasional small errand while you're on the road. As long as you hit your call targets, nobody should be breathing down your neck. HR failed to realize that the system runs on implicit trust. There is now explicit distrust.