I work in a senior position on a team of 3 in an IT company. Burnout, stress, and being over worked are a huge problem at the company. A lot of people end up quitting within one year, mainly due to all the stress. I wont say me and my coworkers are un-fireable (because no position is) but if they were to fire us, it would be INCREADIBLY inconvenient for the company.
Anyway, the other week in our team meeting our Boss brought up quarterly bonuses to increase morale. At first this sounded amazing! But then it said the bonuses would be about $300 and you had to work 12hr days, and be oncall 24/7 to qualify. I said something along the lines of “I'd rather not”
Boss started asking probing questions like “Why not?” “Your telling me you don't want free money?” and “Its practically $100 extra dollars a month, your saying you don't want that?”
Normally I like to keep my work and life divided but I snapped a bit and said “Boss, its only $100/month. I make more then 10x that outside of this Company. Selling you those extra hours is extremely inefficient and, quite frankly, I just don't want to deal with all the stress this entails”
Then Coworker #2 chimed in and said “I'd like to opt-out of this as well. I resell computers and accepting this deal would be a huge loss of opportunity”. Coworker #3 had to leave the meeting, but I think he would also have opted out.
Our Boss didn't expect or know how to respond to that, He just kinda said “Err…. umm…….. well…… ok?”