Company tried saving money by scrapping the holiday bonus — only to end up paying 10x the price in penalties

Loyal employees will do everything in the best interest of the company, but they should never be taken advantage of. An employee who goes by u/MeesterPepper on Reddit shared a post on January 4, detailing how the team responded when their holiday incentives were cut off. The staff were still expected to work on holidays, but their bonus was taken away with a manipulative policy. In return, the staff had the perfect comeback. Since the company chose to prioritize its profit over its people, the staff chose themselves over the company, and what followed was iconic.

The post mentioned that the company worked year-round to acquire clients, especially during the holidays. Due to this policy, they required staff on duty “7 days a week” and even during the holidays. “This is skilled white-collar STEM work that requires a solid foundation in Biology and Chemistry,” the employee noted. It was added that to recruit the best professionals, there had to be some incentives, and so “a 2x overtime rate for weekend hours” was offered. Furthermore, “If you worked on your paid holiday off, you'd get full holiday pay plus 3x overtime for all hours worked,” it was noted. The deal sounds great, but it quickly changed with a shrewd email from HR just shy of the holidays.

"Paid holidays are an extra benefit meant for you to have time to relax. If you choose to work any hours on a paid holiday, you forfeit the holiday hours. And as a reminder, overtime is only after 40 hours of actual work — working on your regularly scheduled day will not count,” the message read. It was put into effect immediately, and that meant if workers had to go to the office during the holidays, it was a complete loss to them. The company clearly hadn’t thought this one through because it backfired brilliantly. “Got in this morning to find an email from my management team that they're ‘surprised and disappointed’ that only two people volunteered to work on December 25th and 26th,” the employee noted.

Thanks to the ridiculous and selfish new policy, no one offered to work overtime and spend their New Year in the office. The company presumed the loyal and hard-working employees would step in as a “team,” but were harshly corrected. Due to this mismanagement, they lost a “close to a six-figure amount in penalties for missed turnaround times.” Ideally, they shouldn’t have expected anything different from the employees because the so-called new policy was such. No one in their right mind would opt to work with no benefit during their holidays just so the company can profit alone. And getting rid of the perks just before Christmas was cruel and clearly self-centered.

Figen Zaim, Founder and Managing Consultant at Olivier Reward Consulting, explained to Ravio, “Bonuses can help even the most junior employee in an organisation to connect the dots between their output, their manager's output, and the company's success overall, which has the added benefit of building commercial thinking across all roles." Anastasia Efremova, Global Director of Reward at Semrush, added, “Performance bonuses can create strong alignment between business goals and individual output.” She also noted that these incentives shouldn’t just be a random increase but should be planned.

"Bonuses need to be really well-structured and tailored to align with the company's goals, with measurable targets to work towards,” the director noted. Unfortunately, this company was only looking at its personal gain, completely ignoring the fact that it had skilled and dignified recruits at hand. “You only get as much loyalty as you're willing to pay for,” the employee concluded, and the internet sided with them. u/BlueCollarElectro wrote, “What exactly did they expect? Go cheap, you get cheap results.” u/virgilreality remarked, “It seems management didn't want to be ‘team players’ by keeping the incentives.” 

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