And, well, the reason for that is simple: businesses hate unpredictable costs, and any submissions for overtime or extra labor hours present exactly that. Sure, an extra hour or two of overtime for one of the organization’s lowest-earning members is nothing but, almost always, organizations fear this one hour of overtime will spread to other staff and departments like a virus and overwhelm their budgeting spreadsheets.
When budgeting comes around, and the executives and upper managers are sitting around a table somewhere trying to decide what costs were reasonable, the fact that “so-and-so” covered for someone else or stayed late to cover a problem is never going to come up.
The upper manager, who is probably very low on the figurative totem pole compared to everyone else sitting around the table, might even be afraid to speak up and explain the reasoning, feeling that they’d be drawing unnecessary attention to themselves and their team’s operation if they did
So while “going above and beyond’ and ”being flexible” are recognized as a key organizational value, and as leaders will quite confidently state in meetings. When it comes to the other side of those conversations, lower levels of the organization will feel like those values aren’t there and instead, that their extra effort only unnecessarily exposes them and that going above and beyond will be met with criticism and refusal when it comes to returning the same in kind.
And this mismanagement itself presents a substantial, hidden cost that doesn’t get addressed in those boardroom meetings in the fact that, as Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workforce, found, employee engagement strongly influences the productivity of the workers of an organization. And that should come as no surprise. Employees who feel valued and supported, and like their efforts are valued and appreciated, and like their extra effort is reciprocated by their employer, will be more invested in not only their jobs but the broader success of the organization.
That’s why, like in this case, blindly applying rigid rules won’t necessarily come back around in overt ways as it does in cases such as this, but will actually harm the organization by showing employees that they will be punished for using their autonomy and best judgment, going off-script to help the company.
