Strange Company rules and manipulations

[CatalinaWOW]

The heath & safety dept would regularly inventory the contents of the first aid supplies in the lab.  If the count of band-aids changed and there was not a corresponding "incident report" filled out, the lab supervisor would get grief that was passed down to all the engineers and techs who may have been working in the lab during that time period.

If you DID fill in a incident report, that would set off some annoying drama and a meeting with H&S and your supervisor.  The stats then end up on the quarterly OSHA reports, etc.  All employee memos on how to be more safe at work to follow.

Makes sense if you were really hurt BUT totally stupid for a nicked or jabbed finger from a probe or X-acto blade, etc.

Most everyone started to keep their own stock of band-aids in their tool bag.  OR, like me who was out once, washed off the blood, put some paper towel over it and wrapped in electrical tape and went back to work.

At a company I worked at there was a formal policy that you could not have your own bandaids, aspirin and the like, and most especially could not share them with co-workers. 

There was a somewhat logical explanation for this, similar to rstofer's comment.  They needed to know how much exposure to injuries they had so that appropriate insurance and treatment facilities could be funded.  The practical effect of this, on a huge plant site with hundreds of employees was that a paper cut or other minor injury handled the officially correct way meant a long hike to the nurses location or major drama as the plant fire and rescue team showed up.  So many scofflaws kept band aids and other stuff around.

This company was also one with a formal policy against archiving emails beyond a fixed period (90 days as I recall).  Based on a real life problem with an engineer I knew well who generated some well intentioned emails that were quite embarrassing to the company when taken out of context.  They decided that the value of old emails was not worth the potential embarrassment.  And were probably statistically right, as an high percentage of company email has no value when written, and the value of most of the remainder drops off very rapidly as time passes.  I was a scofflaw on that one also, and received neither approbation or congratulations when my archives were useful to the company defending themselves against a lawsuit a few years down the road.

[Brutte]

If you start to destroy things when a law suit is filed, even if you did that before a court order to preserve evidence, you are destroying evidence.  If a long long time before there is any legal proceeding in the works, email got destroyed as regular company policy (that all emails are NOT stored after X days), they are gone.  You merely destroyed your property but you did not obstruct justice (which would be a felony).

This might of course explain this rule.
However, when I read that back then (1+ years ago) I came to the conclusion that the true reason was different. I believe it was a part of a "Protection Act Against Whistleblowing". I cannot quote this and other regulations literally as I do not work there any more, but this particular paragraph meaning +- was like that (for sure it was in one sentence):

It is forbidden to archive documentation that could have any potential value to competitors, or any value to government authorities in case of a litigation.

Now imagine a hypothetical situation where a corporation gets involved in illegal actions (discrimination, mobbing, theft of intelectual property, falsifying documents, etc). Then a whistleblower will have to collect the evidence, violating second part of this rule. If he gets caught, corporation will prove he was collecting that for competitors. If however whistleblower succeeds with collecting evidence and goes to court, by law this evidence will have to be presented to lawyers that represent the corporation. Then the lawyers can copy this evidence and "prove" beyond any doubt in a second litigation that this information was sold to competitors by whistleblower, incurred losses and demand compensation.

Concluding, this is for protection against whistleblowers. Of course this is by no means 100% effective but it will discourage most of the people from even thinking about collecting evidence.

[Brutte]

It is forbidden to archive documentation that could have any potential value to competitors, or any value to government authorities in case of a litigation.

Resurrecting old topic.
I have just found a relevant Donald Rumsfeld quote from Wikipedia article which IMHO explains where the above corporation rule comes from:

We're functioning in a – with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise,(...)

For the entity, by setting such rule it is not the abuse that has to be prevented, but rather the collecting of information that proves violation of law.

That is why entities penalize or threaten the fact of documenting when they are involved in violating of the law. Be it violating Geneva Convention or violating Criminal Law or some other standards.

No proof == no violation.

[VK3DRB]

The early days with IBM was a good company to work for. But they had punitive rules against conflict-of-interest. I wanted to buy $1,000 of Microsoft shares shortly after they floated in 1986, which would be worth around $1.6 million today. But IBM would not let me, as clearly spelled out in the employee booklet About Your Company. Being loyal and trusting of IBM, I did not buy the shares.

In 1997, IBM sold hundreds of employees in Wangaratta off to a start-up funded by private equity. The then Chairman of IBM Australia, Robert Savage, told all the Wangaratta employees at a town hall meeting verbatim, "You either join the new company or be deemed to have resigned in which case there will be no redundancy". Having no other suitable high tech employment in the town, almost everyone signed up "by our own free will", including me. In the transition, IBM surprised me with an offer of a 30% discount of a new PC - and revoked $40,000 of my retirement savings in a company held retirement scheme. IBM was highly manipulative and certainly greedy, in my opinion. I should have sent them a bill for the many thousands of unpaid extra hours I worked over the years. The startup failed within a few years. Since then, Robert Savage dropped dead and the CEO of IBM worldwide at the time Louis Gerstner (net worth US$ 630 million) had a son who died choking on a steak sandwich. I am alive, healthy and can sleep at night. In retrospect, I wish I have bought those shares in Microsoft, because in the end I realised I was just a disposable resource to IBM.

I vowed never to work for a large multinational company again.

[Brutte]

I worked for 17 years for Texas Instruments before being fired for standing up for my rights.. I worked on a project for about 5 years and when it was almost 95% complete, the managers asked me to move out of that project as it was going to be shelved.(..)

What I suspect that went wrong is that you have expected to benefit from two sources: from salary (past) and raised status (future). Once it became clear that the contract does not include any future benefits of your past effort and the salary is all that you can expect, you accepted the shift as a lost profit.

Been there, done that same mistake. 

So in the hope of (getting promoted) or (raising your position) in the company you have accepted lower salary from the very beginning. Had you been explicitly informed in day 1 about the fact you have had no chance for any promotion or personal development and about inevitable shift at 95% of the project done, your demand for higher salary would have been obvious and no disappointmens would have taken place.

To be fair, I think that unless I/You had some explicit written contract rule, everything that is not written in the contract (and does not implicitly come from applicable laws) does not apply.

How shameless those guys can be

Homo homini lupus est.

[jancumps]

One of my former corporations had an official regulation that we were not allowed to archive any emails that "could be of any value to government authorities" in case of a potential investigation and litigation. The limit was set to 3 months, older emails were wiped out.
I suppose all corporations have these rules.

I've never heard of such a rule, and never worked at company that had that.

mine has this. We have a maximum retention for all mails, regardless the content.

[CatalinaWOW]

My company had a similar rule on emails.  Which I ignored.  And they were happy to take advantage of that to defend themselves from litigation.  No one ever said anything about the rule violation. 

Such rules are a knee jerk response to a perceived problem.  In my companies case I knew the incident and problem that was the source of the rule.  The rule would have prevented the problem, but no one thought through the whole situation.

Same company had a similar rule that no technical data (drawings, specs, test data, analysis and the like) beyond 20 years.  Don't know the motivation on this, avoiding storage cost maybe.  But it made no sense for a company that was supporting fielded product 30 and more years old.

[jancumps]

I have a different opinion : It's good practice to have a strategy for document storage, archiving, retention.
If you don't need it, you don't need it.
When you spend a significant budget on storage and access control of mails, and with archiving paper and electronic records, then it's worthwhile taking care to retain every mandatory document and have a way of dealing with the ones that aren't required anymore in a cost efficient way.

[David Hess]

Applying routine document destruction to email and messaging logs also limits financial cost due to discovery during a lawsuit.  I know of at least one case where a company went bankrupt because of having to restore and search archival backups for discovery.  Discovery is routinely used to impose costs on the other side encouraging a favorable settlement to a lawsuit.

At a company I worked at there was a formal policy that you could not have your own bandaids, aspirin and the like, and most especially could not share them with co-workers. 

There was a somewhat logical explanation for this, similar to rstofer's comment.  They needed to know how much exposure to injuries they had so that appropriate insurance and treatment facilities could be funded.  The practical effect of this, on a huge plant site with hundreds of employees was that a paper cut or other minor injury handled the officially correct way meant a long hike to the nurses location or major drama as the plant fire and rescue team showed up.  So many scofflaws kept band aids and other stuff around.

A company were I worked in California implemented the same policy *after* removing aspirin and such from the first aid kits so no drugs were available.  I was told both policies were because of liability.

[VK3DRB]

At a company I worked at in the late 90's an employee was reported to management for sexual harassment. A receptionist had reported him to management for persistently looking down her top when talking with her.

He agreed that he did look and told HR that if she was going to wear low cut tops and then he may continue to look. HR had no response and the world kept turning.

Make you wonder what goes on in some peoples' heads.

We had a bizarre experience at one large company. The daughter of a manager who worked there went to work with see-through pants on and next to no underwear. One of my engineering mates sat in the cubicle desk next to her. I sat a few cubicles away and I noticed was my engineering mate had a lot more visitors to his desk that morning asking him various technical questions . I heard the girl was told by her manager to go home at lunch time and put some decent clothes on.

Oh yes, there was an incident where one rather obese woman working on the factory floor one day had brief hot pants on. It was not a pretty sight. Some of her female co-workers had mistakenly thought she had tucked her skirt into her underwear after going to the toilet and one of them gently ask the woman if she had done that. The embarrassment for both when the answer was no would have been palpable.

[tooki]

Women dressing provocatively is an invitation for men in general... Instincts cannot be controlled by brains, or else the population would not grow exponentially in this world...

Buuuuullllshit. Of course men can control their instincts if they want to. If one is raised right, this is not a struggle.

[David Hess]

Women dressing provocatively is an invitation for men in general... Instincts cannot be controlled by brains, or else the population would not grow exponentially in this world...

Women do not wear makeup to influence other women.  Why isn't makeup considered sexual harassment?

Women dressing provocatively is an invitation for men in general... Instincts cannot be controlled by brains, or else the population would not grow exponentially in this world...

Buuuuullllshit. Of course men can control their instincts if they want to. If one is raised right, this is not a struggle.

Well, it may depend on the age of the person, the level of testosterone etc.
One may use his intelligence to overcome instincts if trained hard, but the natural responses should not be curbed. It may lead to long term deviant behaviour among people.
It may be better to use the intelligence to assist the instincts. That will take him to greater heights.

It requires training of the proper habits and conscious thought.  It also goes against human nature.  And women already complain about being left out of traditional male social activities for fear of being accused of sexual harassment.

Invite the guys out for beers after work?  Sure.  Include female coworkers?  That is a risk either way.

[vk6zgo]

One of my former corporations had an official regulation that we were not allowed to archive any emails that "could be of any value to government authorities" in case of a potential investigation and litigation. The limit was set to 3 months, older emails were wiped out.
I suppose all corporations have these rules.

I've never heard of such a rule, and never worked at company that had that.

Me, neither, & frankly, I don't think it would fly in Oz, especially if the Australian Tax Office  "came calling".

[David Hess]

Me, neither, & frankly, I don't think it would fly in Oz, especially if the Australian Tax Office  "came calling".

There are special minimum retention times for specific types of documents like financial where a general document destruction policy would not apply.

[EEEnthusiast]

Yes inviting women for drinks may be really risky. Not inviting them when everyone goes for a round of drinks would amount to gender discrimination as well.
Sticky situation...

[james_s]

One day while walking the dog I picked up two fresh and empty 200ml bottles of nalewkas. It's cheap affordable way to get drunk so bums leave them everywhere. Cleaned them up a bit and next day at work I placed them deep in a cupboard used to store bags of coffee. About 2 weeks later we started having random, mandatory breathalyzer tests for all employees      and HR lady was going crazy, asking everyone for a confidental face-to-face meeting to identify colleagues who could've consumed alcohol at work 

My office has beer in the fridge and fairly often somebody brings in wine or liquor, it's pretty common in the software industry. There are no firm rules around when it can be consumed and so far we haven't had a need for them, people just know that it's inappropriate to get plastered during the day but there's nothing wrong with having a beer or glass of wine over lunch.

Most HR rules seem like common sense to me. HR exists to protect the company and the rules are there so that if an incident does occur nobody can blame the company for not telling them they're not allowed to do it. In any of the places I've worked as long as you behave in a sensible way and don't be creepy or obnoxious nobody is going to hassle you.

[VK3DRB]

When I started working, my superior was called a manageress, ie: a female manager. If I call a female superior a manageress today, I could be cautioned for being sexist or maybe even fired. This has nothing to do with equal rights and opportunity. It has everything to do with political correctness gone mad. Since when have actresses been called actors? What is that?! No wonder men and women are now called "resource" or "headcount" by multinationals. We are not even people, let alone male of female. It is safer not to mention gender in anything in the workplace these days.

At one workplace, we wore ESD coats where some were quite frayed. The CEO was extremely tight with money and would never buy replacements. So I asked him if his business partner can sew (she was also his defacto). He got upset saying that asking if a woman can sew is sexist. Besides being the the master of false economy with poor management skills, he was an idiot in general and I left the company soon after as did almost every other employee.

[EEEnthusiast]

In the tech companies, male to female employee ratio is almost 10:1 or higher. In an office where I was working, the number of male toilets was equal to the number of female toilets. I asked the facility manager to cut down on the female toilets and increase the male ones as the average wait time was very high. They did not like it very much even though my logic was spot on. Do they not consider these things before making the building?

[Circlotron]

I worked for 10 years in the design lab of a company that made good quality switch mode power supplies. On a daily basis we would make engineering decisions that affected fire and electrical safety, the sort of thing that if done wrong would have possibly caused the company to get sued into oblivion. Despite this, we were not trusted to have a key to the stationery cupboard to get a pen.

[madires]

It's all about people. If a company has hired the wrong persons the troubles will start. And it becomes harder and harder to get the right ones as larger the company grows or is.

[BravoV]

Strange rule on sexual harassment

.... employees should not indulge in pornography and sexual acts while at office and so on.... One strange clause was "Indecent exposure of body parts"....

It's all about people. ...

Also the local situation and condition sometimes created weird rules.

Sorry OP, don't mean to be rude or bashing the country, as you're in India, maybe ... just maybe, this created for a reason, preventive maybe ? 

This is just an example from CNN, there are so many similarity from others news agencies as well -> CNN search results , just scroll thru the list as it has so many pages, and watch the date of each related entry to see the frequency.

Unless these are also fake or fabricated news ?  CMIIW

[BravoV]

Those news reports are very much real...

Appreciate the confirmation, to be honest I was wishing & hoping those are fake news. 

At least at the place where I was born & grew up, as grown up, believe we're all aware that this kind of "incidents" happened as all other places in the world. But looking at the frequency and the "scale & depth" of each incident  , personally I find it very-very disturbing.

Also believe CNN does not cover all cases, still from the search results, for me these are considered too many, at least at the place where I live.

That rules, maybe .. again, just maybe, the creator/author thought, there is nothing wrong adding those extra clause, and .. again ... maybe, he or "she" believes it serves more good than harm, looking at the local circumstances of course.

Apologize if my "opinion" sounds rude, just pointing out different paradigm, especially from a foreigner.

[Tomorokoshi]

I worked for 10 years in the design lab of a company that made good quality switch mode power supplies. On a daily basis we would make engineering decisions that affected fire and electrical safety, the sort of thing that if done wrong would have possibly caused the company to get sued into oblivion. Despite this, we were not trusted to have a key to the stationery cupboard to get a pen.

Penny-wise Pound-foolishness is an internal expense that most managers will never understand. It shows up at all levels of corporate structure. Cheap pens for expensive engineers. Cheap oscilloscopes for expensive projects. Cheap security for expensive buildings.

[tooki]

Women dressing provocatively is an invitation for men in general... Instincts cannot be controlled by brains, or else the population would not grow exponentially in this world...

Buuuuullllshit. Of course men can control their instincts if they want to. If one is raised right, this is not a struggle.

Well, it may depend on the age of the person, the level of testosterone etc.
One may use his intelligence to overcome instincts if trained hard, but the natural responses should not be curbed. It may lead to long term deviant behaviour among people.
It may be better to use the intelligence to assist the instincts. That will take him to greater heights.

What complete and utter nonsense.

That’s just medieval-level chauvinistic justification for lechery. Another way of describing it is victim-blaming the victims of sexual assault.

Nobody is saying one can’t have desires. How one acts upon desires, on the other hand, is purely a matter of choice.

[tooki]

I worked for 10 years in the design lab of a company that made good quality switch mode power supplies. On a daily basis we would make engineering decisions that affected fire and electrical safety, the sort of thing that if done wrong would have possibly caused the company to get sued into oblivion. Despite this, we were not trusted to have a key to the stationery cupboard to get a pen.

Penny-wise Pound-foolishness is an internal expense that most managers will never understand. It shows up at all levels of corporate structure. Cheap pens for expensive engineers. Cheap oscilloscopes for expensive projects. Cheap security for expensive buildings.

And stupid open plan offices that save a few hundred bucks a a month per head on real estate, while producing a 20% drop in productivity on someone who is paid many thousands a month. Absolutely mind bogglingly stupid.