‘9-5, in Office, No Exceptions’: A New CTO Ended Remote Work and Imposed Strict Office Hours, Then He Discovered How Much Work Employees Were Doing on Their Own Time—and How Much the Company Relied on That Mutual Goodwill

In this story, this employee shared an account of the software company where they worked with a flexible hybrid working arrangement that included the ability to work from home. That unspoken rule that I described above existed in their workplace. In accordance with the mutual goodwill that existed between management and the staff that if something broke over the weekend or there was a client issue, then the employee would fix it from home. If that meant logging in on a Saturday or Sunday unpaid, it didn't really matter; everyone was looking out for each other, and there was mutual trust. It was almost like the company had on-call coverage despite not having to pay the outrageous overtime figures that go along with it.

But then a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) joined the company, and the company culture spiraled. He began demanding that everyone work from the office 9-5 every day. No flexible arrangements, no exceptions

New CTO:"If you're not at your desk, it's not work." We stopped working the second we weren't at our desks.

The employee detailed how the unspoken rule had worked with the team.

Quick background: mid-size B2B software company, hybrid since forever. The unspoken deal was simple a couple days in office, and if prod broke at 9pm or a client panicked on a Saturday, someone fixed it from home. Unpaid, but nobody minded. Goodwill.

But then a new CTO joined and changed everything with strict rules about working from the office during set hours, doing away with remote working flexibility that had allowed employees to work from home.

New CTO arrives from a much more rigid company. Second all-hands, he kills the flexible days: 9-5, in office, no exceptions. Asked about after-hours emergencies, he says, paraphrasing only slightly,"If you're not at your desk, actively working, I don't consider it work. I don't care what you'd have done from your couch at 9pm."

9-5 at the desk “no exceptions” and the team complied fully to that demand.

Someone half-jokes,"So nothing outside 9-5 at the desk counts?" Him, d**d serious: "Exactly. Glad we're aligned."

We were aligned. So we complied fully, literally.

Every day the team checked out right at 5pm. No longer following the unspoken arrangement that had existed before.

Slack got muted at 5:00 sharp. Nobody checked email after leaving. A PM pinged on-call at 6pm about a broken integration and got silence until 9am the next day.

Then, one Friday, a deploy went out at 4:52, minutes before the freeze a configuration value missed one customer segment. Under the old system, someone would've caught it from their phone by 5:30. Under the new one: the alert fired at 5:06. Nobody was at their desk, and per the CTO himself, that meant nobody was working. So nobody looked.

A client issue over the weekend went unattended. Predictably. After all, no one was on-call.

It ran the whole weekend. Our biggest client had a fully broken dashboard for 61 hours. By Monday at 9am there were 200+ support tickets, a furious VP of Sales, and a client using the word "churn" a lot.

The CTO demanded to know why.

The CTO demanded to know how nobody noticed for two and a half days. Our team lead completely deadpan pulled up his exact quote from the all-hands: "if you're not at your desk, actively working, I don't consider it work." Nobody was at their desk all weekend. By his own definition, nobody was working. Nothing to notice.

I've never heard a room go that quiet.

Then the company was forced to pay for a real on-call rotation. And hybrid work slowly and quietly returned.

We got a real on-call rotation within the week actual comp time, not vibes. Hybrid quietly came back a month later as a "pilot." Nobody's said "if you're not at your desk" out loud since.

Turns out a lot of "not real work" had been holding the place together for free.

There is so much that goes into the morale of an employee or a team as a whole, and it's no small wonder how big a simple change in leadership can send rippling effects through the business despite nothing else changing. 

I think a lot of us have been in positions where we saw our extra work and hard yards go unrewarded. Maybe the effort went completely disregarded and unacknowledged. But sometimes something even worse happens: that above-and-beyond, the extra time, and the extra work you do become the new baseline expectation. There's a resulting effort to distance you from your work and results in the name of keeping you “in your place.”

I think a lot of employees felt this way when they proved their ability to work flexibly and from home, only to have their employers put strict return-to-office mandates in place anyway. The reality is, through the great work-from-home experiment of recent years, a lot of us were probably putting in extra effort just to prove that the experiment could be successful. They might have been doing extra unpaid overtime, but the flexibility and appreciation they received in return made it worth it. But when employers went ahead and went with a partial return to the office, sometimes callously ignoring employee feedback and even doing away with all work-from-home flexible arrangements, it left employees feeling somewhat betrayed and undervalued. 

Meanwhile, if your manager lets you work flexibly, as allowed by the needs of the business and demands of your role, you might feel more inclined to answer a text message from that manager after dinner. Also, if your manager lets you take a day off with short notice and doesn't obstruct you from taking vacation, you might feel more inclined with a problem on your day off. 

One thing that organizations seem to miss a lot of the time culturally is that actually giving their employees more leeway goes a long way toward intangible benefits for the business. By the time micromanagement starts and the expectations mount, employees are going to start checking out. Why would they give you any consideration when you're not giving them the same in return?

All of that time that the employees were working out of goodwill and desire for success as a common goal is gone; that's now regarded as unpaid overtime. And managers won't ever fully realize the value of that extra work once it disappears.

Now, managers see numbers slipping and the organization faltering in measured KPIs and just an overall feeling of momentum. Then it's just toxic management as everything spirals out right to the bottom. At the end of the day, that voluntary overtime is voluntary, and if no one's volunteering, you can't control that except to look back to the point where everything changed for the worse in the company culture.