The Little Sins We Commit at Work—and the Bosses Who Are Cracking Down
Companies are strictly enforcing rules to show who’s in charge and control expenses
4 min
Ever used the office printer for your kid’s homework assignment or scrolled Facebook Marketplace during an all-hands Zoom meeting? Fair warning: Your employer may be paying close attention.
Big companies on the hunt for efficiency are deploying perk police to bust employees for seemingly minor infractions that, by the letter of company law, can result in termination.
“We have had lots of requests for new controls,” says Katie MacKillop, U.S. director of Payhawk, which administers company credit-card accounts and watches for misuse.
Clients are asking Payhawk to restrict when and where company cards work. For example, a company can limit a lunch allowance to be available only on weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and be usable at Chipotle but not at Kroger . In partnership with Visa and Mastercard , Payhawk is developing a feature that sends real-time spending alerts to corporate finance teams and allows them to instantly block suspicious transactions by employees.
MacKillop’s firm doesn’t track what happens to employees who violate company policies, but she says there is little doubt employers are taking codes of conduct more seriously.
That helps explain reports of crackdowns at Meta , where employees were fired for spending $25 meal allowances on other items, Ernst & Young dismissing workers who watched multiple training videos at the same time, and Target canning employees who jumped the line to buy coveted Stanley water bottles ahead of the general public. The companies declined to comment on the incidents.
As the employer-employee power struggle tilts in companies’ favour, some businesses are using strict rules enforcement to make an example of rule-breakers or reduce payroll without having a real layoff. An employer feeling buyer’s remorse after a post pandemic hiring spree can use the company handbook to push out unwanted employees, says human-resources consultant Suzanne Lucas.
“When you are desperately hiring, you’re definitely overlooking things,” says Lucas, who cheekily brands herself the Evil HR Lady. “When you need to cut head count, you tighten up the rules.”
Workers argue many so-called perks are designed to increase productivity. A free meal is an enticement to stay at your desk. A recorded HR tutorial is less a reprieve from the awkwardness of in-person, sexual-harassment training than an invitation to keep plugging away while paying half attention to a video on your second monitor.
Why gin up excuses to fire people instead of simply announcing a round of job cuts? A few reasons, Lucas says.
Layoffs imply a business is struggling, and companies may want to avoid shaking the confidence of customers or investors. Employers often feel obligated—or are contractually bound—to offer severance packages to laid-off workers. Firing people for cause can save money, she says.
Then there’s the effect on a company’s remaining employees. Few things put workers on notice like seeing colleagues pink-slipped for minor offences. And, as a matter of principle, stealing is stealing even if it is a small amount of company money or time.
Warning shot
If a goal of harsh consequences is to keep people in line, then it’s working on Matt Tedesco.
When he read a Financial Times report that Meta fired employees who spent Grubhub meal allowances on things like acne pads and laundry detergent in a saga dubbed “Grubgate,” he flashed back to a similar episode at a defunct company where he used to work. He says a half dozen colleagues in sales were shown the door because they used meal stipends to buy groceries.
Tedesco, 47, describes himself as a rule follower in general and says he is doubly sure to do everything by the book in the current climate. He started this fall as a sales account executive at Hearst after being laid off by S&P Global last year.
“It’s hard to get a job right now—it took me months,” he says. “From an employee standpoint, my takeaway is don’t abuse any privilege because it’s not worth the risk.”
People in a range of industries admitted to me privately that they’ve broken rules like these in the past but said they’d never cop to it publicly. One likened today’s workplace to a street with a 30 mph speed limit, where you routinely get away with driving 37 mph and feel blindsided when you’re pulled over and ticketed. Enforcement levels fluctuate, this person said, and seem to be high right now.
Cracking down is a time-honoured tactic when companies feel financial pressure. In 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession, a former private-client relationship manager at Fidelity told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he and three colleagues lost their jobs for running fantasy-football leagues at work, in violation of a corporate policy against gambling. The stakes in his league: $20. Fidelity had laid off 1,700 employees earlier that year.
And in 2018, when Wells Fargo announced significant head count cuts, the bank fired or suspended more than a dozen bankers who put dinners on the company tab and doctored the receipts. The bank said at the time that it pays for meals when employees work late, but some ordered takeout before the allowed hour and changed the timestamps on the bills.
Without knowing all the details, it can be hard to understand why companies police small dollars when they appear to spend freely on pricier items, says Jennifer Dulski , chief executive of Rising Team, a maker of employee-engagement software. She notes Meta offices are known for vending machines stocked with headphones, keyboards and other electronics available to employees free of charge, yet the company is getting serious about lunch money.
“They’re either weeding or just trying to make an example of behaviour they think is inappropriate,” Dulski says.
Employers have good reasons to be sticklers in some cases, says Cedar Boschan, a forensic accountant in Culver City, Calif. Companies can invite tax trouble if money earmarked for perks and business expenses is misspent on other things.
So, don’t put all of the blame for policy crackdowns on human resources. Save some for the one department that HR might beat in a popularity contest: accounting.
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
The budget has changed the settings. It has not changed the fundamentals.
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