Colleague deliberately staying late at work just to accrue TOIL?

If you have a proper TOIL system then you long the actual hours you work.

So you can take a 2 hour lunch and then stay late to make the time up that day or even accrue more for another long lunch.

We had core hours 10-12 and then 2-4 beyond that as long as deadlines were hit and you didn't go over 2 days TOIL all was good.

People who abused it lost the right to have TOIL.

How would it be fair for me to work Friday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday (12+hours on occasion) only to be told that I can only claim back 8 hours and that I'm not free to use the hours as I wish?

I can see how those rules might work in an admin team, but it's just not practical for an IT Department - especially if the company doesn't want to pay overtime. The work simply wouldn't get done.

I think you’re missing the point which is that they’re deliberately ‘working’ (unnecessary) short blocks over their contracted hours in order to build up extra leave. Not that anyone else needs to or is refusing to work over their hours.

It also doesn’t follow that if people aren’t having to work extra hours the business can afford the additional time off. Maybe they got their staffing model right in the first place.

In my company you can only take 10 hours of overtime with you to the next month, the rest gets paid. If you are doing night- or weekend shifts, it add up quickly, but staying late 15 to 30 minutes past closing time can't be that much in total. Furthermore, whenever I am in the office I either leave before rushhour or I stay late so I won't be stuck in traffic. If my employer wants me in the office they can deal with the consequences of that, because it also impacts my free time. Thankfully, we have a good back and forth with management.

But I gotta say, the posters here saying that people should just lose the overttime they worked or people can't even take time off because they are so understaffed, really baffle me. It's the sign of a bad employer, surely, that you can't take time off ever and that the sickleave days and turnover rate are through the roof. That would be a massive red flag for me and a strong sign to look for employment elsewhere.

We’ve all worked with these people.

We have (yes still have) one member of staff who would take 2 lunches, an hour each, then breaks and then claim overtime after 5! Utter joke.

They still work at the company and overtime is banned as the budget has been spent (on them claiming the hours)

There's no way your petty rules would work in an IT department.

I've worked for plenty of good IT businesses and departments where there were similar controls around TOIL that seemed to work well.

But they also paid decent salaries, paid overtime, gave decent training and had good opportunities to work with new technology - and that really helps smooth the way. It's also a lot less disruptive than shed loads of TOIL meaning changes are done OOH but then there are limited people around in hours to handle the occasional fallout.

None of your business...

People are allowed to take toil, go on leave or to be off sick.

You are not the team manager either.

I'd stay out but you're right. We are allowed max 1.5 days TOIL in a 28 day cycle. We are also not allowed to build up any of that time at home (it is monitored too); additionally TOIL is discretionary- if it were a busy week or anything important happening, it would be rejected. This person is profiteering from poor management.

Time Off In Lieu IE you have to work additional hours but you don't get pay but extra leave!

If you’re not busy enough to be able to accrue TOIL, then you can cope with someone in the team being off work for leave or AA. It seems to me so often that folk are just unwilling to do anything out of their narrow set of routined deliverables. Frustrating.

Time off in Lieu

As frustrating as it can be, these types of people are in most work places. Yes, she's playing a game, staying over 15 mins everyday to take a whole week off later in the year, as well as running errands through the day - but what can you do? Her manager knows she is doing it and is ok with it.

The only thing you can do is disengage from her, any of her work that can be left until after her holiday, leave it for her to get back and don't make life easy for her where possible, if she asks you to pick up any tasks, just say you can't. If you don't have to do any of this for her, then it's not impacting you anyway so don't give it any headspace.

TOIL can be stealing company time. I think everyone should be able to raise it to their manager. Your work hours are your contracted time. Extra hours do not automatically belong to you. It is a form of fraud to create extra work to either be paid for it or paid in time off. It is still stealing if it’s not genuine. Common mistake that people think TOIL is something that belongs to you - it doesn’t, it is time outside of your contract and needs to be agreed with your manager

I have had jobs where I have had toil and jobs where I haven't but have never come across a situation where you could stay 15 minutes late and claim it. I'm a civil servant now and could only accrue toil if my manager had agreed that I needed to work extra hours. I've been there 5 years and this has never happened.

It sounds as if the whole policy needs re-writing.

Sounds like a colleague taking the mickey, which impacts everyone. Sometimes things like this need to be highlighted to managers etc to ensure appropriate policies are in place and being followed. At the end of the day, someone is being paid to do a job and it sounds like they aren't really doing that. It affects everybody if slackers are being paid and getting away with being lazy.
If you do approach managers, do it in the way of clarifying appointments in work time, TOIL rules etc rather than pointing a finger at a certain member of staff. Hopefully an email will follow reminding people of the rules and flouting will be dealt with.
All offices seem to have a shirker, fortunately the one in mine ended up being made redundant - she thought 25 years service would protect her......!

Whats TOIL

And then the company would wonder why people were calling in sick!

You could raise with your manager that there seems to be an issue with the work load distribution as X has built up so much TOIL and is there anything you can do to help.

That's absolutely not how the TOIL policy should work. Nor is it the correct application of flexi time. She's massively taking the piss but her manager needs to address that with her. Presumably the manager will know when she asks for a week of TOIL (!) and ask her how it was accrued?

You can talk to a manager.

But what bare you telling them that they don't already know? They know she's taking TOIL as they need to approve it.

FYI OP, in thr past I've had health appointments from hospitals which are next to impossible to move to a non working day as the clinic only runs then or they have moved the appointment several times and I was just grateful to be seen. For all you know she might be acting blasé to you because there's more going on.

By all means speak to a manager but like I said, you aren't telling them anything they don't know.

Sounds odd. In such a small team has the manager not questioned why she's always staying late and noone else is? It does sound like the manager may refuse to let her take it all in one go if there's been a previous e-mail asking people not to accrue TOIL.

I had an employee like this once, presented me with his TOIL sheet that he’d been sneakily building up for almost a year to about a week.

I have no problem at all with people taking TOIL when it’s legitimately earned and staff work extra time because it’s needed, but some of the things he’d claimed for was ten minutes to nip to the shop on the way home from work (when he was going for himself anyway). He’d also been very underhand about it.

I got the policy out and pointed out that he couldn’t carry over from one year to the next so that got rid of a lump, you also can’t claim for less than 15 minutes, that got rid of another lump. He ended up with about 3 hours, which was fine. I said ‘when do you want to take it?’. He stopped taking the piss so much after that.

For those saying it doesn’t impact on others, when someone is being underhand in acquiring extra leave when it leaves the rest of the team short handed, it absolutely does. It also affect staff morale to have someone being sneaky and taking the piss.

Surely any extra hours outside of core hours should be directed by management according to business need not employee need to accrue TOIL. An extra 15 minutes is just normal finishing off after work time surely! YANBU. I would raise it for clarification on how TOIL is accrued.

I work a job where we build up a lot of TOIL through working out of hours at events, and the company is really good at recognising it.

However, there is a policy that we need to use the TOIL relatively quickly after we've worked it. The reasoning is, the time off is to help us recover from working over our hours.

It isn't to be used for saving up for extra leave. If we built up a week like this, the request to take it would be denied as we'd be told we should have taken it soon after we accrued it.

We had someone like you OP in the last office I worked in before I retired; couldn’t stop picking over who was doing what and running to the managers in the hope of getting staff “told off”. What a hateful pain in the neck she was. Despised by all