AIBU to feel workplaces are insensitive to employees when talking £££

[LoveIsAllThereIs]

I find it really hard not to make comments or passive aggessive digs when my boss talks about spending large sums of money on work related investments, as if it's of no consequence, whilst I sit there working out that expense as a proportion of my salary.

An example may be a cancelled business flight at thousands of pounds, just written off as not convenient etc. Or a 'nice to have' consultancy at a large daily rate. An expense claim that's more than I get paid in a month.

There are so many more I could list. Really peeves me, knowing I give so much more value than these silly expenditures. Making it known is probably doing me no favours, but I know I would always be more sensitive if ever in that position.

AIBU to be annoyed by this?

I have two hilariously different brain states for money.

We spend an enormous amount of money at work. If we spend less than about £10k on most individual things it doesn't make enough of a dent in the budget for me to stress about it beyond the usual checks that it's not a catastrophic waste of money. Investments are regularly in the tens of millions.

In my personal life I get twitchy about spending an extra 50p on the posh biscuits or about spending £15 on something for the garden.

I don't have an answer but it is very strange how I separate those two arenas entirely in my brain. It's ultimately because I would go mad at work if I worried about every £1 but it's a hard balancing act.

I know what you mean, in my department we have to be very careful with our spending. I do my boss’ expenses and the Finance team are always asking if X was really required, could we have done Y instead. Or before covid - things like buying an open train ticket because a meeting/conference didn’t have a specific end time, and it was only £10 more than buying two advanced singles for specific trains, would cause a real grilling about why we couldn’t go for the cheaper option etc. And we are dealing with quite small amounts here, never going anywhere near the monthly limit and each transaction is carefully justified with a business case for why it was needed.

It would be fine (if annoying) if this was the standard approach, but I have provided holiday cover for colleagues in other departments previously where their expenses have included ridiculous costs - first class travel, elaborate boozy lunches, gifts for the team etc - and the Finance team haven't batted an eyelid. Doesn’t seem fair when it’s one rule for some and another for the rest.

@Gladioli23

I have two hilariously different brain states for money.

We spend an enormous amount of money at work. If we spend less than about £10k on most individual things it doesn't make enough of a dent in the budget for me to stress about it beyond the usual checks that it's not a catastrophic waste of money. Investments are regularly in the tens of millions.

In my personal life I get twitchy about spending an extra 50p on the posh biscuits or about spending £15 on something for the garden.

I don't have an answer but it is very strange how I separate those two arenas entirely in my brain. It's ultimately because I would go mad at work if I worried about every £1 but it's a hard balancing act.

Do you not ever compare those big sums to what goes in your bank at the end of the month and think WTF?!

Do you not ever compare those big sums to what goes in your bank at the end of the month and think WTF?!

So we have very stringent procedures for losses so things like writing off a flight doesn't really happen and has to be heavily revised, which makes it better.

I sort of do occasionally, but the organisation turns over about £1.5bn a year so I'd send myself insane if I did. I just have to run my brain entirely separately. I guess it helps as well that there aren't fancy dinners etc being paid for. My old job had a permanent box at the O2 and stuff like that used to boggle my mind.

The thing at a lot of organisations that does my head in is lowest to highest paid workers ratios where the head honcho is paid millions and the lowest paid maybe £15k, so it can be 100x as much or more. In my organisation that's about 7x which is still an awful lot but feels less like blatant exploitation.

I think you're being naive.

What business would exist if it didn't spend money (costs) to make money (profit).

Most business spend £££ to get £££ plus back.

I 'spend' upwards of 500k per year, and am as frugal with it as if it was my own, but sign off 70k a time without batting an eye lid. It doesn't occur to me thats X% of my salary in one invoice. It costs my company something like 30 mill a year to bring in 40 mill, 10 mill profit.

Do you honestly think employees should be thinking about the effect of claiming their expenses on the person who processes them? They have no idea what you are paid - it’s irrelevant. I think it might be time you found a new job - you think the tail should wag the dog?

for you

I used to buy tv ads when I graduated.
A 30 second ad in fucking Jeremy Kyle was about the same as my annual salary and 30" in coronation street was a £70k this was back in 2005....
I spent a year trying to work out if I could somehow siphon a bit off the tv budgets before realising a higher paying job would be easier and involve less prison time 🤣🤣🤣

The most disgusting one that still stays with me was a 60 second ad in a football game that did higher than expected ratings and cost just over £250k
At the time i was sharing a 2 bed flat with my mum and 2 siblings (she fled when violence against one sibling escalated very badly and was v financially abused by him)

That one advert would have bought us a 3 bed in zone 2 / 4 Bed in zone 4 outright at the time. I remember trawling rightmove and feeling so sad at the waste. That shitty 60 second ad would have transformed our lives.

There's like a sliding scale of cost effectiveness with some stuff though. I could spend an entire morning costing pencils and find the absolute cheapest with the best quality and save £25. But that is not good use of my time which costs more! So a quick look at 3 suppliers will have to do. Sometimes it's that type of thing. You are better off leaving it that spending a load of time trying to rectify things which ultimately ends up costing more.

@Blueskyredcloud

Do you honestly think employees should be thinking about the effect of claiming their expenses on the person who processes them? They have no idea what you are paid - it’s irrelevant. I think it might be time you found a new job - you think the tail should wag the dog?

My boss knows exactly what I'm paid. It's the insensitive talk around throwing money around (everywhere but the payroll) that annoys me. I'm not sure a new job would change the issue

The economy is alla giant, interconnected loop. You indirectly benefit from businesses splashing their cash around, even if you can't see it. The us and them thinking never gets us anywhere as a society.

Boasting about how much money you spend is vulgar. Claiming your legitimate expenses is not.

I don't think it's insensitive, exactly. Sometimes gobsmacking how much money gets moved around - I regularly oversee a few deals that are worth triple my salary a day, but what am I going to do, insist I'm paid that amount a day?

If you're not happy with your salary and think you should be paid more for your role you should definitely speak to your boss. If you are happy with it and you're just mad your business spends money on things, YABU.

I don't think most people think like you do. I'm sure a lot of the business expenses are large proportions or multiples of your bosses salary as well. Large businesses deal with large amounts of money.

I think most people dissociate from it in terms of personal feelings.

I used to work in a cash office, handling thousands of pounds in cash a day. I never used to think what I could do with it probably because I knew it wasn't mine to spend and didn't want to depress myself and I never considered stealing it, there were cameras everywhere and lots of checking.

I'm always amazed when people manage to steal lots of money from companies they work for, that there aren't stringent checks and balances.

I'm sorry but that way of thinking strokes me as bizarre. Any organisation or company is going to have more cash than any individual employee and to have things to spend it on other than payroll.

strikes me

@FaceyRomford

I'm sorry but that way of thinking strokes me as bizarre. Any organisation or company is going to have more cash than any individual employee and to have things to spend it on other than payroll.

Yes I'm wondering if I understood OP correctly.

'An example may be a cancelled business flight at thousands of pounds, just written off as not convenient etc. Or a 'nice to have' consultancy at a large daily rate. An expense claim that's more than I get paid in a month.'

These are business expenses.

I don't understand.

So a big boss has a first class flight to wherever and then something else comes up.

So what? It's company money. And big boss isn't doing it for fun. Traveling a lot especially internationally is exhausting.

Consultants get paid eye watering daily rates. They have no job security, pension paid, paid hols etc. Horses for courses but I like the stability (ish) of s permanent role.

Why are you comparing the cost of work flights or contractors to your salary? That's really weird.

Not quite the same thing, but a couple of years ago I remember our company director making a bi-annual trip to the office to explain why we weren't getting our (1.8%) increase that year. He turned up in a brand new 100k sports car. And yes we all sacked off the afternoon to work out what car he could have still bought and also given us the 1.8% increase.....

I've been out for super expensive client dinners (sometimes).

They're pretty awkward.

You have to chat pleasantly to people you have zero in common with.

You can't enjoy the food properly because you have to be chatty and upbeat.

You can't get pissed.

Then you have to get the tube home in the middle of the night and get up and into work at normal time. (I don't like cabs, slower and too many iffy experiences, and anyway not always offered if you're a bit junior).

It's not fun it's work cutting into your own time.

Be careful what you wish for...

I used to work at a hotel owned by a massive entertainment firm. Tens of thousands of employees worldwide. Following a serious H&S breach on another site, the company was fined a significant amount of money and found the money by making redundancies. So I found it rather galling when staff from other sites (and I'm not talking about the minimum wage bar staff like me here) came to stay for training or team building and got pissed on company credit cards.

Some really interesting views here. @therocinate I think you may have a point, I think an underlying emotion here is that I don't think I'm paid fairly for my role, so perhaps this is playing a bigger part in these feelings.

I few months ago I was completely overstretched with work and asked if I could increase my hours to fulltime. I was told the company couldn't afford it yet and it would be looked at for a date in the future. So it's very frustrating when you then see these sorts of big sums getting spent. I know budgets are a complicated affair, and you can't just move buckets around, but it makes me feel undervalued, when actually my role is 'critical to the business' (their words not mine).

Despite the above, I have always felt like this about the insensitivity, regardless of where I have worked. I think @coldemortreturns hits the nail on the head with that example! That's pretty outrageous insensitivity!

Your boss isn't paying for these expenses from their salary and neither are you. Not sure why you care how the business spends money on business related costs?

"Critical to the business" is just shit they all say

Don't do more than your set hours, it sounds like you might be.

I think it's more insensitive when businesses boast to the employees about how much profit has been made and how happy the shareholders are, and then saying there won't be any pay rises this year as they can't afford it. Well they can for the big boys but not the lower employees (the ones who do the actual work). At a company I used to work for, they got loads of people to apply for promotions, saying that they would likely get them for doing extra work during covid. No one got a promotion. So glad I left there.