The phrase overtime mafia is not clickbait, but the reality of Polish companies. It is customary to think that if someone is exploiting someone between the employer and the employee, it is the boss his subordinate. The overtime mafia is fundamentally different. In such an arrangement, it is the employee who exposes the company he works for to financial loss. How does the overtime mafia work? How to fight it? Read more.
Overtime: a permanent feature of the full-time job
A 40-hour working week is the norm in several European countries, also in Poland. However, working full-time has a certain disadvantage: without overtime, an employee has no possibility of influencing the amount of their remuneration (discretionary bonuses are an exception). Overtime work, although it occurs on a smaller and smaller scale every year, continues to be a standard in organisations. It reduces the comfort of work and increases fatigue. What makes such overtime work different from the overtime mafia? The employee’s intentions.
What is the overtime mafia?
The concept of overtime mafia is not yet popular in Poland, which is a pity, because it very accurately describes the phenomenon occurring in many companies. The overtime mafia consists in a hidden agreement of employees which results in generating unjustified overtime work. This is usually associated with an artificial reduction in performance during normal working hours. Such a classic abuse will be encountered, for example, when an employee deliberately prolongs their duties only to be able to complete them in hours paid additionally.
How much does your company lose?
A survey conducted by KPMG Poland in 2016 exposed the bitter truth: financial losses caused by perpetrators operating inside companies are greater than those that can be generated by outsiders.
KPMG International has also published statistics showing how much money businesses around the world are losing by not being aware or ignoring the existence of the overtime mafia in their organisations. Almost 40% of intentional use of overtime work ends up in a loss of up to USD 200k per year for a company. In Poland, this would mean a loss of almost PLN 750k. If this amount does not impress you, the next in line is more than USD 5M per year, so more than PLN 18.6M: this is 25% of cases.
If you do not want to find out for yourself how much a Polish entrepreneur can lose, arm yourself with the right tool and detect the overtime mafia in your company as soon as possible.
Write to our expert on LinkedIn or contact us at marketing@eqsystem.pl: we’ll give you tips on how to do it.
