Your handbook says, "No unauthorized overtime permitted." Your managers tell employees that they must get their job duties completed during regular work hours because there is a company-wide prohibition against working overtime. Your managers also tell employees to accurately record their hours worked. All good stuff, right? Could be.

But what if your employees understood (or claim they understood) the message to be: "to keep your job you must get your work done and if you have to work overtime to get it done, so be it. Just know that we don't want to pay for the overtime so I don't want you recording those hours. If you do I'll see you as being an inefficient slacker and I will ‘correct' the time records to eliminate your overtime hours." This is not the message you intended to communicate.

This situation may seem farfetched because you know that non-exempt employees must record and be paid for all hours worked. You also know that the minimal "savings" your company would achieve by not paying its employees properly is outweighed by the practical risks of losing good employees and the legal risks for violating wage-hour laws – including potential personal liability. And, given that claims under wage and hour laws are one of the fastest growing areas of employment litigation, the risk of a legal challenge to a company's pay practices is greater now than in recent memory.