Too many companies grow, need more labor, allow employees to work overtime to fill in the production gaps and after a period of time, find payroll overtime has grown when sales have not. The first thing this trend shows is no managerial control on their employees’ work hours. One way to control and monitor overtime is to enforce a policy of requiring overtime approval prior to the employee working. Force the employee to get written approval for overtime before working. Make managers submit their plans for all overtime in order to make they plan and defend their selections.
Employees cannot work their own time schedule; force supervisors to plan work. They have to get preapproved for working over eight hours per day or whatever constitutes overtime for your company. Make everyone understand that without this approval, they do not get paid.