As a supervisor, you have the right to require an employee to work overtime. However, you CANNOT require an employee to accept comp time. Under the regulations the employee must have the choice to either be paid overtime or given comp time. You can ask an employee to work overtime and tell them that you can only offer comp time for the additional hours. In this case, the employee can either accept that or not. If they don’t accept it and it’s critical that you have the employee work overtime, then you will need to pay the employee overtime.
Remember that rearranging employee work schedules may be an option in lieu of overtime/comp time, as long as the hours recorded (work hours, sick and vacation) in a single workweek do not exceed 40. These types of schedules provide flexibility for both the department and the employee.