I use a MacBook Pro for work. According to my workplace's policy, when I leave my desk, I lock the screen. There's a bug in MacOS High Sierra where sometimes when I come back and unlock the screen, the screensaver is showing and can't be dismissed. The laptop is therefore unusable.
The only way I have found of getting back into my mac is to hold the power button down until the laptop shuts down. But this isn't a safe shutdown; if I have any Parallels VMs running they are usually corrupted and I have to restore them from backups.
Is there a safer way shut down, or otherwise get back into, my Mac? If so, what is it?