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Malicious compliance (media.piefed.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/funny@lemmy.world
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[–] 39 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

Only tangentially related, but I used to have a decent boss and then a particular coworker arrived. He would find loopholes and cracks and breaking points of literally every single bit of flexibility we had. Eventually, we lost almost all of it. We had a strong union and this new guy knew how to abuse that. He didn't get caught breaking any rules, but it was obvious that he was using any flexibility to avoid it being provable. Took like three years before we got rid of him.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Honestly, depending on what it is, if the rules suck then it’s the rules’ problem.

    At my last job I was told that they didn’t do overtime but I could bank hours. At some point they said that the spirit of it was that I could use those hours on the same project, not really to make up for missed time during the whole month. But see, overtime hours are always loaded towards the end of a project which would just mean I’d be giving them free labour when I was already not paid that well. I kept track of my extra hours and used them all the time to make up for missing whatever and while I don’t feel at all bad I’m sure their thought is that I was cheating their stupid, shitty system.

    If managers and executives want to get paid so much money for being so smart then you’d think they’d be intelligent enough to do create decent rules. But we all know that they’re not so here we are.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I partially agree, and it is important for rules to be exact in large systems. But if it was possible for them to be a bit more loose, and for people to still follow the spirit, then you would be able to give people a lot more freedom. But, it's almost impossible to make rules that are lenient enough for people to actually enjoy them without them being so lenient that some people will exploit them. This can typically work in small scenarios with a few people that know each other well. And in those cases, it's very useful to have a set of relatively lenient rules that allow people to act based on their discretion. But, as soon as you have a large group of people, this breaks down, as people don't feel the same attachment to each other/the group and their responsibility.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Sure, though we also gotta look at what these rules are even asking of us. Like, I can’t even think of a rule that could be that badly exploited aside from someone saying “take a day off if you need a mental health day it’s ok” followed by someone just taking every Friday off for their mental health. And in that case, the person would be 100% correct since many studies and real-world trials have proven that a four day work week makes people happier and more productive but coworkers and management would be pretty mad if they were all forcing themselves to do the objectively worse five day week.

    And if one person taking advantage of what they were given is enough to break the system then the system was already busted for a long time. If you need special exceptions that are so vague in order to make things work then shit’s fucked to begin with. Don’t tell me I get a bunch of days off and then get mad when I take days off, ya know?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I would say that is not a decent boss then. At least, not for that employee.

    If a worker is making their colleagues unhappy by being an ass, management should be willing to take appropriate action.

    I inherited some workers with bad attitudes when a company I was at merged two teams. On paper it was impossible to fire them, so I wasted so much time trying to get them to fit in. After a year I gave up and went to HR who was like, "oh yeah no problem we'll let them go". I didn't even think that was possible, based on our management training, but it turns out that since their shit attitudes and associated shit performance were well documented it wasn't a problem. We just paid them severance and off they went.

    I was worried about the impact on the other employees, but everyone was happy to see them go.

    I talked to one of them months later and he actually thanked me. It turned out that he was unhappy with the job but unable to get motivation to move on. He ended up at Greenpeace for a while; I don't know how long he stayed there... we were not friends. 😅

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Our union is pretty strong and they were obligated to defend him. This dude also lawyered up for everything - it was like a second job for him. Anything added to his record would be challenged, amended, or argued that everyone else also did something technically similar so they should all be written up, etc. Also didn't help that he knew exactly how to piss of my boss and my boss lost his cool once and cursed him out. I think that added another 12+ months to the guy's employment since now he could argue my boss had something out for him personally.

    He loved the power it gave him and he virtually scammed every system to "legally" (again, nothing obvious enough to get caught) get rewarded for it in most cases. Most organizations will eat this cost of giving in to these shitbags just to get rid of them in the moment.

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