At my company, at the first position I held, I was an FTE at a help desk. Management thought it was a good idea to mix it up and put people in change of units that were outside the expertise of those holding positions. Some shitty lady from finance, with an MBA, became our boss. She had this sort of mentality about time.
Previously, I’d stay until the job was done and not think anything of the time I was losing. I liked my job and helping people. She decided one day, when I left about 15-minutes to make a doctor appointment across town, that I had done something wrong and needed to work my entire 7.5-hour shift. She wanted us to note everything we did and document it for her review.
She fucked up. To comply, I wrote a program to track when I locked and unlocked my computer and log it with date time and show the running total of the time worked per day. I stopped staying late. I stopped returning from lunch early if I knew we were busy. People stood at the counter waiting while I finished incidental things at the end of my shift to prevent any late departures. I made sure to never leave early, but I never stayed late or took walkups near my 7.5-hour day.
Malicious compliance is my favorite kind of compliance!
The latter. She was loathed by almost everyone. We had a new FTE position open and a student hire (higher ed) applied and got offered the position. He was a fuckin’ rock star at this shit. Real personable and great at tech troubleshooting.
He had a 1-on-1 with his Team Lead, who was cut from the same cloth as the interim director, and asked him how he felt things were going in the department. He laid out thoughtful points of ways things could change to improve morale, didn’t even mention the interim director or blame anyone for specifics. She didn’t like this new hire telling her how things could be better and he got fired by the interim director. Since he was a new hire, he was on probation.
It was fucked. Dude had been a student worker longer than the interim had worked in her previous finance position! She probably would have fired me had I been on probation as well!
At my company, at the first position I held, I was an FTE at a help desk. Management thought it was a good idea to mix it up and put people in change of units that were outside the expertise of those holding positions. Some shitty lady from finance, with an MBA, became our boss. She had this sort of mentality about time.
Previously, I’d stay until the job was done and not think anything of the time I was losing. I liked my job and helping people. She decided one day, when I left about 15-minutes to make a doctor appointment across town, that I had done something wrong and needed to work my entire 7.5-hour shift. She wanted us to note everything we did and document it for her review.
She fucked up. To comply, I wrote a program to track when I locked and unlocked my computer and log it with date time and show the running total of the time worked per day. I stopped staying late. I stopped returning from lunch early if I knew we were busy. People stood at the counter waiting while I finished incidental things at the end of my shift to prevent any late departures. I made sure to never leave early, but I never stayed late or took walkups near my 7.5-hour day.
Malicious compliance is my favorite kind of compliance!
Did it have the desired effect of changing the policy or torpedoing the department hard enough she was replaced?
The latter. She was loathed by almost everyone. We had a new FTE position open and a student hire (higher ed) applied and got offered the position. He was a fuckin’ rock star at this shit. Real personable and great at tech troubleshooting.
He had a 1-on-1 with his Team Lead, who was cut from the same cloth as the interim director, and asked him how he felt things were going in the department. He laid out thoughtful points of ways things could change to improve morale, didn’t even mention the interim director or blame anyone for specifics. She didn’t like this new hire telling her how things could be better and he got fired by the interim director. Since he was a new hire, he was on probation.
It was fucked. Dude had been a student worker longer than the interim had worked in her previous finance position! She probably would have fired me had I been on probation as well!