employees are fighting back with malicious compliance

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

As long as we have employers, we’ll also have managers who issue nonsensical or inefficient edicts — even when their employees point out a smarter way to go. Sometimes that’s because they’re more focused on control or appearances than on actual results. Sometimes it’s because they’re out of touch with the day-to-day realities of the work. And sometimes they’re just bad managers.

Today at Slate, I wrote about how some irritated employees have learned to respond to these policies with “malicious compliance”: scrupulously doing exactly what they’re being told to do, but in a way that exposes the absurdity of the request. You can read it here.

View the full article