A good manager knows when to strictly enforce the rules, and when it is better to let some things slide.

In this story, a new manager was forced to begin carefully tracking the time of a great worker, which ended up getting the worker a huge boost in salary.

Take a look at how everything worked out in the end.

As a new manager, my boss told me to start keeping a stricter leash on my subordinates. Okay

A few years ago I was a maintenance manager for a rental company. We had about 700 units (apartments and houses) and only 5 full time workers.

It was only sustainable because we had one tradesman (Bob) who would work without any complaints.

Clogged toilets, heat not working, fixing anything that he was in contact with, always without complaints.

Having an employee like this is a blessing. Or it should be.

When I became manager my boss wanted me monitor bobs actual work times because all the boss saw was that Bob was 5-10 minutes late everyday.

They wouldn’t accept that he was working 50+ hours a week. We agreed on a punch-in clock to solve this problem.

He was all too happy to start tracking Bob’s time because he knew exactly how this would play out.

Now I was in maintenance before with Bob, he was a mule but worked more and harder.

I knew if we monitored his hours it would be far more than what he was previously recording.

In the first week with the clock, Bobs check only had 40 some hours, the boss felt vindicated and gloated that we would probably save around my yearly bonus now.

Fast forward to the end of my position there and Bob had went 30 weeks in a row with 50+ hours.

This effectively turned the $75,000 job into a $125000 job.

Bob had built up 4 weeks sick days and 3 weeks vacation, he knew I was leaving (I like tools not paperwork) and wanted to book off all this time before I left.

I submitted the requests and HR approved them.

I have to believe that Bob is even retiring a little early because of the extra money he made due to OP’s malicious compliance.

On my last day there and the beginning of bobs vacation, he announced he was submitting his resignation and today was his last day.

My boss made me take him the office and convince him to stay, we ended up grabbing our coats and went out for a beer.

And now the icing on the cake to this story…

I found out later that they had to hire 2 people to replace Bob and the boss was not getting an extension on his contract.

Why is it that upper management can’t leave well enough alone?

Take a look at what these other Redditors had to say about this happy story.

This is really what should have happened. It sounds like Bob had years of extra money coming to him.

Sadly, people like Bob seem to be a dying breed.

Micromanagers are a burden on the employees and the company.

Companies need to get rid of the micromanagers, not the hard workers.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.