New Supervisor Wanted Everyone To Stick To His Work Hours, So They Left An Important Meeting Because They Were Outside Of Those Work Hours

Sarrah Murtaza

4 months ago

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance/pexels/fauxels

Managers and supervisors aren’t inevitable and they often forget that!

These team members make sure they give their mean manager a taste of his own medicine.

Let’s check out the full story!

“Work my hours, or we’ll find someone who will”

So, there I was, working at a mid-sized IT firm as a software developer.

My team had always been pretty laid-back, focusing on results rather than the exact hours we were glued to our desks.

Our projects were delivered on time, our clients were happy, and our team morale was high.

That is, until we got a new project manager, let’s call him Dave.

Dave was going to cause a lot of trouble.

Dave was fresh from a highly regimented corporate background and had ideas about “proper workplace management,” which basically meant micromanaging everything.

He’d schedule unnecessary daily status meetings, demanded we fill out hourly work logs, and insisted that everyone strictly adhere to 9-to-5 office hours with minimal breaks.

He made things worse!

One day, during one of his infamous “efficiency crackdowns,” he sent out an email with a new policy that all coding must be done strictly within office hours to “ensure collaboration and supervision”.

This was ridiculous because creative work like coding often requires flexible hours for maximum productivity.

But Dave was adamant, and he ended his email with, “If you think you can find a loophole, think again. Follow the rules, or we’ll find someone who will.”

Dave had his opponents!

Challenge accepted, Dave.

I decided to comply—meticulously.

I coded strictly between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM, not a minute earlier, not a second later.

If I encountered a bug or was in the middle of a complex piece of code?

Everyone teamed up.

Too bad. 5 PM means the end, no matter what. My teammates, fed up with being treated like schoolchildren, followed my lead.

The results were predictable.

Projects that usually took a couple of weeks started dragging on.

Tasks that we could have completed in days with a bit of overtime took much longer because we couldn’t capitalize on the bursts of late-afternoon productivity we were used to.

Things got bad at work.

Our workflow was severely disrupted, and the quality of our work started to deteriorate.

Dave noticed, of course.

He had to answer to upper management for the “sudden drop in productivity and lack of commitment”, which he knew was a result of our dissatisfaction with his new policy.

When upper management called for an impromptu Zoom meeting with the entire at 4:30 PM to address the ongoing project delays, the entire team logged in to explain our situation.

Dave wasn’t going to give up

In the meeting, Dave spent half an hour shifting blame and berating individual team members. He didn’t even mention the 9-5 policy that had led to the whole situation.

As the clock ticked towards 5:00 PM, the tension in the virtual room was palpable, and our team hatched a plan over text.

But everyone else sure hung up!

Right on cue, as the clock struck 5:00 PM, one of the employees spoke up, “In compliance with Dave’s 9-to-5 rule, we must log off now.”

Without missing a beat, every team member clicked “Leave Meeting,” leaving a stunned Dave to face the executives alone.

This abrupt mass exit highlighted the impracticality of Dave’s rigid policy, making it clear to the executives that change was necessary.

Follow up? SURE!

The incident, quickly dubbed as the “5:00 Zoom Exodus,” led to another meeting, where Dave was publicly admonished and instructed to abolish his strict rules in favor of more flexibility.

And as for me and my team?

It’s a victory!