Things aren’t always professional with multi-national organizations, and employees love to give insider stories. Which we love, of course.

This man’s lousy HR needed a lesson and he’s keen to tell the tale.

Check out the full story!

Make sure to understand corporate policy!

Some years ago, I was working for a large corporation.

One of the responsibilities of the team I was on was to offer on the job training for employees and managers on a number of topics that are not important here.

These employees were extremely dedicated to their job.

The point is, we took our job seriously and tried to do the best work we could.

Among other things, that meant changing the training topics and content on a regular basis to make sure it was up to date with industry standards and what our colleagues actually needed to know.

At some point, we were approached by corporate HR.

Things were extremely lousy with certain departments.

Apparently, our trainings were bypassing most of the central controlling and approval processes, which was creating issues for them.

I could understand that. However, these processes were awful. Slow, unnecessary, bureaucratic… and HR showed no interest in improving them.

There was no way we could follow them without sacrificing our quality standards.

He knew he had a choice but decided to do what he was told.

I could have outright refused to follow them and created a massive conflict, but there was a better way.

We set up a workshop with HR to make sure we understood the processes we needed to follow, in detail.

Over several exhausting hours, we mapped out every single step that needed to be done, by anyone, along every step of the way.

Flipcharts with scribbles and diagrams quickly filled up every square foot of available wall.

They found a funny way to do things.

At the end of a long and exhausting afternoon for everyone involved, I pointed out that we now had a full picture of what needed to be done (good work everyone!), but we still needed to align on next steps – how would we get there?

It was at this point that the HR manager in the room asked whether we could “postpone” that topic for the “follow-up workshop”, as everyone seemed to be very tired.

Everyone got on the same page.

Of course, we agreed.

Funnily enough, that follow-up workshop never happened.

Whenever the topic came up, everyone was quick to state how busy they were at the moment, and could we delay for a few more weeks?

Things stayed like that for years to come.

A year or two later, our training program had to end for an entirely unrelated reason, so it didn’t matter anymore.

So if you ever need to refuse to do something in corporate world, don’t say you won’t do it – accept it and make sure it slows to an excruciating crawl.

Who would’ve have thought people can get so creative along with being lazy?

Let’s find out what the Reddit community thinks about this story.

Sounds fun! This student had his way around his teachers.

That’s right! This person applauds the man for his malicious compliance.

Another experience! This man shares how things were with his annoying boss.

This person wants to know how baffled the boss was!

This person has a different take on the story.

If only HR took their job as seriously as these employees did.

That would be the day.

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.