Employee moral is important.

Taking away small but nice things in an office environment, like the ability to wear jeans on Fridays, can have a big impact on how employees feel about going to work.

In today’s story, one boss puts an end to casual Fridays, and the employees are furious.

Instead of doing anything drastic, they get their way by following the rules.

Let’s see what they decide to do.

You want us to dress in business attire when all other departments get to wear blue jeans? You got it!

This happened many years ago.

I worked for a top US banking institution.

In our building, all of the other departments were allowed to wear blue jeans on Fridays.

My manager decided that our department had to wear business attire on Fridays.

There’s really no good reason for them to have to wear business attire.

To be clear, we had no customer facing presence.

Also, our department processes check deposits from ATMs, and they came in mesh bags from the armored couriers.

They were usually quite filthy and were frequently wet in bad weather.

So when our manager told us that we couldn’t wear blue jeans on Fridays like every other department the entire team was upset.

She stuck to the dress code with a creative flair!

Here is where we cue the malicious compliance.

The next Friday, I went to my closet and found the most mismatched outfit I could put together, sticking completely to business attire.

We are talking pastel floral print shirt with pants with bold colored stripes.

I put it on and proudly walked into the office.

My manager just happened to be on vacation that week, so nothing was said about my ridiculously mismatched outfit.

The other employees caught on.

Fast forward to the next Friday I, once again, chose the most hideous combination of an outfit that I could put together.

Once again, I walked into the office with my head held high, confident in my business attire.

Imagine my surprise when I walked in and EVERYONE on my team had on hideous combinations of clothing.

As you can imagine, my boss walks in and sees everyone in their various hideous outfits.

The boss was not happy!

The look on her face was priceless!

All 15 of us in hideous outfits, but all meeting the business attire dress code.

She pulled us all into a meeting and told us that our attire was entirely inappropriate for a business environment and that she would have to write each and every one of us up.

I asked her to pull out the company handbook and read the definition of what it said as business attire.

They weren’t breaking any rules.

She read it and it stated something like clean and pressed business attire consisting of slacks, skirts or dresses and clean pressed shirts or blouses.

It went on to say something like no blue jeans, t-shirts, ripped or clothes with holes, no sleeveless shirts and no athletic or gym shoes.

I asked her where in the guidelines does it say anything about whether the outfits “matched” or not.

She couldn’t find anything and said she would have to contact HR to discuss with them what her options were to write us up.

Employees in other departments wanted to help.

Needless to say, none of us were ever written up. She did however say we still needed to dress in business attire.

Word quickly spread to other departments about her forcing us to wear business attire.

The next week two departments around us decided that they would also dress up in hideously matched clothing.

The managers of those departments quickly got in touch with our manager and put pressure on her as they didn’t like how their employees were dressing.

The manager finally had to back down.

Our manager called us into a meeting and told us we could wear blue jeans on Fridays going forward.

Malicious compliance wins!

Sometime later, I will tell you about the sign in/ sign out board she created.

Seriously, what’s wrong with blue jeans? Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

They should tell HR.

Yes, I was expecting something about the clothes getting dirty too.

I completely agree!

This person did something similar.

All non-customer facing jobs should have relaxed dress codes.

What’s the point of being uncomfortable?

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.