If management is gonna throw a bunch of obstacles in the way of workers, it’s only gonna end up hurting them in the long run.

But it’s funny how it takes a catastrophe for some of them to learn that lesson the hard way.

Check out what happened when these workers were given new directives that ended up blowing up in the bosses faces.

Start now!

All orders must be connected within 3 days or escalate. Sure thing, boss.

“I used to manage the activations department for an ISP.

I wouldn’t say I managed the team as my style is they worked with me, not for me.

I was simply the department leader. For some context, the company had been growing for quite some time, but unfortunately not hiring enough staff to cover the growth.

I started in the support department before being moved to this position after the entire old activations team quit. Due to the small world it is in the ISP space in my country I’ll keep things a little vague.

Some background is required.

The old team of 3 plus the manager used to have one person work on the oldest tickets in their queue, plus two on the newest tickets to keep things moving, being interrupted by calls, walk ups and messages.

The manager would handle billing and cancellations. The same ticket would often get handled by multiple agents in a day, often the same agent multiple times too.

Almost every day they were all doing unpaid overtime (we’re all salaried employees) to handle the spill over from support throughout the night.

They were really backed up.

When they quit they had about 1,000 order tickets. Complaints were common but not outrageous. I knew that was unsustainable given the growth and acquisitions.

By the time this story is relevant we had over 3,000 tickets and almost no complaints with the same number of less experienced staff.

To put that number in a little more perspective, that was 2 to 3 times as many tickets as every other department, combined.

We made many changes over the time and I became an expert in the back end of the ticketing system. But the biggest change was we changed our workflow to a priority system. And everything now had a due date.

Things were about to change.

All new tickets had a due date of the day they came in. If the customer wanted their connection on a different date, and the pre-check showed no tech was required, that became the new due date. If a tech was needed, the appointment became the due date.

If the customer emailed us against their ticket, or any update happened to the ticket, the due date changed automatically from whatever it was, to today so we could be across the developments as customer request dates and tech dates could be months into the future.

Suddenly the age of the ticket didn’t matter, just the due date and this reduced so much double handling, and customer updates were responded to quickly and calls dropped significantly.

Now stick with me, as all of this becomes relevant.

My priorities were handle the cancellations and billing. When done I followed the same priority as the team unless I was in meetings.

The teams priorities were (oversimplified):

1: Get new orders (and relocations) vetted, techs booked, and set applicable due dates.

2: Activate the completed orders or update the customer, tech and due date if there were issues.

3: *IMPORTANT* Escalate overdue orders, and follow up escalations (due date).

4: Activate voice orders.

5: Finally everything else that was due today.

Things were going just fine!

It became a well oiled machine. The escalations were maybe 0.5%-1% of our orders.

As we had so few complaints and typically raving positive reviews from our customers the general manager didn’t really understand how we worked or the depth of the changes that made us so efficient.

My daily report was usually skipped in the end of day meetings as we had minimal issues. He focused on the other departments

The way we worked now meant that tech issues or appointment issues were also escalated and resolved quickly as nothing slipped through the cracks anymore.

The Internet wholesaler worked really well with us as we set clear expectations with our customers, and we always had great data to back up the escalation process.

Our most remote customers who had to wait long times for techs completely understood. Usually a tech was taking a charted bush flight out there followed by some off road driving to get to the customer so get a satellite internet connection installed.

These customers were often hundreds of KMs from the nearest town and understood the logistics that would be involved and the waiting periods. Very rarely was this an issue.

On to the story…

Now while we had so many orders coming in, we had just as many, usually more some days, customers cancelling their services, largely due to the long support wait times or poor quality support response emails.

But then the situation turned ugly…

This meant the general manager was panicking about our record showing we were losing customer to the board and shareholders. In front of everyone he had a massive yelling fit directed at me about the companies negative growth, and this was my fault and I need to have every customer connected within 3 days or else we escalate it.

We have too many orders not connected. No more excuses from the wholesaler (did I mention they were great and moved heaven and earth for us?). Escalating these and getting them connected was our number one priority. Follow them up daily. He’s had enough of my team slacking off, etc.

Everyone’s jaws around me dropped. They knew we weren’t perfect, but we were the smoothest running department in the company. I saw red and took a breath. That’s fine.

Cue malicious compliance.

After that public dressing down I immediately sent him an email confirming what he just said. I got it back in writing. Techs take longer than 3 days those orders and escalations become our NUMBER ONE PRIORITY. He didn’t say business days.

So I sat with my team and informed them that our ticket queue is going to be in a world of hurt, but we need to make it clear to him that he doesn’t understand how we work, what we do, and that the way he spoke about us was inappropriate.

They laid down the law.

They are not to stress about the numbers, they are not to do unpaid overtime. I don’t care that they are on a salary. Salary accounts for reasonable overtime, and this is not reasonable.

They are to end work when their shift ends. Do not accept time off in leiu. Only accept paid overtime. I will take the fallout. They aren’t paid to be stressed.

Most days we have to work on about 300 tickets total. And today was a Friday. Customer not getting connected until Tuesday. Well that’s 4 days. Escalate.

Customers roads impassable due to flood so tech has to wait for dry weather. Too bad. Escalate. We escalated about 50 new orders that day.

Which meant Monday we had the usual weekend and Monday orders plus those 50. That day over 100 new orders were escalated, plus the 50 followed up.

So our queue reflected we had about 450 tickets due. Less than a third of the new connections got connected even though a tech wasn’t needed.

It was getting pretty wild in there!

Next day the same thing, except only a handful of orders got connected. Now we had 600 tickets (over)due. By Thursday supports being hammered by people asking about their connections. Overdue tickets hit the 1000’s.

Wait times blew out, orders got cancelled, complaints got raised.

Come the next Monday the support managers were screaming at me to get my department in order. I directed them to the general manager.

A meeting was called with all department managers over the current state the business found themselves in.

When I was asked what was going on, I simply pointed to the email, referenced the dressing down my team got, and informed him I was simply following orders.

“That’s ridiculous, use your brain. You should know what should be escalated”.

I pointed out that I thought I did, right up until you screamed at me in front of the entire company and belittled me and my team.

You made it clear I have no idea what I’m doing and to do what you say. He informed me to go back to the way we operated and he will review my workflows in detail at a later date. I tried to say it wont be that simple.

We need to follow the escalations through with wholesale. Getting our queue back in order will take weeks.

He wasn’t having it. No, the new orders were our number one priority again. Get people connected.

I again move to object, but another angry outburst informing me to do as he says.

Cue malicious compliance Round 2 and another follow up email confirming.

We stopped following up the escalations as we had too many new order tickets to process.

Some people were definitely NOT happy.

By the end of week the wholesaler called an emergency meeting with the company board, a meeting I was not a part of. They were threatening to pull our wholesale agreement due to the escalated orders not in line with their matrix and we had inundated their staff also.

Not only that, we were no longer keeping up our end of the bargain following them up. This wholesaler was where a significant majority of our customers were fed from. After this meeting finished I was pulled from my seat to explain myself to the board.

Emails prepared and with the support and sales managers with me for support and as witnesses, I explained the above. I was cleared to leave.

The fallout.

Booyah!

My team and I were given a blank cheque for overtime to get us back in order. Unfortunately no other staff from other team could assist in a meaningful way. But my team were only too happy to put in as many hours of paid overtime the workplace laws would allow. The company also supplied dinners.

It ended up taking us over 6 weeks to undo the damage the general manager had us cause with the OT. The wholesaler also reduced the remuneration we got paid as they no longer considered us a top tier ISP.

My reports were no longer skimmed and the general manager sat with me often to understand how we worked, and complimented me on the innovations from my teams suggestions.

He also didn’t order me around like that again, but more asked for input before making recommendations. We also did get our top tier ranking back eventually.”

Here’s what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person shared their thoughts.

Another reader chimed in.

This individual spoke up.

Another Reddit user had a lot to say.

And this person chimed in.

This is some seriously spectacular malicious compliance!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.