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There’s always change when a new CEO or VP comes in. After all, they’ve been brought in to make change, and it’s likely that they’ll want to prove themselves immediately. So they spot something small that needs changing, something where they will be able to show tangible results right away, and insist that that thing changes. All the while, the workers who have been doing their job a certain way for so long are expected to comply right away, or else face the consequences.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to all new bosses. Some actually listen to their workers, perhaps schedule meetings with them, to get a full understanding of how the company actually works, and how the workers feel about things, before they start imposing their own will on the company. They want change, but they understand that change needs to be gradual, with everyone on board, in order to see the best impacts. Sure, both types might succeed – but only one is likely to have a happy company of workers at the end of things.

The guy in this story works for a company that has a new VP, so of course, changes are underway. And some of those changes are so incredibly annoying that he has decided to comply in full, out of pettiness. But when he does so, he ultimately comes to regret it.

Read on to find out why.

When malicious compliance backfires

I work in operations and maintenance on several small solar fields throughout the Midwest. Essentially, the companies that actually own the solar sites hire my company to do routine and corrective maintenance.

We have about fifteen crews working all over the US.

We have an internal ticketing software we use to keep track of how much time we spend at each site, and what work is being done. This is pretty important since we use all of our tickets to justify the site owners paying us.

It can be a little frustrating to manage these tickets sometimes if there’s a lot going on.

Let’s see why this system can be a problem.

For example, if I’m on site for company A and get a phone call from company B, I need to create a new ticket, or log that time on an existing ticket for company B’s phone call.

I can’t just charge company A for the thirty minutes I spent answering a bunch of random questions for the other company.

There are also times when you’ll be walking through the field and notice something and just fix it real quick. Like we’ll be replacing a broken module (solar panel) and happen to see a broken zip tie and you just replace it.

It’s not what you were doing in that section, but it takes all of thirty seconds, so you just do it.

Read on to find out how this ticketing system ended up getting even more complicated.

However, a couple months ago, our company’s VP retired, and the new guy is… a little extreme. He wants to make sure we’re really being diligent with our tickets and documenting everything. There was a company wide Zoom meeting to introduce him, and he spent almost twenty minutes talking about tickets.

We’ve all heard this before, and we’re all pretty good about making sure our hours are accounted for with the appropriate tickets, so we didn’t really think too much of it.

A few weeks later, VP was out visiting one of my sites while we were doing preventative maintenance on four inverters. As I was setting up to do my work and the other tech was at the spare parts container on site getting some material, I noticed a module nearby had some damage.

It was chipped from a rock or pebble (we’re in a pretty windy area), so I took a picture of it, noted the location, then went back to the inverter. As I was walking back I called the other tech and asked him to grab a module while he was at the spare parts containers.

When I finished at the inverter, I closed that ticket, created a new one for the broken mod, we replaced it, and I closed that ticket, and we moved on to the next inverter in line.

But that ticket wasn’t the end of things.

At the end of the day VP pulled me aside to ask why I wasn’t managing my tickets correctly. I said, “I’m not sure what you mean. Every thing we did today had a ticket.” But to this, the VP replied, “Yes, but you didn’t track your time correctly.”

I told him, “I’m sorry, I’m still not sure what you mean. We worked a little over eight hours today. We spent roughly two hours at each inverter, and then twenty minutes swapping that broken module. It’s all accounted for.”

But the VP told me, ” No it’s not. You took about five minutes out of working on that inverter to look at that broken module and call the other tech. He then spent time loading a module into his truck to bring over, where was that accounted for? So there’s at least five minutes on the inverter ticket that was actually spent on the broken module, plus however long it took other tech to load the new module.”

He continued, “You should have logged out of the inverter ticket, created the module one and documented that time, then logged back into the inverter one. Other tech should have logged out of the inverter one, logged into the module one while he was loading up the module, then logged back into the inverter one when he started driving back to work on the inverter.”

Yikes! Read on to find out how this worker felt about that.

I was a little taken aback by this. It’s not like I had spent the time doing work for a different site, it was all for this one, and we don’t get paid differently for each task we do. Its all the same hourly rate.

I swallowed my objections and told him I would fix the tickets.

Cue the malicious compliance. Over the next few weeks, me and my other tech went from three to five tickets a day, to close to twenty a day.

I was walking through the field on one task and picked up a piece of trash that blew in? Stop and create a new ticket. I answered other techs question about the job he was doing while I was working on something else? Stop and log into that ticket. Broken zip tie? New ticket. Answer a text from my supervisor? New ticket. You get the idea.

Let’s see how that went down with the VP.

As you can tell from the title, this did not go how I was expecting. VP loved it.

At the most recent monthly crew lead meeting, he absolutely gushed over how accurate our tickets were. How we set the new standard for how tickets need to be managed and everyone else needs to come up to our level.

This was exactly what he wanted to see and wouldn’t accept anything less.

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So yeah, sometimes malicious compliance will backfire and just make your life harder and make all your coworkers hate you.

Uh-oh. You have to feel really sorry for these workers, for whom petty compliance to these ridiculous rules has now made their own working life significantly more complicated – and the same for their colleagues too.

You’d think the ridiculous detail of these tickets would be too much for the VP, and he’d see how nonsensical his request was.

But no, it seems like this will keep on just getting worse and worse.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person had a similar experience with ridiculous time logging systems.

And others had had fun with similar situations in the past.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought that he should be logging even more than he already is.

The theory of logging tickets for the time spent on different jobs is solid. Of course you’d want to know, as an organisation, how much of your employees’ time is spent on different customers’ jobs, to ensure that they are paying properly as well as to make sure that your workforce is concentrated in the areas of most need. Because of that, it makes a lot of sense.

But all of the admin required to log jobs in the infinite detail that this VP is requesting is crazy. There’s no way at all that so much of their workday should be spent logging tickets – after all, this is wasting a whole lot of time in itself. But the fact that he can’t see that, and instead is praising the way that his workers have made a mockery of him and his system? It shows how little he understands the job his workers do.

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Author

Kyra Piperides

Kyra Piperides, PhD | Contributing Science Writer

Dr. Kyra Piperides is a contributing writer for TwistedSifter, specializing in Science & Discovery. Holding a PhD in English with a dedicated focus on the intersections of science, politics, and literature, she brings over 12 years of professional writing and editorial expertise to her reporting.

Kyra possesses a highly authoritative background in academic publishing, having served as the editor of an academic journal for three years. She is also the published author of two books and numerous research-driven articles. At TwistedSifter, she leverages her rigorous academic background to translate complex scientific concepts, global tech innovations, and environmental breakthroughs into highly engaging, accessible narratives for a mainstream audience.

Based in the UK, Kyra is an avid backpacker who spends her free time immersing herself in different cultures across distant shores—a passion that brings a rich, global perspective to her writing about Earth and nature.

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