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Imagine working on a small team at a company. If one of your coworkers was laid off, that would significantly impact the amount of work left for everyone else on the team.

In this story, two coworkers are laid off, yet the remaining employees are expected to stay on top of the work as if nothing has happened. It’s truly impossible.

Instead of stressing out about it, they stick together and decide to make sure they are doing their work exactly as they should. They also refuse to do anything extra.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Lay off a third of the team and expect us to work harder. We will see about that.

So this happened sometime in the 2010’s somewhere in the UK (that’s all I’m revealing) I worked for a medium sized PLC in a small team that worked with the sales department getting quotes.

I had previously worked in another team in a different department in the same company as well.

So to set the scene the company had recently had some issues with regulators and senior management were either oblivious to the damage they were doing or didn’t care.

They were trying to save costs but going about it all the ring way.

Uh-oh!

So my team consists of 6 team members and a manager. We were fairly busy and often helped out on other teams as well and they would in turn help us. (This is important for later)

So we are all called into a meeting without warning and told that due to declining work tickets they were laying two of us off.

They did say two people were safe (the manager and his sidekick).

They made us reapply for our jobs including doing a test (following the letter of the law on redundancy), which had nothing to do with our roles.

They really shouldn’t have laid anyone off.

It also became apparent during the process that the company flat out lied or at the very minimum manipulated the data used to come up with their conclusion of falling ticket numbers (they dropped by 13 from year 1 to year 3, bear in mind it was a total of several thousand tickets a year).

In the end the company carried on and two team members were removed and made redundant, one of whom took a golden handshake the other sued the company for various things (not really worthy of mention here) and won.

After the dust settled it also became apparent manager secured his sidekicks position despite him being the worst member of the team in terms of work done and work quality.

It’s ridiculous to expect fewer people to do the same amount of work.

So in the weeks after the entire team were too busy to help other teams who then stopped helping us, so a huge backlog of tickets also built up.

We also got threatened with disciplinary proceedings if our backlog didn’t come down.

But was also refused any overtime.

During the process we had also been admonished for skipping steps in getting quotes (steps that often took a significant amount of time, and served no purpose)

They definitely weren’t in a rush.

So me and two others remaining (not including sidekick who had his nose so far up managers rear ended in came out of his mouth) decided to do everything by the book, down to every last bulletpoint.

This made the backlog of work even worse, but they couldn’t say anything.

One week we had another meeting with HR the sales director and our manager to discuss the issues.

We all calmly said “we are sorry but we have to follow the guidelines and rules laid down and this is as fast as we can work”

They stood firm.

We were also asked to start helping out the other teams again as we should be team players.

Again we said “we are sorry but we can’t, our workload is too high and it’s also not in our contracts that we have to do other teams work”

This went on for several months and management still refused to believe we were overworked.

When it was time for holidays we realised they hadn’t changed the amount of people allowed off from 3. So we all booked holidays (they both went abroad and I decided to visit family the other end of the UK)

It took the manager quite awhile to realize this mistake.

Of course when manager realised (a week before) he went nuts and another meeting with HR was called.

We all calmly said “sorry but we checked the rules for our team and 3 people (out of 4, manager could do what he likes) can be off at any one time.” And again stood our ground and all went on leave for 2 weeks each.

This caused even more chaos at work as you can imagine.

The sales director after this hatched a plan to get the Indian teams (we had offices in India and other offshore places) to be trained up by us and to help us, however they demanded we fly out to spend weeks there training them.

This idea didn’t work either.

Again we all refused as it’s not in our contracts to be trainers or to have to work abroad (they ignored the fact I didn’t have a passport at this point).

Soo poor old manager and his sidekick travelled out and trained them for weeks. (Eventually both stayed for over 2 months and failed to train them. We would send low effort tickets to them and they would screw it up and we simply said sorry to fix this we need to do it again.

So after 6 months they gave that idea up entirely.

This was great timing.

We after around a year or so of this (I’m being deliberately vague on timing so please don’t ask about it) we all decided to all seek other employment having found we all could not trust the company or manager anymore.

And we all found roles elsewhere within a week of each other so all handed our 4 week notices (again to the letter of our employment contracts) and were due to all leave on the same day.

Now the female member of the team who was a very learned person and she revealed in all our contracts any documentation we create is ours and we can do with it how we wish when we leave.

So we hatch a plan.

Here’s what they did…

In the final week we are there we move all our digital stuff to one location. Including all my manuals and cheat sheets for my previous team.

They both did the same with their previous positions within the company.

On our final day we bring in our own external drives and with IT’s help download and removed all documentation and deleted the copies on the company systems.

We all said our goodbyes and at the end of the day quite happily told our manager what we had done.

Let’s see how he reacted.

He exploded and demanded it back.

And we calmly tell him not according to the letter of our contracts this (waving the drives at him) is ours and we choose to remove it with us.

We were later told by friends who remained that the sales director had a fit because now no one was doing quotes for him.

Gladly we all have had great new places and keep in touch.

Good for them for sticking together and refusing to do anything that wasn’t directly part of their job.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This is a good point.

Another person is pretty surprised.

This person thinks they were able to recover everything that was deleted.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a employee who airs every last grievance in his resignation letter.

Another person points out several problems.

In the comments, the manager is blamed for a lot of things, but it doesn’t sound like it was the manager’s decision to cut the employees. Perhaps the manager realized that was a bad decision. I don’t know. Either way, it’s ridiculous to expect fewer people to do the same amount of work especially when overtime is not an option.

The best part of this story is that the remaining coworkers were a united front.