You’re working diligently at your office computer. Out of the blue, your manager appears and reprimands you for taking an extra 15 minutes for your 30-minute break the day before.
You’re confused. You rarely take more than 20 or 25 minutes for your break, and you’re always careful to be back within half an hour. Then it dawns on you what happened.
You explain to the manager that another employee had stopped you in the hall to ask your advice on dealing with a problem. You spent several minutes helping your coworker, which made you one minute late clocking back in. Because the time clock rounds off to the nearest 15 minutes, your 31-minute break was recorded as 45 minutes.
For reasons you cannot comprehend, the manager refuses to accept your explanation and warns that if you abuse your break time again, your salary will be docked.
This was posted on Reddit by the employee in question. From that day forward, the employee contrived to go on break exactly seven minutes after the cutoff time and return within seven minutes of the cutoff on the other end. For instance, punching out at 10:08 would get recorded as 10:15, and punching back in at 10:52 would get recorded as 10:45. In this way, a 44-minute break was clocked as 30 minutes.
When a supervisor told the employee it seemed they were gone longer than usual, the employee simply said, “Check the record.”
There’s no question that the employee’s actions are ethically indefensible since, as we all learned in grade school, two wrongs never make a right. However, it’s easy to understand why someone would respond that way. We may even sympathize with their actions.
It’s simple human nature. If I get unjustly reprimanded because of a glitch in the system, it’s easy to rationalize exploiting the same glitch for my own benefit. Although I might be wrong for doing so, the burden of responsibility rests on my manager to create a culture that renders unnecessary this week’s addition to the Ethical Lexicon:
malicious compliance | noun
Subverting the intent of policies and regulations without actually breaking the letter of the law
Imagine if Amelia Bedelia intentionally rolled jelly on the floor when asked to make a jelly roll, cut holes in a polka-dot dress to remove spots, and stripped the sheets by shredding them to pieces. Her antics would classify her as a malevolent psychopath rather than a lovable literalist.
Malicious compliance, however, falls somewhere in between. In his 1980 novel, The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein coined the term white mutiny to describe responding to overbearing authority by following orders so literally as to subvert their intent. When leaders misuse or abuse their power, they unwittingly encourage underlings to search for creative forms of rebellion in which insubordination hides behind the guise of meticulousness.
Under some circumstances, this can be a legitimate cousin of civil disobedience. Police officers have been known to protest wage freezes or budget cuts by stopping speeders but letting them off with a lecture rather than writing a ticket. By doing so, they continue to enforce traffic safety while reminding municipalities that cops are also a source of revenue.
In other cases, white mutiny can be truly malicious. But that maliciousness is often provoked by poor management. Like the boss who routinely woke up an employee at 6 a.m. calling to ask if they’d like to volunteer to cover shifts; one worker responded by calling the boss at 3:30 a.m. to volunteer if he needed coverage. Or like the businessman who wasn’t permitted to tip more than 15%, even for small menu orders, so he started using his expense account to order expensive meals to compensate the waitstaff more fairly for their service.
The more we witness unethical behavior, the easier it is for us to justify our own ethical compromises. Compound that with a culture that values strict compliance over sound judgment and ethical decision-making, and you’ve created a toxic environment in which employees use creativity and ingenuity not to do their jobs better but to circumvent the systems they no longer believe in.
Like so many elements in company culture, preempting malicious compliance is simply a matter of following the dictates of common sense:
- Listen to your employees. If their explanations or requests are reasonable, accept them, even if that means bending the rules.
- Trust their judgment. Allowing employees a measure of autonomy to make their own decisions gives them a sense of ownership and responsibility.
- Support their growth. Set aside time and provide resources to help motivated employees develop new skills. They will be grateful to you and prepared to take on new responsibilities when you need them to.
- Be flexible. Making a fuss to save small change today will likely cost you a pretty penny tomorrow.
Employees who trust and respect their bosses, who find their jobs fulfilling, and who feel part of a worthwhile enterprise have no reason to subvert authority or disrupt the smooth workings of their company. Just the opposite; they will eagerly go above and beyond because they see themselves as part of something greater than themselves. Create that kind of environment by promoting an ethical culture, and you’ll never need to worry about compliance, malicious or otherwise.