Malicious Compliance

[REPOST]

This happened a little while ago, but I still think about it sometimes.

I was a supervisor of a small team (who were great at what they did) and one payday had three worried staff members thinking payroll had cocked up and given them too much money - they hadn’t.

One of my guys came in 5 minutes late and got “caught” by one of the other managers. Who told my boss and it got round to me.

“I want you to check their clock ins and clock outs and let me know so we can dock them any time they weren’t in on time”

Now - I don’t care, they were a great employee, got a tonne of work done and always stayed late if they needed to finish things off. Also - I don’t want to even think about if that was legal or not.

It didn’t sit right with me.

Two things weren’t in his favour right now - one - he was being a tool and two - I’d already got another job lined up which he didn’t know about. So I didn’t care.

What next? I did as I was told and I checked. Couple of minutes here or there, nothing major. I then checked all of the extra time they worked since they’d started and added it all up. Made sure to take out anything they’d already claimed as overtime. Logged it in the system and approved and sent it over to finance myself.

Then I checked my other guys times as well and did the same thing.

Turns out - my guys were damn helpful, and helped out other areas when they could. The Overtime went over certain time limits and tipped over from 1.5 times pay to 2 times pay.

It added up to a lot.

I delayed it a couple of days to make sure it all went through and double checked with finance to make sure all was good. Then I called a meeting with my boss to let him know everything and hand him a letter.

He was not pleased.

Worth it.