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Boss Makes Unrealistic Productivity Demands, Employee Maliciously Complies

Sometimes, managers should focus on the amount of work getting done instead of the time being taken to do it.

We all think about it, but no one says it out loud; People can easily finish an 8-hour job in 3 to 5 hours if they really focus on it. However, they have to do things really slow and make it look like they are doing work all the time if they are working 9 to 5 jobs. That is because if their boss or manager catches them sitting idle, even if they have finished their work, the boss will just think that they are being lazy or wasting time. A lot of managers don’t care about how good you are at your work, they only care about you constantly working on that job while you are clocked in. They think you are stealing the company’s time if you sit idle. But what do you do if you finish your work efficiently and are left with some extra time? Well, you make it look like you are super busy with work even if you are not. Fooling your boss is the only solution here. Penny wise and pound foolish bosses are the worst. They never see the true potential of their employees just because they are more concerned about the useless, little things.

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This Reddit user shared their story about their job while they were working from home. Apparently, if they did not use their keyboard every 5 minutes, the company’s system would register them as idle. The employee could perfectly work from home and their performance was better when they worked remotely as well. However, their boss argued that they spent a lot of time idle when they worked from home, so they would have to come into the office to work. This infuriated the employee, and they found a way to cheat the system. Scroll down below to read what they did.

Via r/MaliciousCompliance

Imagine judging someone’s performance based on their idle time in the chat.

The employee really despised working in the office. But after covid, the company announced that they would be deciding who would continue working from home and who would have to return to the office.

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The employee was told that they would have to work in the office. The reason? They would go idle in the chat too often.

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The employee explained that they worked more efficiently from home. They would get all their work done, and nothing would be pending in the queue. This would result in their idle time.

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So the employee wrote a 6 line PowerShell script that would keep the keyboard running, and their chat would not be idle anymore.

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When covid hit again, he got to work from home again just because he wasn’t that idle anymore.

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A lot of people asked them for the script and they shared it.

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If the work is done, all you should worry about is the quality of it, not the time being taken to do it. If someone can efficiently finish their work in fewer hours, that just means they are skilled enough to do it.

This is how other Redditors reacted to the malicious compliance.

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People shared their own ideas for avoiding idle time.

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Why are they measuring productivity like that?

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Some companies really have ridiculous rules.

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How would you have tackled this situation? Do you think the employee did the right thing? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

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What do you think?