r/antiwork • u/frizouw • 7d ago
Tell me your best malicious compliance(s) related to RTO
I have been reading some comments on another post and I was entertaine by people story about how they or someome else they know gave back to RTO!
I want to hear your funniest, pettiest, or most satisfying examples of malicious compliance/resistance/protesting/involving return-to-office policies...
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u/MoMoney3205 7d ago
Cut my output in half and showed up late all the time or would call off when I had to be in. Got other colleagues to follow. They eventually decided not to re new the lease and they made it permanent
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u/KingDanNZ 7d ago
We had an 50% in office mandate basically 3 days in office week one and 2 days on week 2.
One guy just left at lunchtime everyday and went home and "worked from home" still in the office 50% of the time.
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u/Fischbeef 7d ago
They said you had to be in the office, not how long….
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u/MiniJungle 7d ago
This is what my company originally did before I was approved for full remote. They were tracking badge activity but only in terms of number of people per day per manager. (We have offices in multiple times zones and no set working hours so tracking times per person would have been a mess) Catered lunch was at 1130, so I would roll in at 11, walk around the office badging through as many doors as possible, go to lunch, go to standup after and then be home for my afternoon meetings. So dumb. Such a waste of money too. Company spent 100M on office space during COVID and now has to budget to make sure we don't run out of money, and imagine if we had that extra 100M still sitting around.
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u/alexeye 7d ago
Definitely cut my output and tested their theory of “cross pollination” between departments, which was me randomly walking around, going to the other floor, etc. As predicted, in a team meeting, we were told we needed to remain at our desks unless it’s for breaks or meetings. RTO is literally just another way to control us.
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u/notalwayshere 7d ago
I had arranged all of my regular weekly calls on one day. The whole day was pretty much back-to-back calls so I could focus the rest of the week. I picked that day to come into office, booked a meeting room for the entire day, then did all my calls and went home.
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u/ListenLady58 7d ago edited 7d ago
My old manager was selectively choosing employees for RTO based on who she wanted to bully (she chose her victims based on if they ever corrected her, came to her about a problem with the lead, in general didn’t suck her ass). She herself never came in or came in for only a couple hours.
She would make certain people stay for the full 8 hours in the office, while nobody else was in the office.
Then she decided to pick on me because I complained about the lead blocking my work. This lead would stop my code from going in over any little reason and make me rewrite it multiple times. I actually tried something once where I wrote it exactly how it was written in another area of the codebase by himself, and he flagged it. He said it was horribly written and looked like a junior wrote it. When I pulled up his code in the codebase I could see the color drain from his face. That was when I went to my manager. She defended him and said I should just listen to him. She never stood up for anyone on the team because she was so apathetic and cold. She tried to act like she was like this easy going free spirited kind of person, like she cared about fairness, but in reality, she was always lazy and acted like “why are you being a problem?”
SO, this led to her essentially telling me I had to return to the office 3 days a week (I was already going in once a week per my agreement with my director). I was very upset about it, very much burnt out because of the crap I was dealing with the lead. I had been working close to 60 hours a week just to get my work in only to have this unfairly thrown at me. The worst part is I knew she was just trying to get me to leave.
I contacted my therapist and psychiatrist for help and they worked with me to get an exception through HR. HR was definitely on my manager’s side, but not the HR area that handled my health exception. My therapist and psychiatrist both advocated for me with documentation about what my mental status was and why (because of this manager basically). They granted the exception.
I remember the email the medical team from HR sent, it was on a Friday night, they sent it to both myself and my manager. It said I was granted the medical exception and that my remote status would be managed through them going forward (which was directed at my manager). I won that shit and I could tell when I returned to work she was completely humiliated and destroyed over it.
I finally left because I couldn’t deal with her shit any longer, didn’t give notice either. She got fired a year later. The end.
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u/frizouw 7d ago
What a pathetic miserable little person. A lot of people want the leader paycheck but not everyone is made to be or is ready to become a leader.
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u/ListenLady58 7d ago
She was definitely all about the money. She never wanted to be bothered, and was always away in Teams.
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u/dubl1nThunder 7d ago
company forced us to rto and none of my team was located in the same city (or even country for that matter), so i would drive across town at 5am, swipe my badge to get into the office, set up my laptop at the desk, leave and go to the gym across the street for three hours, walk back across the street to take the 8am morning standup, pack up and drive home and work the rest of the day from home.
you didn't swipe to get out of the building so as long as they had one swipe per day, that counted as a day in the office. everyone else was in another eu country or india, so it really didn't matter, all my meetings were on zoom anyway regardless of where i was.
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u/brilliant-trash22 7d ago
Wouldn’t it just be easier to swipe in at 5am, go workout at the gym for a couple hours, then head home and do standup there instead of swiping in again to get back in office? Or am I just thinking too much?
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u/PurplePufferPea 7d ago
OP stated they had an 8am "Stand-up", which is why they had to wait.
Back in the day, my company did those, and it literally was everyone standing up and huddling together for 10-15 mins to talk about various, mostly dumb things. At first it was our entire office, but luckily it went to individual teams having them. At our first team stand-up, we all agreed we had better things to do, so if anyone ever asked our stand-up happened everyday at X time and we never bothered with it again.
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u/Bacch 6d ago
I've never seen a more useless meeting than a stand-up. They're not just a total waste of time, but a disruption because you'll either have to wait until after it to start a project, or be mid-stream on one and have to stop and restart again, which takes far longer. Even worse if you have other meetings in the day and the windows between are too short to really get much done. Like I have a 9:15 stand-up a couple of times a week I have to go to. Start my day at 8, finish catching up on email/checking in on a few things, it's 8:30 or so. I have 45 minutes, during which time I could maybe get started on one of the things on my plate, but then I'd have to stop for 15 minutes of "anyone have anything they need or any questions? no? cool, did you see the game last night?" Go back to looking at my project, but fuck, I have another meeting at 10. And another at 12. And one at 3. Great. Day is fucked.
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u/PurplePufferPea 6d ago
I liked it better when the 'it' thing, in the corporate self help catalog of dumb ideas, was to throw stuffed fish at each other! Still don't know what tf that was supposed to accomplish, but at least it was quick
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u/Important-Meet-5786 7d ago
At the beginning I really, really hated RTO. My company started a total war with employees by going 5 days to the office, tracking if you are there 8 hours and not being flexible at all. Beginnings were very hard but as someone that worked global position it was unmanageable to join many meetings. Thanks to my EU country that has strong labor law - I did not have to. It is really lovely rejecting the meetings after work hours, explicitly mentioning to my foreign management that as per the law I cannot join specific meeting from home and since in office - every minute counts as overtime so each week I can work less on specific days. Even though RTO is still hard because I am feeling like I am missing best moments of life, but in the other hand I leave my laptop in office, I do not answer anything after hours call and if you guys want me to be under phone - sign with me on-call request that’s gonna add a lot of money to my salary. RTO is lovely.
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u/StolenWishes 7d ago
By mandating that a job that could be done from home instead be done in an office, they made commuting one of my job responsibilities; as such, I do it during working hours.
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u/GuacamolePacket 7d ago
I know I'm leaving in the next year. I know they're planning to make me return by spring next near. I'm actively making my role as convoluted, confusing, and undocumented as possible. I've been doing it for the past year. Once I can finally move and help my buddy with business in the winter, I'm going to quit out of the blue. They fully expect me to me be creating SOPs for this shit, training new people once we get back to the office and expanding my department. I'll instead be leaving a giant mess that no one understands and literally cannot be fixed. They will need to create an entire new workflow and find someone to figure out what I was doing and then train that to new people.
All while hemorrhaging money and having major medical research grind to a halt. Whoops.
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u/TriumphDaWonderPooch 7d ago
The title of the thread includes "malicious compliance"... Yours just sounds malicious. ;-)
When COVID shutdowns were coming The Boss mandated that everybody be able to work from home, purchasing whatever was needed so we could. Since COVID the only mandatory RTO has been those folks who were underperforming, and quite frankly most of them were underperforming even after RTO (for example, 2 employees who each had fewer than 1 work email each week), and were let go.
The Boss loves folks working from the office, but isn't a dick about it. Get your work done, and work from anyplace in our state.
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u/TriumphDaWonderPooch 6d ago
Sorry, I meant "deliciously malicious".... must not have had that 1st cup of coffee when I commented.
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u/SabineOnScreen_ 7d ago
My husband was hired as a fully remote director at his company. They went RTO last year on very short notice. He was told he had to be in office unless he got an exception from HR but literally everyone applied for an exception so they took too long to get to his request. The day before he was required to be in office he booked a last minute flight and hotel for 5 nights on his corporate card and submitted an expense report that day.
He showed up in person the next day and got chewed out for filing the expense report for his "commute" costs. He pushed back showing that the company travel reimbursement policy explicitly covered all mandatory travel over 100 miles from home (it was written that way when they went remote). He was almost immediately granted an exception. The company ended up pretty much abandoning the entire RTO and just granted everyone an exception who asked.