Training new employees, teaching them the terrain, and getting them used to their new work habitat is often like taking toddlers to a playground and explaining how a slide works, or monkey bars. New hires are either energetic, upbeat, and willing to learn, or they are lazy, entitled, and demanding. Let’s assume the latter, and let’s imagine you report your new hires’ lack of care to upper management. Let’s go one step further and say that upper management couldn’t care less. What would you do? If your first thought is to comply maliciously, then you and OP have a similar outlook on life.
u/ActualMis shared their story on malicious compliance via Reddit. Back in the 90s, OP was working at a large company, in charge of a printer room. The company shipped a lot of products, and all those products had to have printed labels/documents. Without the paperwork, nothing could be loaded onto the trucks. When OP’s coworker quit, the company found themselves in a bit of a jam and decided to fire OP and make them train their replacements.
Even though this was less than ideal, OP didn’t really have a choice, as they needed a good recommendation for their next job. A dilemma arose when OP was attempting to train the new hires… which presented itself as laziness. It seemed that the new hires didn’t want to work, and as they had connections to the head office, they weren’t ashamed to show it.
Things quickly went downhill, and although OP did their best to inform upper management of what was going on, their warnings fell on deaf ears. You can’t force someone to listen to something when they don’t want to hear it. So, to put it lightly, chaos ensued. Scroll down to read how exactly these new hires ended up costing the company tens of thousands of dollars due to their own entitled, lazy attitude, and refusal to learn the basics of their new job.
