New Management Tells Workers to Quit if They Don’t Like the New Rules, Everyone Quits

There's no shortage of stories about incompetent managers driving their skilled staff away with terrible ideas about how they should be doing their jobs, and this post recently shared on r/MaliciousCompliance is a perfect example.

For those who want the TL;DR: basically, OP worked at a sales job where they had a fantastic manager who treated his staff like human beings and gave them the freedom to do their jobs in whatever way worked best for them. As long as everyone was hitting their targets, he was happy—and the staff wanted to do a great job because of that. Unfortunately, the cool boss left the company and of course his replacement was a total micromanaging yes-man for upper management. The new boss forced everyone to go into the office 5 days a week, where sales staff had to cold-call customers instead of building relationships in person. And on top of that, he messed up the workspace vibe with new assigned seating. After a few weeks of plummeting morale, new management held a meeting and essentially told the staff, "if you don't like the new rules, you can hand in your resignation letter." Well, all of the old staff who had been with the good manager maliciously complied, leaving the new team with half a staff and no way to hit their targets.

Keep scrolling for the full story and to see how people reacted in the comment section.

Posted by Mel Dawn

“Complying with a resignation request” —u/SubjectAd

The comment section

Redditors in the comment section related to OP's frustration, and many had their own similar experiences to share.

“Recently learned about the Chesterton's fence theorem.” replied u/Daikataro, “The abstract is that, before you tear down a fence, you learn why it was put there in the first place. Or like we say in engineering. If it's not broken, don't fix it.”

“Oh fucking hell, that was my life at my last job.” said u/kmkmrod, “We made a good amount of money. We got a new vp who wanted to make more money so she threw out everything and started from scratch. We all gave it a chance. We brought in new people and consultants. They helped come up with a strategy. As we approached each issue we came up with options, did investigations, and picked the best path. We did that over and over. We did save some money by introducing new tools and found some efficiencies that saved some money/made more money, but largely we rebuilt what we had because it was the best way to do what we did. She saw it and threw it out again and said come up with something different, so we went back and made different choices. We ended up spending more to make less money. We had a $200M business, made it into about a $225M business, then she tore it down and now it’s a $75M business.”

“The newbies don't have tenure, experience and sales to back up their claims of how they work and the benefit of it. They likely are on less pay starting out than the expensive older crew, less favourable packages, benefits and commissions. Short term the company just saved themselves a huge amount of money and reduced long term expenses. Ops team built relationships, the new crew will be given a script to follow and an endless cold calling list. Just like spam, wide coverage, low hit rate but still turns a profit, and those staff will get better over time. If not, churn is a thing that's just accepted in cold calling jobs.” said u/Sirix_8472.