22-year-old employee teams up with 30 coworkers to enact payback on micromanager for making them log every detail of every task: 'Data [was] lost in a heap of unusable data'

Micromanagers always seem to forget that demanding more work from their employees might end up just being more work for them in the end. Quite frankly, being a micromanager is a lose-lose situation. On the one hand, you are potentially risking the trust and loyalty of your employees by demanding more than is necessary and making them feel like there is someone watching their every move. On the other hand, you are risking your own sanity by fixating on everyone else's productivity and likely hindering your own in the process.

When it comes to logging your work, whatever happened to trusting your employees' process? As long as the work gets done and gets done well, there shouldn't be any questioning of how long tasks take. As long as no employees are actively inconvenienced by someone else's process, interrogating someone's process is a waste of time, especially when the output is strong. Now, if tasks are not getting done well, it's best for managers to figure out how to properly support their team rather than find a scapegoat to blame.

This particular micromanager decided that it was appropriate to demand that every consultant on their team of 30 employees should log every single detail about their daily tasks and responsibilities. It's safe to say that this backfired quickly. Let's just say that the team took those instructions literally. After all, enacting malicious compliance in a team-wide effort was likely the only way to demonstrate to their micromanager that this was not the ideal avenue to obtain pertinent information. In fact, all the important data this team included was inevitably buried due to unnecessary reporting about bathroom breaks and lunch hours—reporting that the micromanager insisted needed to be there in the first place. Keep scrolling below to see how this boss ultimately reacted after attempting to sift through this heap of information.

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  • "You want to micromanage 30 people? Sir, yes Sir!"

    A group of seven employees stand in a cluster. The man in the middle, wearing a grey jacket and a white button-down shirt, expresses disapproval with a thumbs down gesture. The woman on his right places her hand on her face in exasperation, while the man on his left leans his head into his hand.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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  • The most amusing part of this story is that the team-wide collaborative effort here is probably the kind of strong communal work that this manager dreams of implementing. However, it took an unnecessary directive to tease out that kind of collaboration. I guess the takeaway here is that there is nothing like an act of innocent rebellion to bring a group of disparate individuals together. 

  • My girlfriend was having issues with her micromanaging boss and made me remember this orchestrated malicious compliance we did back around 2003-04 when I was working for a consulting company.
    via mdlapla
  • The client we were working for was a bank that had us working from the -2 basement, which consisted on a warehouse full with ATM replacements parts and another retrofitted warehouse with desks for us. You can imagine the type, flickering neon lights, ventilation columns, only thing resembling a window was a poster of a window the consulting company hung up on one wall.
    via mdlapla
  • Cellphones weren't that common then, Internet was kinda on but everything was blocked because of the bank's firewall. We had to access google via IP address.
    via mdlapla
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  • Working there was hard, only distraction was having a talk around the watercooler and going upstairs to get a coffee.
    via mdlapla
  • We were like 30 people, split into 2 big teams doing COBOL and 1 smaller one doing web, dotnet and whatever else somebody asked the manager to deliver. I was part of the smaller one.
    via mdlapla
  • The client asked us to track how long it took to finish each task. This was handled by each of the 3 team leaders, and people had a little bit of leeway on how to report hours spent. So, each team member would tell team leader whenever a task was finished and how long it took. It worked pretty well because team leaders were chill and the guys were serious and didn't slack much.
    via mdlapla
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  • The manager (let's call him MICROMANAGER, since he was all about micromanaging but also because he was short AF) calls me one (I was kinda jack of all trades back then) and my team leader (TL as in Team Leader but also, he was tall AF, so TOO LONG) one day and says "look guys, I have a feeling we are not working hard enough, I need to be able to report the exact
    via mdlapla
  • amount of time we spend on each task to the client, I want you to have some kind of software so people can input the time they spend on each thing".
    via mdlapla
  • TL tries to explain that the current system in place works rather well and there's no need to change the status quo, that the numbers were accurate and such. MICROMANAGER says that it's not enough, that people are wasting time and he wants accurate tracking.
    via mdlapla
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  • I was like 22-23 at that time, first job, but TL had a knack for malicious compliance. So he designed the system. It consisted on a little traffic light in the taskbar, red meant you were assigned, yellow meant a temporary stop, green meant unassigned. In order to change from one color to the other, a popup appeared and you had to input the reason for the change.
    via mdlapla
  • Then we created a web page that summarized and presented the data anonymously. It also had an export button so MICROMANAGER could check and use it to report himself, faster than how the team leaders were doing it (at least, that was MICROMANAGER's idea).
    via mdlapla
  • We installed this in every computer, and showed how it worked to MICROMANAGER, he was happy and told us to explain the system to the team in order to start the trial run of the idea right away.
    via mdlapla
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  • A man wearing glasses and a blue button-down shirt raises his hand to his face with a clenched fist while two people in business attire stand behind him.
    via Unsplash+ (Getty Images)

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • So we did, TL gathered every single team member, and told them that MICROMANAGER wanted an EXACT tracking of each one. He repeated time and time again the word EXACT. Like probably 50 times in 5 minutes. He also said that the next day would be a trial run for the software.
    via mdlapla
  • So, 30 team members understood right away and complied. In an EXACT way. Here's an example on some of the things I remember (I might remember some of this ones a little embellished, it's been a while) as highlights from the report (with time added up) after the trial day:
    via mdlapla
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  • • Arrival - taking coat off, no hanger available, tried to . hang it on top of other coat, both fell. 5 minutes. • Cough attack, had to get a glass of water. 5 minutes. ● Joke, morale booster. 2 minutes.
    via mdlapla
  • • Lost track of thought, . realized I was looking at the poster of a window instead of a window. 3 minutes. • Gone to the toilet. (this was like 400 minutes or so, 30 people, 2 times in the day or so).
    via mdlapla
  • • Discussing last night's football match. 50 minutes. • Air too cold, had to ask maintenance to up the temp. 4 minutes. • Somebody asked temp to up the temp, now everybody is sweating, had to ask them to lower temp. 2 minutes. • Inputting change of state in traffic light app. (Something like 2 hours in total)
    via mdlapla
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  • And the list kept going and going and going. The real data was also there, but it was practically unusable. Before leaving the office, TL called his team and we had a really good laugh reading the list.
    via mdlapla
  • The next day, when we arrived, MICROMANAGER called TL, told him something and TL asked me to uninstall the traffic light app from every computer.
    via mdlapla
  • TLDR: Micromanager asks to track exact time spent on each task even though the old way of tracking was working, we create an app and everyone goes into extremely detailed mode so data is lost in a heap of unusable data, micromanager backs down on request.
    via mdlapla
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