Boss demands employee respond only to ticketed requests that follow the process "no exceptions," employee complies and ignores boss's urgent messages: 'I stopped answering his Slack messages'

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  An employee is seen from the side, typing on a laptop. In the background, a manager holds a tablet to discuss a project or ticket.

• “Do this, no exceptions,” is tightly wrapped. But this addition of “no exceptions” offers a lack of determination and agency to staff; it removes the trust placed in them to make the right judgments. It's an ultimatum, an absolute, and when it comes to ultimatums and absolutes, there is never going to be buy-in and extra effort to make something right outside of the designated ultimatum.

  Sometimes it's a quiet form of defiance, sometimes it's just exhaustion, but at a certain point, a demand for “no exceptions” is going to cave to a very real exception that needs to be made. 

  Let's be honest, we've all received that Slack or Teams message that should have been a more formal email. It doesn't necessarily make a difference, but the context almost helps our brains understand the importance of it. Just like how you have to get your computer out when you're completing a major purchase or paying a large sum of money for a bill. Similarly, when other messages and requests don't follow the appropriate channels, you end up with a whole lot of muddy, murky data and KPIs that don't mean much of anything. And while this is important, if you're going to be strict, you had better stick to that and, it's important to understand that “no exceptions.” means no exceptions

  This employee described how their team lead had declared a strict policy that required all work requests to go through the company's ticketed request processing system. “If it's not in the system, it doesn't exist, no exceptions,” quickly backfired when weeks later the team leader sent an urgent message to the employee asking for data ahead of a client call. This was an exception to the rule that the team lead had previously made, so the employee ignored the improperly filed requests. The team lead's call with the client went poorlyt and the directive was quickly reversed.

• My manager insisted EVERYTHING goes through the ticket system. So I stopped answering his Slack messages.

  
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  An employee sits at their desk, focused on a laptop displaying a Trello-like ticketing interface while a larger monitor shows lines of code.

  _{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}

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