Manager demands strict clean-desk policy in the office, employee comply by wasting company time packing and unpacking their belongings every day: ‘Just following the policy’

Don't you love a manager who punishes the whole team over one employee's mistake?

Bosses have many responsibilities when it comes to managing their employees, and like everyone else with a job to do, they tend to love some responsibilities and hate others. 

After you've had a few bosses, you notice exactly which tasks they enjoy doing and which they avoid at all costs. When it comes to calling out individual employees for something they are doing wrong, we've noticed that some managers do it with passion, while others refrain from it as much as possible. But this task is something every manager has to face at some point. Nobody's perfect, and it is a manager's job to correct their employees when it's necessary. 

As unfortunate as it may be to be on the receiving end of that, it's much worse if managers actually do refrain from correcting their employees, because then you face something similar to what happened in the story below.

This manager decided to enforce a strict "clean desk" policy with the idea that employees would stop leaving important company documents on their desks overnight. While, on paper, this seems a reasonable request to demand of your employees, the real reason this policy was introduced was because of one employee. This employee's desk was always a complete mess, but instead of confronting her directly, the manager decided to loop in the rest of the team into this policy.

One employee, who saw through the manager's plan, decided to prove to the manager that the policy wouldn't be necessary if she'd just address the problem head-on instead of tiptoeing around it. The employee proceeded to clear out their desks completely at the end of every day, taking everything that they could home with them, then spending precious company time every morning to put it all back. This led the manager to understand just how strict her policy was towards her team, while the one employee who was the real issue still didn't improve.

How should a good manager handle this situation? Do you think it's fair to enforce a policy on a whole team when the problem is only with one person?

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