Yes, it’s good to have a healthy work-life balance. It’s also not wrong to have a seemingly imbalanced balance, if you keep on keeping on without robbing yourself of a healthy lifestyle.

But it doesn’t stop folks from assuming that your balance should be more balanced. Like, you think that 95/5 is your balance, but everyone else insists it should be 50/50. And then they try to force it upon you. But you ain’t having any of it and then malicious compliance happens. And then they backtrack on their decision. And then you win.

More Info: Reddit

It’s all about that work-life balance these days. The only problem is, there are those who refuse the 95/5 balance in favor of 50/50, and then malicious compliance happens

Image credits: weewendy (not the actual image)

A Redditor recently had to comply with the company’s request to use up their time off by July, and so they opted for 25 Fridays off—a tactic that could affect the bottom line

Image Credits: u/PandorasPenguin

In particular, the Redditor’s “Friday” tactic meant that the company wouldn’t be able to bill this one customer 100%, as the employee was only planning on working 80% per week

Image credits: seventyfourimages (not the actual image)

Image Credits: u/PandorasPenguin

It didn’t take long to convince the higher-ups to backtrack on their decision and do what they always did—”buy” the vacation time from the employee and everyone wins

Image credits: nina_p_v (not the actual image)

Reddit user u/PandorasPenguin recently shared a bit of malicious compliance on their part. A long story made short is that OP wanted to trade in their abundance of vacation days for an appropriately extra salary. It’s an iffy thing to do in some socially aware jurisdictions, but nonetheless an option if you feel money is the way to go.

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But, abbreviated personas, i.e. HR and the CEO, decided work-life balance is a must, even more-so after covid, and so the employee’s multiple months worth of vacation time now had to be somehow spent by July. Why then? They’d otherwise burn away as there are limits to how many days off folk can have, and if they didn’t use them, their loss.

Well, now that OP was more or less forced to use these days, they came up with a better idea. Instead of taking 5 weeks worth of vacation time (it’s the amount of time they were risking to lose by July), they decided to take every Friday for the next 25 weeks (spread across just a tad bit over 6 months) off.

All fine and dandy, except this also meant that the company would no longer be able to bill one of their clients, with whom OP worked, 100% of the work they did, as they would now do 80% as one of five work days would be gone. And that meant 20% income. When the simple solution would be to just pay OP their vacation days and have them continue working 100% with loads of vacation time left over from the next year’s reservoir.

Well, the company did backtrack on their decision, and decided that it was best to do just that—pay the man. Woman. You get the point. So, it all boiled down to a back-and-forth that led to OP being paid out 2.5 months worth of salary and they still had another full year worth of days off, i.e. 32 days. More than enough to plan trips to 3 countries.

And, in the end, folks online also won as they got to witness some grade-A malicious compliance, and even comment on it. Some discussed the issue, pointing out that some places, like Poland, don’t allow for such payouts and instead actually enforce the rule to go have a grand ol’ time off. Or countries like the US, where vacation time is a bit of a mess. Slight exaggeration with the word bit.

Others praised OP for their genius—as long as they get enough vacation time to satisfy their needs, who’s to judge? And hey, they get a fat bonus to their paycheck, so that’s always a win. And then there were like-minded people who also had loads of days off and had no idea what to do with them.

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Whatever the case, 7,900 upvotes later, the story started making rounds in the Reddit community. Speaking of which, you can read it all in context here. But before you do that, why not share your thoughts about this story, work, overworking and everything in between?

We leave you with some knowledge to consider pointed out by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network:

Overworking increases risk of injury at work by 61%. The risk of experiencing depressive symptoms nearly triples as the level of overwork jumps from low to high. Same happens with levels of stress, except it’s not 3, but 6 times higher. The more hours people work, the less satisfied they are with their lives, and women are often more affected by this than men. And this is just people personally.

There’s a whole other dimension of negatives surrounding people’s inability to no longer have a proper family life, which in the end often affects both their significant others and their offspring. And it’s not just relationships in general, but, in the case of kids, their academic achievements and the like can also suffer.

In other words, it’s a downward spiral into self-destruction. So, know your boundaries, and keep them in check. This has been your PSA for today.

Netizens enjoyed this bit of malicious compliance, not only sharing their own predicaments, but also discussing the topic in general

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