Often when you’re anticipating a meeting at work, it can be a huge relief to find out that it’s been postponed. If you weren’t prepared or simply weren’t in the mood, it can feel like a stroke of luck when you get that alert that the meeting’s been pushed until tomorrow. But if that started happening every single week, do you think you’d be annoyed?

Below, you’ll find a story that one employee at a tech company recently shared on the Malicious Compliance subreddit, detailing how he managed to cost his clients thousands of dollars by simply following orders.

Colleagues at this company started complaining when their weekly meetings kept getting pushed from Fridays to Mondays

Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)

But when this employee agreed not to postpone them any longer, clients were less than impressed

Image credits: RDNE Stock project (not the actual photo)

Image source: Sinaneos

Later, the man clarified a few details about the situation for readers

Employees should be allowed to raise concerns if they don’t agree with how things are done

Image credits: MART PRODUCTION (not the actual photo)

If you don’t understand why things work the way that they do, it’s important to ask questions. We shouldn’t sit around feeling like we’re doing a pointless job or following orders that make no sense to us. Curiosity is something many of us could benefit from exercising more often! But when there actually is a valid reason for the processes in place, employees should understand and respect the rules.

Being surrounded by negative coworkers can take a huge toll on anyone. You don’t have to love your job to stay positive and refrain from constantly complaining. A negative work environment can impact employee productivity and morale and can make team members more prone to burn out. In turn, being surrounded by negative colleagues can cause stress, anxiety, depression and physical symptoms such as migraines and muscle pain.

According to LifeHack, there are a few coworkers in particular who tend to partake in complaining: those who are simply looking for someone to listen and want to be heard; those who are not aware of the matters surrounding their complaints; and those who are looking for someone to assist them with a legitimate grievance. 

But constant complaining can create a toxic work environment

Image credits: Yan Krukau (not the actual photo)

This complaining can be challenging for colleagues and managers to deal with, when it starts turning the office into a less enjoyable place. But when it comes to frequent complaints or complaints from an entire team, such as in this story, Alyson Meister and Nele Dael at Harvard Business Review recommend understanding the function of the complaints.

If they’re for a valid reason, they might actually be productive. Can we solve this problem and make everyone happy? Let’s investigate. Venting, on the other hand, is complaining that doesn’t necessarily require action. Someone might just need to get thoughts off of their chest, and this can be healthy in small quantities. Then there’s malicious complaining, which is at the expense of others and can create an unhealthy work environment.

Meister and Dael note that it’s important for employees’ complaints to be heard and for them to be understood, otherwise they might become resentful over time. They recommend having interest and curiosity in the team’s qualms. Don’t hesitate to facilitate conversations about employee concerns, but at the end of the day, it’s not going to be possible to please everyone. 

Managers should be confident in their decisions and abilities

Image credits: CoWomen (not the actual photo)

According to Indeed, when colleagues undermine your work or decisions, it’s important to remain confident in your abilities. They are allowed to complain or disagree, but they cannot necessarily change things for everyone simply because they don’t like your decisions. In this case, the whole company had to learn a lesson the hard way. But it could have been prevented if they had simply listened to the OP’s initial reasoning for postponing meetings.

It can also be helpful to set boundaries around which topics employees are allowed to raise complaints about. LifeHack recommends that managers tell their employees they’ll entertain a conversation about complaint topics only once. Once a solution has been found, addressing the same topic again and again can be a waste of time.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this malicious compliance in the comments below, pandas. Have you ever had to teach your company a similar lesson? Feel free to share, and then if you’re interested in reading another Bored Panda article discussing malicious compliance in the workplace, we recommend checking out this one! 

Readers shared their thoughts on the story, with some criticizing the company’s schedule

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