Chaotic working? Malicious compliance? What to do about passive-aggressive staff

Disaffected staff are turning passive-aggressive with techniques like malicious compliance and chaotic working. It’s time to reconsider your management and policies, says Nicole Kobie

There are plenty of good reasons to follow instructions perfectly: for compliance, so everyone is on the same page, to benefit customers, to outperform rivals. But such dutiful earnestness has been weaponised against companies by employees as an alternative to quiet quitting.

Malicious compliance isn’t a new idea, but this workplace trend has been revived in online communities such as Reddit and TikTok as a reaction to overbearing, micromanaging workplaces. It’s taking passive aggressiveness professionally by following instructions or orders to the letter, even if the outcomes are negative.

Chaotic working, on the other hand, is taking out dissatisfaction at work by being excessively generous to customers or employees. For example, by giving out discounts or other benefits in the name of good service but in truth because you no longer care if you get in trouble or not.

This is a big problem. The subreddit dedicated to malicious compliance includes 3.9 million members. 3.9 million! And it’s packed with examples.

One employee was forced via company policy to get a doctor’s note for a single day off ill, and the GP instead signed them off for two weeks. Another person was banned from working from home because he was too idle in the office chat, so he wrote a script that inputs a full stop every five minutes; he’s back working from home.

And in one last example, company security required employees to show their last five photos on their phones before departing for the day. You can imagine how that went: not well for the poor security guard tasked with flipping through the grossest photos staffers could manage to take.

Chaotic repercussions

The aim is to quietly disrupt the workplace, and perhaps a particular policy, while adhering to the rules. Everyone knows the employee is trying to prove a point, but it’s difficult to hold them accountable when they’re strictly following company protocols.

Of course, managers and colleagues are well aware of the true motivations behind the situation, so even if there are no formal repercussions, the passive-aggressive attitude behind malicious compliance can damage an employee’s reputation and chance of promotion. Tread carefully.

Chaotic working is especially fraught, as it’s making use of employee discretion to dole out discounts, freebies or other benefits. Technically, a company may allow employees to do this from time to time — for example, to manage complaints or reward key partners — but chaotic working takes advantage of that flexibility for corporate punishment. Unlike malicious compliance, chaotic working doesn’t stick to formal rules, so employees are risking trouble.

Management response to chaotic working and malicious compliance

If a staffer is giving away free products, offering discounts, or writing off late fees because they’re disaffected with work, there’s clearly a wider management issue that needs to be addressed. Sometimes an employee just isn’t a good fit, other times a conversation could solve the issue. It’s always worth a chat to find out.

Either way, thankfully the employee isn’t taking out their irritation in a way that will hurt the business — if anything, they may be boosting customer loyalty.

Managers may want to crack down on chaotic working by tightening up policies around employee discretion, but be warned: that could cause staff to switch tactics to malicious compliance instead.

On that front, malicious compliance is a tool often deployed to push back against a specific policy, so if staffers are trying their best to destroy a new rule by over-adherence, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the rule itself. Rewriting a policy to be more sensible or flexible could be easier in the long run, especially if it really is flawed. Otherwise, the malicious chaos caused by employee pushback might never end.