Complying With Asinine Workplace Policies

A person is not irrational in carrying out unneeded workplace steps or one part of conflicting orders (if they conflict, you cannot fulfill all of them wholly) if they do not believe anything false about the nature of their goals, or if they recognize at least the basic illogicality of someone else wanting these procedures in place.  Anyone in the workplace is still likely at some point to be faced with such policies or expectations, passed down to them by someone else above them on the hierarchy.  There is a way to satisfy at least some of these policies in a manner that either draws attention to how idiotic they are or that sabotages the company simply by doing what one was told.

What if they tell you to send a manager an email update for every single trivial or pointless change in scheduling something with a client, every fluctuation in an office plan that does not involve them, and so on?  Since they supposedly wanted an email update for everything, giving them what they asked for might make them realize that they either did not really know what their own instructions meant or that they do not actually want that after all!  An inbox flooded with gratuitous emails could interfere with their own work and remind them of how pathetic their own commands are when they are not in alignment with reason.

Do they claim they want to be told about every five minute adjustment to tackling an objective that comes up across every single workday?  Well, if that is truly what they want, they have no basis for objecting when all of the workers given this task do exactly that.  No delays in their own productivity or personal frustration would make them repeal this demand if they truly were rational and sincere in making it.  However, it is likely that if their own workload is large enough, they will regret giving instructions that slow down not only the employees, but the managers or employers themselves.

Some managers love to push for changes just for the sake of change, an irrational reason, or they will pressure workers to do completely unnecessary or counterproductive things merely for the sake of exercising power arbitrarily or emotionalistically.  They do not do it for the sake of the company, as if the company is not made of people who are more foundational than success and profits already, but they do it in order to act on delusions or to make themselves feel important or useful when they are in opposition to reason, the only thing that intrinsically legitimizes anyone's stances.

Complying with their irrationalistic demands can be done in such a way that they see how much it ultimately slows them and perhaps hinders the very goal the demands were intended to bring about.  This does not have to be done out of malice as irrational, hypocritical, egoistic workers might assume is justified.  Because malice in a moral sense is the desire to inflict unjust harm on someone or to punish them for emotionalistic reasons, malice is not the same as complying with certain asinine instructions in order to subvert them.  One can do this without being irrational or without being motivated by malice or selfishness.  The phrase malicious compliance is a very misleading one when it is used in reference to this.