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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/GinggasinParis on 2025-07-17 15:47:02+00:00.
I just saw an article about Mercedes Benz allowing Teams calls with a camera to their vehicles and it reminded me of this situation.
Several years ago I worked for a small solar company that was acquired by what is essentially the Walmart or solar. We went from weekly in person meetings on a schedule that worked for both management and staff to daily check ins, weekly department calls and other unnecessary regional calls and meetings. What was initially 2-3 short meetings per week turned into around 10 45 minute to an hour meetings per week. My responsibilities were about 20% in office, 80% field work. Some of the locations I needed to get to were an hour + away and a lot of times I was crunched to get to 5-6 locations within the work day. For as long as I could, I would either skip a call if I was in the field or I would listen and not participate so I was “on the call” but could still take care of whatever tasks I needed to. I ended up getting reprimanded and told to just park and take the calls but I needed to participate in all of them or I would be written up. So that’s what I did. If a call was happening, I would find the closest parking lot, take the call and participate. This company also scrutinized overtime and hours so we couldn’t work OT without approval. This meant if I didn’t get something done, I would just head back to the office and reschedule it for the following day. My coworkers did the same and our productivity dropped overall by about 60%.
Within a month, our regional manager was in our office asking us wtf was going on and we told her directly that we have a large region to cover and most of these calls are nonsense corporate feel good bs. If they wanted productivity where it was before, they needed to cut the meetings because meetings don’t improve metrics, actually being able to work does. They did cut our meetings but it turned into a shitshow when the big company fully took over. That office is now officially closed because while we had the 2nd best metrics in the entire company, we were tired of the bs and we all quit and they could not replicate our quality or quantity of installations in that office.