Help! Should I Enforce Nonsensical Rules at Work?
“Some of those regulations are good, some are impractical, and some are so poorly thought out they actually contradict one another. My boss has basically told us which regulations to follow and which to ignore.” - TGC
I’m always glad to see TGC addressing questions like these. Almost nobody else is.
And who can argue with his case that rules and policies are a mess among imperfect humans?
That said, it’s a bit hard to find the decisive ethical principle in the article. The author says you’re not responsible for these rules, but you’re responsible to your direct manager, so selectively enforce as he directs and let him bear the responsibility.
In rigidly heirarchcical companies, this might hold up, but if my experience is at all typical, most companies clearly communicate that every employee is individually responsible for compliance in addition to supervisors’ responsibility to implement compliance.
I think a better line of argument might be along the lines of the different kinds of rules. You have ethics rules that have to do with fraud, waste, and abuse (of property), and harassment, retaliation, and the like. You have health and safety rules that are partly ethical (wellbeing of fellow workers) and partly practical/financial (avoiding liability).
Then there all sorts of procedural rules that are intended to make things more efficient/less chaotic etc. The difference between company ethics and company process isn’t always clear, but a good bit of the time it is.
For both categories (ethical vs process) you have spirit of the law vs. the letter to factor in. It’s always important to understand what you’re trying to achieve, because situations will happen where the rule doesn’t work to achieve that aim. So even in the ethics category, there can be situations where accomplishing the aim involves breaking the rule. But that should be uncommon. In process/procedure rules, on the other hand, there’s often no clear aim, but when there is, situations where accomplishing the intent without following the letter are more common.
So maybe there are two factors here: what kind of rule is it? and what’s the goal of the rule vs. the literal requirement?
It doesn’t help that in some organizations, the rule-making entities are way over-resourced and have nothing else to do but continually crank out more and more increasingly detailed rules. The reality in these places—again, in my experience—is that noncompliance increases because nobody can even keep track of it all, in additional to the increasing disconnect between ideals-driven rules and the realities where the work gets done.
It’s not a simple problem.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I can’t remember the book or author now but I listened to an interview about this. The author had been an officer in the military and done a study that demonstrated that it was impossible to read and sign all the documents they are given each day. There is not enough time in a day. That creates an ethical dilemma for a believer.
I guess I’ve been blessed in that the “official” rules in my workplaces have not been too onerous. The exception I can think of is the COVID restrictions, where I was convinced that the arrows on the floor telling us where to walk were actually concentrating any pathogens aerosolized in the air and made things more dangerous, as well as face mask requirements that I wasn’t convinced were making much of a difference for our almost 100% vaccinated workforce. I complied, as it wasn’t that big of a deal to me. I’d had the disease, gotten the jab, don’t have COPD or things like that, etc..
For me, probably the bigger issue is when the employer has some very specific requirements, but they’re hard to interpret. Then you’ve got the unwritten rules, especially when a quorum of the power structure goes “woke”, that you’ve got to learn if you don’t want unpleasant meetings with your manager and HR.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
One ethical factor is that when rules are contradictory compliance is literally impossible. And as Josh noted, sometimes they can be impossible in other ways. We need to be honest with ourselves about the difference between impossible and difficult. But when they’re truly impossible, the principle is: this is not really a rule. Somebody is trying to solve a problem that can’t be solved with regulations. Similarly, when you have laws making mutually exclusive demands, you really don’t have law. But we also often lump ‘difficult’ and ‘improper’ in with ‘impossible’ with laws we don’t like—so this is an ethical reality that can easily become an imaginary loophole.
I’m reminded a bit of the stereotypes about the wild west. I’m sure that in some cases, they’re accurate. A common storyline is the isolated western town where the Sheriff has taken law into his own hands and is corrupt. In that situation, we intuitively root for the rebels. From an ethical standpoint, we’re probably right because corrupt authority isn’t really authority and decrees with no legal authority are only pretending to be laws.
But this isn’t the same thing as a duly elected legislature or official making law that we think is unconstitutional. In that situation, the law of the land provides a framework for challenging the law of the legislature/official. The ethical response is to use good law to fight bad law. (It took many decades but this is exactly what eventually happened to Roe v Wade.)
In companies there are often also ways to fight bad rules with good rules.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Discussion