'You can't use your work phone unless you're on the clock': Company suffers drop in production following employees' conformance to new guidelines, HR fails to mediate

It's quite something when incompetent leadership and management destroy initiative and morale. In this case, OP was working at a job that required a lot of communication and coordination. Often, a lot of things required from them were time-sensitive. The employees all had a work phone, which they would use for work calls outside of work hours, as well. One day, the company decided to forbid its employees from using their work phones outside of work. They would use scare tactics to make sure the employees complied with this upper management decision, calling and texting them off the clock to see if they answered.

As you can imagine, this resulted in fury, disappointment, and some good old malicious compliance. In an act of defiance, the employees decided not to use their work phones outside of work hours at all. Things quickly began to fall apart, and things got so bad that the company's clients began complaining, resulting in a loss of revenue.

The CEO teamed up with HR and called an emergency meeting, to which all the employees' arrived, smirking. OP and the other employees told management that they had warned them but to no avail. The CEO and HR were utterly exasperated, unsure of what to do. Scroll down to read what happened next.

For more, here is a customer who lost thousands of dollars thanks to their own lack of skills in the communications department; the customer complained about a designer item that had arrived in 'terrible condition', to which the retailer replied that they were willing to give them a full refund. Nevertheless, the customer decided to file a chargeback, leading to a whole other variety of issues.