Modelling mojo and state of mind

[Fishoutofwater]

1 hour ago, simonmcp said:

Apparently there is a new culture of doing "The bare minimum" at work emerging

I can assure you it is not new.

[Coldgunner]

Should have updated Friday, HR confirmed that they're not taking it any further, no written warnings, no punishments except talking to my management about appropriate work language. A bit upset that it was dragged out for a week. The nameless individual has failed in their 'game' and their attempt to obtain whatever 'power' they were after has fallen on deaf ears.

 

That person will not be trusted by us any more. The unnecessary stress the ordeal has caused me on top of the stress I already had has not helped. Thankfully I did get to speak to my team leader about that and like I said before they're quite happy for me to take a more background role for a bit. Apart from my immediate comrades (who were also complained about), I'm not trusting anyone.

 

2 hours ago, simonmcp said:

Apparently there is a new culture of doing "The bare minimum" at work emerging.

 

Not sure I agree entirely, I think, at least in my job, there's been a lot of thought about flexible working and working smarter. Some still do bog all I agree, but I don't think that's a new thing. Its maybe easier to slack off, and as above I don't trust some people. Some people don't get that if everyone picks up 10% of the overall workload, you've not got 4 people doing 25% each. Some people are just thick and don't understand that if everyone does their bit it takes the stress off.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Coldgunner

[Northmoor]

2 hours ago, simonmcp said:

Apparently there is a new culture of doing "The bare minimum" at work emerging. Blamed on lockdown, I experienced this with a colleague back in 2003. He openly told me that is what he did, I was left to do all the work he should have done. It prompted me to look for another job, I got one with much better pay and conditions.

 

I now work two jobs which has its downsides - both jobs would like me to do more work than I can fit in. Has stopped me modelling for the last 8 months.

It's not new, I've had colleagues whose work ethic could be described as such and have to admit at times in my career, I've felt very much like that myself.  There are some genuinely lazy people in this world - those for whom no matter how easy their job, are always looking for new ways to get away with doing even less - but they are greatly outnumbered by those people who are simply in the wrong job or at the wrong employer.

 

What does appear to be a new culture, is the significant number of middle-class professionals who have apparently left the workforce altogether to join the economically inactive.  Having learned during lockdowns to be much more self-sufficient than they'd realised they were capable (and able to reduce their cost of living by not commuting or taking so many foreign holidays), they have left their well-paying jobs, sometimes with generous redundancy payments to live in early semi-retirement.  These people seemingly can't be tempted back into the workforce with big salary increases and some companies simply cannot understand how to deal with employees who aren't motivated by money.  This doesn't help those remaining in the workforce who have to do the workload left behind, so for many of us still working, life isn't getting any less stressful.

[SteveyDee68]

On 12/07/2022 at 20:23, cctransuk said:

 

I won't go into detail here but, suffice to say, I was once put on a disciplinary charge for telling the truth - which embarrassed a senior local government politician.

 

A hastily convened hearing took place, between myself and a fellow officer; the haste was due to the fact that the enquiry officer was due to go on leave the same evening.

 

I subsequently received, via the HR department a letter, supposedly from that enquiry officer, stating that he had found me guilty. The problem was, on the date that he supposedly wrote and signed the letter, he was in the middle of a fortnight's foreign leave!!

 

My response to the Council Leader in question was that I rejected the enquiry findings on the grounds that they were fraudulent - giving my reasons - and that, under the same circumstances I would do exactly the same again.

 

I heard no more about the matter!!

 

Never underestimate the depths to which senior management will stoop to achieve what they cannot do by legitimate means. Stand up for yourself; do not be intimidated; and say it as it is!

 

John Isherwood.

 

Agreed - include HR in that too, in my experience!

 

[Blandford1969]

11 hours ago, SteveyDee68 said:

 

Agreed - include HR in that too, in my experience!

 

HR are used often as the fall guy or excuse. 

 

In my last job one Branch Manager would sack someone who complained and when asked why they said said person had said HR had told them so even though I had never been spoken to. 

 

In the previous job one of the Directors said they wanted person X sacking - my telling them in the way they wanted was not legal resulted in shouting, stamping of fists and feet and a degree of swearing. 

 

Please do not put all HR in the same boat. Many of us have scruples and are quoted when it is an excuse by poor management. Having said that I have also encountered some who who are totally untrustworthy and would sell their own granny if they thought it would get them further. 

[SteveyDee68]

31 minutes ago, Blandford1969 said:

HR are used often as the fall guy or excuse. 

My experience of HR in a post 16 college where I worked as a lecturer:

 

* “Formally interviewed” (with a double tape cassette like a police interview!) about something I knew nothing about occurring in my department: a very clear indication from my interviewers that they thought I knew all about it and was withholding information**
 

* Subsequent victimisation with increasing workload (at one point - just before my breakdown - I had three different subjects over five different (exam) levels (some in the same class of students!) over eleven different departments/subjects, all of whom expected/demanded customised syllabuses for their subject area - I the closest anyone else was working like myself was a colleague working for ten departments, but only teaching one subject over three levels!)

 

* HR demanding to meet me at my home after my breakdown and being signed off by my GP with ‘severe depression caused by work related stress’ - it took a formal letter from my doctor stating that they would be ‘invading my (mental health) safe space’ by doing so, as that would ‘invade my home’ by physically bringing those work stresses into my home, to make them back off

 

* HR organising Counselling (6 weeks) but despite being informed after the fourth week that he thought I needed at least twelve weeks of meetings, said counselling interrupted for eight weeks due to the paperwork sitting on someone’s desk because they went on annual leave (!) and then having to start the process again with another Counsellor (for 6 weeks) before HR saying that I had had my “allocated” 12 weeks

 

* Shortest ever “return to work” period (3 weeks, during the summer holiday when no classes running) according to the council’s Occupational Health Unit

 

* Immediately placing me on “competence procedures” to ‘see if you can still do your job’, causing me massive stress - Occupational Health had no idea, and when they found out the nurse was searching for solicitors for me as she said they were out of order and literally paying lip service to employment laws

 

* A formally minuted meeting apparently attended by myself and my rep that neither of us attended (as both were teaching at the time, with security fobs to prove where we were at the time)

 

* HR telling me I attended that meeting alone, and must have forgotten attending it without my rep

 

* HR also minuting that my rep was at that meeting (contradicting what they told me), and also quoting him in their “minutes”!

 

* HR hiding all evidence of their faked meeting in subsequent meetings after challenged by us both about it being false

 

(My workplace colleague/rep happened to be one of the college teaching union reps, but unfortunately I wasn’t in a union (due to pressure from the wife) so couldn’t call upon a union for official help/support. Upon dismissal, he helped me find a lawyer/solicitor to represent me in an Unfair Dismissal tribunal, but costs etc would have to be bourn by myself (thanks to the Tories scrapping legal aid for unfair dismissal cases!). Presenting the facts of the case, said solicitor said he’d never seen such a blatant case of workplace victimisation and unfair dismissal with appalling HR procedures, but unfortunately at this point my mental health was so poor that I couldn’t string a simple written sentence together, let alone create the detailed (and chronological) reports he needed in the time limit allowed for Unfair Dismissal cases to be submitted. 

 

So, to cut a long story sideways, my experience was of HR being complicit in institutional victimisation and bullying that resulted in me losing my job, my mental health, and ultimately my wife, home and family.

 

Left with a deep mistrust of HR; where I work now they appear to be better, although one of the first things they did was send me someone else’s terms and conditions of employment contract to sign! When informed, they simply said delete the information and they’d resend me the correct contract! Ironically, they had just made me undertake mandatory GDDP training, and yet they themselves were in serious breach of those regulations (according to a friend who happens to work for the Commission regulating the above!)

 

You can perhaps understand my mistrust of HR!

 

** Turned out it was ££££s of false claims for support funding undertaken by three colleagues who happened to (physically) work in the same office I was based in - the transcripts of the “interview” did not include them saying to me “You work in (that) office - of course you know what’s going on!” and “Maybe you think what you did was to help (the college)” and I refused to sign the transcripts as being accurate unless those phrases were added - to be able to recall them word for word 12 years later perhaps demonstrates how strongly I felt I was accused (wrongly) of being involved! They wouldn’t insert them into the transcript, nor let me listen to the tapes of the interview, nor allow the tapes to be transcribed by a third party! In retrospect, I should have started looking for a new job right there and then but I had been happy in my job up until that point. Only after that, and a change of line manager, did the victimisation/pressure gradually start. I have never - to this day - received a formal apology from the college for that false accusation (which my counselling identified as being the trigger for my eventual depression)

@Blandford1969 also said:

 

“Please do not put all HR in the same boat. Many of us have scruples and are quoted when it is an excuse by poor management.”

 

My cousin and her husband are both in HR for the NHS - apparently they are both well regarded by both staff and management at their respective hospitals, so as you say not everyone in HR have sold their souls to the devil!

 

Sorry to rant - I have put this all behind me, although one day - perhaps - I will get my day in court (so to speak)!

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, Blandford1969 said:

HR are used often as the fall guy or excuse. 

 

In my last job one Branch Manager would sack someone who complained and when asked why they said said person had said HR had told them so even though I had never been spoken to. 

 

In the previous job one of the Directors said they wanted person X sacking - my telling them in the way they wanted was not legal resulted in shouting, stamping of fists and feet and a degree of swearing. 

 

Please do not put all HR in the same boat. Many of us have scruples and are quoted when it is an excuse by poor management. Having said that I have also encountered some who who are totally untrustworthy and would sell their own granny if they thought it would get them further. 

I'll back you up on that.  I have experience of both poor and excellent HR departments.

 

One long-time employer had no idea how long anyone who had worked for them, so when I'd done ten years service I had to tell them I could have an extra 5 days leave, they just had to trust me.  More recently I've had HR people who lost internal job applications, so the whole selection and interview process had to be terminated and re-started.

 

Another company whose culture I never got on with at all, actually had HR people I could not fault.  They had everything in place from day 1 and on my last day (after resignation), they actually gave me a friendly and courteous exit interview (never had one at all at the previous company), with the emphasis on me talking and them listening.

 

Sorry, this is going off-topic, but I agree that HR do tend to get unfairly blamed for the mistakes of others as well as their own.

[33C]

Love 'em or hate 'em, join a union. Turns them and me into them and us. Remember, nobody does anything for nothing. Their rewards are financial, spiritual or personal. Protect yourself, no man is an island. 

[leopardml2341]

Sadly it seems to be increasingly acceptable that (some) people are given creednace as a result of being upset/offended on behalf of others.

 

Equally sadly it would also appear that those same people are not at the front of the queue when it comes to supporting  others. It's a bit like the 'rights and responsibilities' discussion - everyone 'knows their rights' but few seem to acknowledge the responsibilities which go hand in hand with those rights - ho hum!

 

[john new]

Most of the Personnel teams in the several places I worked in over the 38 years of my career were efficient and able to do what the changing aspects of work life demanded of them. That said there were two bad apples in that time (at HR/Personnel section head level) both of whom got sacked. If the rumours that circulated afterwards of why they had been dismissed had any basis of truth to them it was fully justified (obviously I am not stating what the rumoured infringements were here).

 

If HR did collectively have failings in the latter years of my career it was failing to eradicate toxic bullying by the highest tiers of management in the way they were handling nationally enforced budget cuts. When I left the stress levels generally in that workplace meant it was not a good place to be employed in; those that could leave did. Me included!

 

Edited August 15, 2022 by john new

[Blandford1969]

8 hours ago, 33C said:

Love 'em or hate 'em, join a union. Turns them and me into them and us. Remember, nobody does anything for nothing. Their rewards are financial, spiritual or personal. Protect yourself, no man is an island. 

When I worked at a Brewery the Union rep and myself had 'boiler room' chats where we would discuss any case off the record between us and always ended up agreeing between us on where it should probably fairly end up. Then we just made sure fair play happened. The did sometimes mean the management did not get the result they hoped for. 

[Blandford1969]

9 hours ago, SteveyDee68 said:

 

 

Sorry to rant - I have put this all behind me, although one day - perhaps - I will get my day in court (so to speak)!

Don't worry I have the same view of some of them. My past place did not do things correctly and that was the HRD even getting my notice period wrong by 3 months. Long story short I got an extra 6 months out of them.  It has also had a massive impact on my mojo and anxiety and depression over the last few years.  

 

As for court my honest opinion is only the lawyers win. You get months of stress you might win, you might not but it can be found out by future employers. Better to just get as much money out of them before you leave. 

[ianathompson]

15 hours ago, Blandford1969 said:

As for court my honest opinion is only the lawyers win. You get months of stress you might win, you might not but it can be found out by future employers. Better to just get as much money out of them before you leave. 

 

I would tend to agree with this statement.

I left teaching with an enhanced redundancy.

I was the union rep that the Senior Management team wanted to discipline to further their own ends.

Had it gone to court there are a number of factors that could have intervened rendering the result uncertain and stressful.

 

The management style of most educational establishments seems to be based on bullying.

After I left I worked in a factory and then got a job on the railways.

In neither case was the work atmosphere anything like so toxic.

 

I do not know what the school management said about my abrupt departure, half way through a term.

 I was, however, recently talking to an ex-colleague who was surprised that I had received any redundancy.

 

Ian T

 

[SteveyDee68]

Want another couple of experiences of HR but at University level?

 

I worked for 10 years for a red brick university in my local city, eventually as personal assistant to the senior pro-vice-chancellor (one step below chancellor). When the university reunited* with what used to be it’s applied sciences departments, my boss casually asked about a month before the actual date of “reunification” what was happening with myself and three other support staff, all at the same level, who were working to support the highest levels of administrators right up until that final day. HR’s response? They had literally overlooked all four of us when reassigning staff to new/equivalent positions!

 

I remember meeting with the HR person responsible for me and him telling me that I would have a job, same pay etc, but absolutely no idea what I might be doing eg I could be enveloping in the mailroom; the week before, I had been speaking to the Embassador for Qatar and Sir Patrick Moore (the astronomer)! He then suggested enhanced voluntary redundancy, which he described as “We’ll give you as much money as possible to go away and not be a problem”. Seriously.

 

I took the redundancy (to enable me to train as a teacher)

 

Same institution got a new Head of HR, and as my mum was Secretary to the previous incumbent she was assigned to him. She introduced him to me, and told me she thought he was “very nice”; my own first impression (which I told her) was that I got a bad feeling and didn’t trust him. One year after his appointment (ie after my mum had guided him through what happened and when throughout the academic year), he suddenly told her he wasn’t happy with her work, didn’t like her telephone manner and that she wasn’t his first choice of Secretary in the first place. Classic case of “constructive dismissal”, especially as *nobody* anywhere had anything but good things to say about her. Of course, that totally destroyed their working relationship and she moved sideways to work for someone else. Jump ahead approx four years, and the same Head of HR was suddenly on “gardening leave” for over a year, before quietly being paid off to leave. (There is more truth in the scene in Educating Rita when Michael Caine’s character explains he hadn’t been sacked because “that would involve them making a decision” than most people realise!)

 

It always seems that the higher up the tree you climb that incompetence is rewarded … our most recent Prime Minister being a case in point!

 

Steve S

 

* Throughout the process it was always strenuously emphasised that it was not an “amalgamation”

Edited August 16, 2022 by SteveyDee68
Typos

[Northmoor]

3 hours ago, SteveyDee68 said:

 

 

They had literally overlooked all four of us when reassigning staff to new/equivalent positions!

 

I remember meeting with the HR person responsible for me and him telling me that I would have a job, same pay etc, but absolutely no idea what I might be doing

That is about as clear a description of Constructive Dismissal as it's possible to write.

[SteveyDee68]

13 hours ago, Northmoor said:

That is about as clear a description of Constructive Dismissal as it's possible to write.

Well, it was way back in 2004, so that ship sailed a long time ago.

 

Interestingly, I was talking with someone yesterday who was telling me that the HR person who spoke to me is still working at the University, and in the meantime had acquired a CBE … I assume for something other than “services to HR”!

 

Steve S

Edited August 17, 2022 by SteveyDee68

[MrWolf]

I found that amusing.

 

You would think that a university type would have turned down any award with "British Empire" in the title, given that they are pretending we are responsible for every bit of evil in history.

 

I guess that "I've got a gong and you haven't" still counts for something! 😆

[BlackFivesMatter]

From day one in a job get a c y a cover your ….tail book. Not a diary but record any incident you think may be relevant. Hard to do but 1/1/01 md told me to do report on sales. 3/1/01 printed report put on desk and advised mds secretary. md off. 4/1/01 md asked about report I told md I put it on their desk and said to sec. 
if you can bcc any non classified email to your private email do so. If you can note times as well so much the better. Update daily, not war and peace but keep a record. I did and £40,0000 of compensation, a former employer diagnosed with a nervous breakdown following the Tribunal - it’s worth it

[Northmoor]

7 hours ago, MrWolf said:

You would think that a university type would have turned down any award with "British Empire" in the title, given that they are pretending we are responsible for every bit of evil in history.

Can we leave the Daily Express editorials out of this thread, please?

[MrWolf]

49 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

Can we leave the Daily Express editorials out of this thread, please?

 

Sorry, as a one time teacher I must remember that I am still bound by the Guardian's official list of subjects and or persons allowed to be mocked....😉

 

 

[Coldgunner]

Thankfully the complaint has come to no more than a chewing out. I've been chewed out at work before, so its water of a ducks back so to speak. Still annoyed that it got taken so far, but hopefully that will be left in the past.

 

The good news is that after 3 years, Peterborough beer festival is back on next week, and I've got the second half of the week off. Plenty of time to get utterley trousered and make an arse of myself.

[MrWolf]

Good to hear that, both for your sake and for others. There's so much static created by the spurious complaints that many of the real ones aren't heard.

[97406]

As I get older, with retirement a small light in the distance, thoughts are turning to my own health and wellbeing. One thing I’m reducing is alcohol consumption, much of which was to relax on an evening after work. After struggling to find time for modelling, I now allocate the 2 hours or so straight after work to working on various projects instead of unwinding with a beer or 2 or 3. It’s working so far after 4 weeks and I feel healthier as a result. Alcohol consumption is now limited to weekends and even then, less is consumed. Alcohol free lagers also get utilised more, which make for a great placebo. 

 

Who’d have though my rejuvenated interest in model railways would have a health benefit too!

 

Yours, “Old Hollow Legs”. 

Edited August 23, 2022 by 97406

[fulton]

On 23/08/2022 at 05:32, 97406 said:

As I get older, with retirement a small light in the distance, thoughts are turning to my own health and wellbeing. One thing I’m reducing is alcohol consumption, much of which was to relax on an evening after work.

We ( my wife and I ) were at that stage a few years ago, and decided to stop all alcohol, we could see it could get out of hand, difficult at first, especially in social situations, even today sometimes I think a glass of wine would be nice, but we support each other, we both feel better for giving up. I did a job for eight years where I was in contact daily with people with alcohol and drug problems, each with their own story, how easy things can get out of control, one particular memory was of a young women sitting outside our building, waiting for her boyfriend who was inside, she had all the signs of heroin use, had not seen her before or ever again, I wonder what her story was.

[john new]

Once you work out the cost over a year (it helped me give up tobacco about 45 years ago) and what you could buy instead giving up suddenly becomes a lot easier. Even one £10 bottle of wine per week is £520pa. That’s two x Accurascale Deltics or two x Bachman V2s for example. Surprising how it adds up so quickly.