A Work Update
Nov. 28th, 2023 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teylaminhThis is a long version of a recent Facebook post, because (as ever) there's a lot to process. As of this week I have finally moved to my new team, a situation which only came about because I had an actual breakdown last week (22nd November). Before I get into what happened, there's some background context that I just want to get down so I can get things straight in my brain.
I’ll try and break this down into months as otherwise it’s a huge info dump…
January – February
I can't remember now if I mentioned this here, but I was supposed to move teams back in January this year. I had a slightly panicked/last minute call off my team leader between Christmas/New Year to say I would be the first one to move, because the person I was replacing was on secondment and his contract had come to an end and would not be extended. I was more than happy with that decision - new year, new start, all that jazz - but it then didn't happen because the team manager (my TL’s manager) was off sick / in hospital, so obviously I expected a bit of drift.
In February we had our first intake of new starters and I got roped into training one of them. I questioned why I had to be involved considering I was supposed to be moving, and the response at that point was that I wouldn't be going any time soon. We had an induction meeting at our South venue for the three new starters, where I also met my new team leader for the first time having previously only spoken to her on Teams. At that point she suggested she wanted to move me in April, so clearly there was no escaping the new starter training but I was hopeful it would only be a short-term thing.
Out of those initial three, we only have one still in the team - one of them lasted two months before we broke her, the other lasted about six before moving on (because she'd applied for a Council job at the same time, was successful in both, and it was just a case of timing - she went back to the interviewer and he agreed to take her on - fair play!). As time has gone on, trying to fill the vacancies has been like a revolving door, as the agency staff just haven't lasted and it's been a struggle to get permanent staff in post. As I predicted, the restructure is not working for the service at all.
Half of the problem there is that either the TL or the agencies are not being honest with people about what the job entails. They are being told it's "mostly" minute-taking (sorry, I mean "note-taking" *eyeroll*), and then they get here and realise the minuting is about 20% of the job and the rest is a lot of very complicated, fiddly admin tasks that are made all the more difficult because none of the systems work properly.
Also, it's just insanely, relentlessy busy, worse than it's ever been, so new starters are having to hit the ground running. Usually it takes around six weeks to fully train a new minute taker - they are having to start doing meetings at week two, after a week of shadowing, and learn the rest as they go along. Unsurprisingly, we have lost track of work and there have been mistakes as a result.
At one point the team leader started sharing out the training because she'd run out of competent staff to allocate new starters to (and whilst we were training we were not able to cover meetings, which for full time staff equates to five a week), which then resulted in the training not being done properly. In July I had to spend a week with one of them just going through all the post-meeting tasks - we spent a whole day going over it all in fine detail, and by the end of the week she'd got it, so that was positive - but it highlighted very quickly the fact that certain members of the team just hadn’t been doing things properly.
That in itself is really frustrating because it's not like I haven't pointed these things out before now, it's just that the TL was happy to let things drift and not deal with them directly, except to send blanket emails to everyone (which the culprits don’t think apply to them). Then some of the people who were training staff were moving roles imminently, so it never did get dealt with, but the worst offender has at least moved to a team where her incompetence can't cause any damage.
Anyway, things carried on in much the same manner for a while and there was no suggestion of any movement.
March – August
In March I was supposed to attend some mandatory Customer Services training, which was already annoying enough considering the restructure was supposed to "build on our excellent skills" or some bollocks, skills which are clearly not that excellent if they think we all need customer services training. I ended up missing it because I had a stomach bug (literally thought I had food poisoning at one point but luckily it had passed within three days or so). Trying to call in sick was a nightmare in itself, as my TL was on leave and my new TL was covering – she didn’t answer her phone so I left her a voicemail asking her to text when she received it (which is what I usually do if my TL doesn’t answer first time), and when she hadn’t responded by 9.00am I had to log in to contact the PO for my conference to tell her – I offered to do post-conference support tasks for her instead and she was fine with it – and send the TL an email, none of which I should have to do when already feeling ropey.
I also tried to cancel my place on the course, which was a recipe for failure, because the website is a clusterfuck and the admin team responsible for the mailbox are useless. The website had me as a "no show" even though I'd emailed the organisers to let them know, because there was no way to retrospectively change it. The team then sent me an arsey email about a month later asking why I hadn't attended. I sent them a snarky response with the original email chain and my TL also luckily backed me up.
I had my return to work interview with my new TL (because my current team leader was still on leave) and at that point she suggested I might be moving in July. I still naively assumed that something was in the pipeline, more fool me.
Things pootled along in much the same manner for a while, I had a fortnight off in July and on my first day back had another half-day of mandatory training, namely “Connections Count”, our new trauma-informed Trust working model. This was supposed to be a full day of training, but someone decided Business Support staff only needed to attend for half a day, so the trainer couldn’t actually finish the course properly. Most of it is geared towards practice / frontline staff; what came out for Business Support staff was that none of the principles being discussed had ever been used when working with us.
It turned into a bit of an offload session where we all shared horror stories that are typical to beleaguered admin staff the world over: never listening to our concerns, making decisions without us being involved, ignoring us when we raise issues and then blaming us when things go wrong (even when we try to mitigate against it). The course was being run by our in-house clinical psychologist and the (then) Principal Social Worker, and they promised to take our feedback higher. At one point the PSW commented, “I just wrote down what you didn’t all say”, when they asked if we could apply the model to our own working life and the room was silent.
On my feedback after the training I reiterated for them to please take the feedback higher, because the restructure has been nothing short of traumatising. We had a retirement lunch for a colleague shortly after the training, where someone commented that they didn’t realise they’d been traumatised until the training laid out the signs/symptoms. I already knew we’d been traumatised, and all the training achieved was retraumatising us. At one point, a colleague and I were both ranting about an incident that occurred in 2014, which neither of us had even thought about in years – for five minutes we were both back in that zone again. It was nothing we haven’t come to expect – last minute demands and unclear communication making an already stressful situation worse – but at the time it triggered chronic health issues in several staff, a fact which was never acknowledged. (I’m including myself in that, because it was the initial cause of my recurrent UTI’s and, well, the rest is history.)
The more I think about this lately, the more I think that sending Business Support staff on the training was actually quite dangerous, but of course senior management wouldn’t have thought of that because they probably don’t realise how their actions have affected us. This is not a recent thing, it’s been ongoing for years – admin are the bottom of the food chain and always the last to know anything, and even if the Head of Service realised his restructure was traumatic, I don’t think he would particularly care.
I had a catch up with my TL at some point and July was also suggested as a potential start date – obviously that one didn’t happen either.
In August I was training another new starter, which was a struggle. The TL allocated her to me because she wasn’t sure about her, and wanted a second pair of eyes – the training was hard going because she was very quiet and it took me at least a week to get a conversation out of her. Things were also delayed because we had a nightmare week of chaotic meetings / cancellations; for anything that was cancelled on the day, I made sure we remained in the conference room so she could sit and absorb the ambient discussions, but whether that was helpful I don’t know.
September; a brief respite!
I went away to Bulgaria in September – on my own, as Paul had a Blood Bowl tournament in Alicante. It was my first time flying solo and I went from Birmingham, which was a bit more expensive but considerably less stressful / time consuming than going from Luton, who are an omnishambles. We also had a day trip to Turkey where we were almost arrested at Border Control for smuggling cigarettes, but luckily they realised it was a genuine mistake and let us off without a fine. (Apparently the 200 cigarette limit is only when you’re flying, not when you’re driving.)
We went to a town called Edirne to do some shopping – there’s a huge mosque there which is really impressive, and the little bazaars are really interesting. I bought a painting for the bathroom and we had kebabs at a streetfood place which were amazing (I may never have a chipshop kebab ever again, they absolutely do not compare). We also went to find the local mall to have a look around but it was mostly expensive clothing shops and incredibly boring, so we left again.
From mid-September onwards things have gotten progressively more irritating. I haven’t had any more new starters to train (luckily) but it’s been so busy that we physically can’t cover all the meetings. Instead, we have been mostly doing post-conference support, which means the Chairs do their own minutes and we do all the associated admin – which is mostly impossible because the Chairs never communicate. At one point, my week comprised two actual meetings and six post-conference meetings, to the point where I completely lost track of everything.
It didn’t help that my steroid jab wore off in mid-October, so I’ve had intermittent brainfog and have been pretty much exhausted all the time, plus the added bonus of my anxiety acting up whenever anything pisses me off (and my default anxiety reaction is usually rage).
October onwards
We have a new Head of Service for CP and experience so far seems to suggest that he wants the service to fail. I have been assisting with an Eclipse project to update all the worklists and forms for the service, which has been fine except that the business analyst apparently didn’t listen to some of what I said and ignored me when I sent her a question that apparently was too complicated to find an answer for (see above re: they ignore us when we raise things). Whilst all of this has been going on he has been trying to update the minutes template.
Myself and a colleague (one of the two remaining in CP) had a meeting with the HOS early in the year where he asked our opinion on what we would want the minutes to look like. After that, I sent him the slides I’d put together after my report writing course, which I’d done with a view to eventually sharing them with the team except (as with everything) it drifted to the point of never happening. The only reason I sent them is because I felt they were supporting exactly what he was telling us in that meeting about how to record the information. I didn’t get any response.
Since then, he has apparently been doing a “pilot” in the background with some of the PO’s and some of the new starters, most of whom have now moved on as they were agency, and a new template was introduced in October. I actually had sight it a bit earlier than that (August I think) because I heard two of the PO’s talking about a new template and asked the question – one of them emailed it to me, even though she probably shouldn’t have done, and listened to me ranting about it with great interest.
Reader, you may recall that when I did my last big rant about the restructure, I surmised that the previous pilot in May 2021 was done with the purpose of simplifying the minutes for incoming, lower skilled staff. That predication may well have borne fruit but apparently the new HOS wants to make them even simpler.
The new template is a clusterfuck. It has basically no information on it because we are only supposed to record “information not already in reports”, which is frankly as clear as mud, and the only guidance we’ve received is to ask each Chair what they want – which is not sustainable and also not helpful, as the Chairs have no idea what’s supposed to go in there either. The rest of the template is the child and parents’ views, and the Chair’s summary, which is supposed to reflect the information they’re recording on the Strengthening Families board under the heads (risks/strengths etc) – the model we have used since 2016.
In the meantime we have also opened our shiny new building where the PO’s are being encouraged to use a digital pen to write on the board (as opposed to typing the information), so we are seriously at risk of losing a lot of very important information. We actually received a “Good” rating from Ofsted this year – enjoy that while it lasts, I guess.
To me, the new templates feel unsafe – it feels like a serious case review waiting to happen. For all of us “old timers”, they are incredibly unintuitive to use, because we’re used to listening to all that information and analysing / making sense of it, but that’s not what they want under the new arrangements. For me, the final nail in the coffin has been a subtle but nonetheless telling change to how we are referred to – we are not minute-takers, we are note-takers. I’ve always argued that what we produce has never been “minutes” in the first place. Now they really do just want notes.
According to one of the Chairs who was also part of the so-called “pilot”, they also only attended one meeting to discuss the new templates – it seems the HOS was going to push ahead with it regardless and only involved staff as lip service. To me it almost feels as though he’s pandering to the head of Business Support, who has a ridiculous expectation of staff doing six meetings a week, rather than pushing back against this insane decision which is quite evidently failing the service.
They went live in mid-October. About a week before that I’d had my appraisal meeting with my current and new TL to set goals for the new role, when they said I would hear about my start date a week later (you can probably guess what happened). The new templates went live about a week after that and at that point I requested to be moved, because I didn’t want to use them, and I was told it wouldn’t be possible.
So since mid-October I have been feeling increasingly despondent, because the new templates, coupled with the fact we are mostly only doing post-conference tasks (i.e. monkey work), and a couple of Chairs who have decided to manage their own diaries rather than allowing us to do it, makes me feel that we are basically surplus to requirement. If not for the fact that initial conferences have to be minuted by law, I fully suspect we would be going the same way as the IRO service, where the Chairs do their own meetings and manage their own diaries… which was an abject failure when it was first introduced.
The frustrating thing is that the Chairs quite clearly do appreciate us, but there’s nothing they can do about the situation. I knew the restructure would fail the service and oh, look, it has. My mantra lately has been “Either this is a Grade 2 role, or it’s not – and if it’s not, what the fuck are we doing?” Some of the Chairs have been rather more bluntly putting it as “you get what you pay for”. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Alongside this, I also got nominated to be a “building champion” by my TL, because they decided the Gr3’s should be doing that in our service area. I was told that this would just be around supporting new starters i.e. where to get their badges done, where everyone sits etc. What it turned out to be instead was doing inductions/tours for groups of staff. I had to attend a training session with the HOS for Business Support (where I had to pretend to be nice for an hour), and then spend two days at the building doing tours – by the end of it I was physically and mentally exhausted. If I’d realised that was what the role involved I would have declined – my other colleague dropped out for personal reasons and I wish I’d done the same.
My colleague (F) who is staying in CP often emails me and we send each other rants/essays back and forth for the day. She is having second thoughts about staying even though she wanted to, because nobody is really clear on what the role will involve and things just seem to be getting worse. The TL keeps telling her things will get better, which is patently insane – the current situation is the direct result of 13 years of Tory rule, where public services have been decimated and nobody has any money – short of a sudden and immediate change of government, things are not going to get better – and even then it will take years, if not decades, to repair the damage.
Oh, and I also had to attend MORE mandatory training in October (on my birthday) for “Supervision Skills”, even though none of us are quite sure if we will actually be supervising staff or just monitoring work. This was also a ridiculous situation because they didn’t put on enough training sessions to ensure all staff could attend, despite it being mandatory.
The Incident
So, bearing all of this in mind, this is the context in which the incident on Wednesday occurred. This month has been extremely stressful, with the culmination of all this nonsense as well as having to deal with Paul almost getting dismissed due to ill health absence (he wasn’t, thank god). Last week my stress levels were higher than they’ve been for a while and I spent the best part of two hours after my conference just offloading at my Chair – she only started this year and apparently even she could tell that I was considerably more stressed than a few months ago. TBH I have been offloading at every Chair I have meetings with, because sometimes if you shout loud enough at the right people, something will change.
Anyway, on Wednesday I had a conference at our south venue, so I went there in the morning like a good little admin lackey. At 9.30am, half an hour before we were due to start, the allocated social worker arrived and informed me that the Chair would be attending virtually.
I should probably clarify, this Chair is dealing with some family things so has a hybrid arrangement in place, and she is only supposed to be doing initial conferences on the days she’s not working from home, as it’s been agreed they shouldn’t be held virtually. She has attended virtually before but I knew in advance because I’d informed her about having a new starter observing. Apparently she assumed it was “common knowledge”, and it may well be within the booking team but they should have made it clear to me/my TL that it was happening. The point is, if I’d known I would also have attended virtually.
She had sent the social worker an email with instructions on how to get the hybrid tech working, but all the screens were blank so I had to go and find te BITSO (at the other end of the building) to reset everything. Even if I’d known how to do that, it involves turning everything off at the wall and they’ve installed the sockets about 7 foot high (presumably to prevent any children in meetings from messing with them).
The BITSO then advised that someone would need to plug into the tablet that we use to control the meeting link, and that someone ended up being me as both of the social workers looked blank. That seat is usually where the Chairs sit to manage the meeting. While I was moving all my stuff, one of the reception staff came into the room and advised that she remembered the family from when she worked at the access centre, and told us that the mother was particularly volatile / unpredictable so would we like a panic alarm. At that point, I voiced that I felt the situation had placed me at risk.
The meeting was huge (the room was full) and as a result the Chair (obviously) struggled to manage it because the sound quality is not that great and because there were so many people. The mother was sat two seats away from me for the duration, but luckily there were some other family members and some very good professionals in attendance, who were able to keep her calm. It went on longer than it should have done because of the difficulty in managing it, and I somehow managed to stay focused despite a background of anxiety.
At one point, another Chair poked her head in the door asking me to turn the volume down, when she would have clocked the unusual set up. I only managed to turn it down a little bit because I was conscious that otherwise the Chair could not hear the discussions.
I had a post-conference chat with the Chair afterwards, though it mostly comprised her having messed up the worklists – this was frustrating enough because she was literally sat next to the trainer when he was going through the new plan and should have been aware of what was involved. Once that was done, I intended to head home, type the plan up and then inform my TL about the situation.
What happened instead was that two other Chair colleagues were sat in the kitchen. They were trying to have their lunch as my meeting was kicking out – due to the lack of proper management, everyone was milling about in the meeting room and taking their time in leaving, and that room basically exits into the kitchen, so they would have seen the set-up from their position. As I came out they both looked concerned and asked what was going on, and because they were nice to me I fell apart and started crying as all the stress and anxiety came crashing down on me.
They were both really supportive – one of them gave me a hug (TBH that just made things worse) and the other offered to drive me home, with both of them telling me firmly not to do any more work and they would tell my TL what had happened.
My TL called me a couple of hours later and I broke down into hysterics. I can’t really remember now what I said, but I laid out that I wanted to move because I couldn’t do the job any more not least because it’s obvious they don’t want us, and the incident that morning had finally broken me. She had to rush into another meeting so the conversation was cut short, not that I was really coherent to start with.
I went to have a nap and woke up at 5.30 to a missed call and a text saying I could move the following week. I was going to see the week out off sick, but she encouraged me not to due to the impact on my sickness (which is just more stress), so instead I worked Thursday morning and took the rest as leave.
Evidently, it was that easy to move me this entire time, but by that point I was too exhausted to be angry about it. The matter has been escalated and some processes have been put in place now to prevent it happening again, but the point is that it should never have happened in the first place and it could have been avoided with clear communication. We should never be in a position where a minute-taker is sat in a conference without a Chair being present, especially for a potentially high risk case. We are not conflict trained and my physical location within the room made me an easy target. It could have been one of our new starters in that position, not that it makes it any better that it was me. I told South colleagues about it on Thursday and they were all in agreement that the situation was unacceptable and they would have reacted in a similar way.
I have now put the TL in a very difficult situation with minuting cover as she is waiting for more new staff to come on board, and for the next three weeks I’ll continue to support the CP team with post-conference tasks and doing the minuting rota whilst the TL is on leave, which TBH I half expected. Alongside that I will be getting to know my new team and their various processes, but I’m hopeful that I can finally get a proper hybrid working arrangement in place rather than ad hoc building attendance for meetings, which has been the case most of the year and is frankly knackering.
Essentially, my entire life has been on hold for 11 months whilst this nonsense has gone on. I’ve fluctuated so much over the new role – I was eager to move back in January, but there was a period where I was seriously considering asking to stay. I have deliberately not mentioned the move because I was under the impression the team leaders were trying to sort it out in the background, but it seems that wasn’t the case after all. Whilst I’ve been waiting I’ve been trying to get things in place that I would have sorted out if I was staying in the team, none of which have happened because of the instability in staffing – so anything I’ve tried to achieve just hasn’t gotten anywhere. It’s just been absolute chaos now for months, and at some point I gave up on giving a shit any more.
It’s impacted on my work/life balance also, as due to a combination of being on holiday and being too ill / exhausted to attend, I had to send apologies for my November concert. I decided to go back last week for Messiah because I thought the serotonin might be helpful, which was at least partially accurate, but the rush lasted precisely as long as it took for me to go back to work and then… well.
On the plus side, I now feel 100% saner than I have done for the past month. I knew things were getting to me but I didn’t realise quite how much until this incident sent me off a cliff. I wanted to leave on a more positive note, and I’m sure the rumour mill is turning at this point (which is why I wanted to tell my colleagues on Thursday) but maybe it will make people think a bit harder about remembering we exist. The booking team are always kept in the loop but for some reason the minute-takers are invisible.
I think that’s about everything. I probably should have updated about these things along the way, but most of it ended up in Twitter/X rants despite my best intentions. I will hopefully have more spoons again now so I can start looking at an alternative.
Anyway, I will obviously post the year in review meme next month, which will now be much shorter as I don’t have to rehash all of this stupidity!
I’ll try and break this down into months as otherwise it’s a huge info dump…
January – February
I can't remember now if I mentioned this here, but I was supposed to move teams back in January this year. I had a slightly panicked/last minute call off my team leader between Christmas/New Year to say I would be the first one to move, because the person I was replacing was on secondment and his contract had come to an end and would not be extended. I was more than happy with that decision - new year, new start, all that jazz - but it then didn't happen because the team manager (my TL’s manager) was off sick / in hospital, so obviously I expected a bit of drift.
In February we had our first intake of new starters and I got roped into training one of them. I questioned why I had to be involved considering I was supposed to be moving, and the response at that point was that I wouldn't be going any time soon. We had an induction meeting at our South venue for the three new starters, where I also met my new team leader for the first time having previously only spoken to her on Teams. At that point she suggested she wanted to move me in April, so clearly there was no escaping the new starter training but I was hopeful it would only be a short-term thing.
Out of those initial three, we only have one still in the team - one of them lasted two months before we broke her, the other lasted about six before moving on (because she'd applied for a Council job at the same time, was successful in both, and it was just a case of timing - she went back to the interviewer and he agreed to take her on - fair play!). As time has gone on, trying to fill the vacancies has been like a revolving door, as the agency staff just haven't lasted and it's been a struggle to get permanent staff in post. As I predicted, the restructure is not working for the service at all.
Half of the problem there is that either the TL or the agencies are not being honest with people about what the job entails. They are being told it's "mostly" minute-taking (sorry, I mean "note-taking" *eyeroll*), and then they get here and realise the minuting is about 20% of the job and the rest is a lot of very complicated, fiddly admin tasks that are made all the more difficult because none of the systems work properly.
Also, it's just insanely, relentlessy busy, worse than it's ever been, so new starters are having to hit the ground running. Usually it takes around six weeks to fully train a new minute taker - they are having to start doing meetings at week two, after a week of shadowing, and learn the rest as they go along. Unsurprisingly, we have lost track of work and there have been mistakes as a result.
At one point the team leader started sharing out the training because she'd run out of competent staff to allocate new starters to (and whilst we were training we were not able to cover meetings, which for full time staff equates to five a week), which then resulted in the training not being done properly. In July I had to spend a week with one of them just going through all the post-meeting tasks - we spent a whole day going over it all in fine detail, and by the end of the week she'd got it, so that was positive - but it highlighted very quickly the fact that certain members of the team just hadn’t been doing things properly.
That in itself is really frustrating because it's not like I haven't pointed these things out before now, it's just that the TL was happy to let things drift and not deal with them directly, except to send blanket emails to everyone (which the culprits don’t think apply to them). Then some of the people who were training staff were moving roles imminently, so it never did get dealt with, but the worst offender has at least moved to a team where her incompetence can't cause any damage.
Anyway, things carried on in much the same manner for a while and there was no suggestion of any movement.
March – August
In March I was supposed to attend some mandatory Customer Services training, which was already annoying enough considering the restructure was supposed to "build on our excellent skills" or some bollocks, skills which are clearly not that excellent if they think we all need customer services training. I ended up missing it because I had a stomach bug (literally thought I had food poisoning at one point but luckily it had passed within three days or so). Trying to call in sick was a nightmare in itself, as my TL was on leave and my new TL was covering – she didn’t answer her phone so I left her a voicemail asking her to text when she received it (which is what I usually do if my TL doesn’t answer first time), and when she hadn’t responded by 9.00am I had to log in to contact the PO for my conference to tell her – I offered to do post-conference support tasks for her instead and she was fine with it – and send the TL an email, none of which I should have to do when already feeling ropey.
I also tried to cancel my place on the course, which was a recipe for failure, because the website is a clusterfuck and the admin team responsible for the mailbox are useless. The website had me as a "no show" even though I'd emailed the organisers to let them know, because there was no way to retrospectively change it. The team then sent me an arsey email about a month later asking why I hadn't attended. I sent them a snarky response with the original email chain and my TL also luckily backed me up.
I had my return to work interview with my new TL (because my current team leader was still on leave) and at that point she suggested I might be moving in July. I still naively assumed that something was in the pipeline, more fool me.
Things pootled along in much the same manner for a while, I had a fortnight off in July and on my first day back had another half-day of mandatory training, namely “Connections Count”, our new trauma-informed Trust working model. This was supposed to be a full day of training, but someone decided Business Support staff only needed to attend for half a day, so the trainer couldn’t actually finish the course properly. Most of it is geared towards practice / frontline staff; what came out for Business Support staff was that none of the principles being discussed had ever been used when working with us.
It turned into a bit of an offload session where we all shared horror stories that are typical to beleaguered admin staff the world over: never listening to our concerns, making decisions without us being involved, ignoring us when we raise issues and then blaming us when things go wrong (even when we try to mitigate against it). The course was being run by our in-house clinical psychologist and the (then) Principal Social Worker, and they promised to take our feedback higher. At one point the PSW commented, “I just wrote down what you didn’t all say”, when they asked if we could apply the model to our own working life and the room was silent.
On my feedback after the training I reiterated for them to please take the feedback higher, because the restructure has been nothing short of traumatising. We had a retirement lunch for a colleague shortly after the training, where someone commented that they didn’t realise they’d been traumatised until the training laid out the signs/symptoms. I already knew we’d been traumatised, and all the training achieved was retraumatising us. At one point, a colleague and I were both ranting about an incident that occurred in 2014, which neither of us had even thought about in years – for five minutes we were both back in that zone again. It was nothing we haven’t come to expect – last minute demands and unclear communication making an already stressful situation worse – but at the time it triggered chronic health issues in several staff, a fact which was never acknowledged. (I’m including myself in that, because it was the initial cause of my recurrent UTI’s and, well, the rest is history.)
The more I think about this lately, the more I think that sending Business Support staff on the training was actually quite dangerous, but of course senior management wouldn’t have thought of that because they probably don’t realise how their actions have affected us. This is not a recent thing, it’s been ongoing for years – admin are the bottom of the food chain and always the last to know anything, and even if the Head of Service realised his restructure was traumatic, I don’t think he would particularly care.
I had a catch up with my TL at some point and July was also suggested as a potential start date – obviously that one didn’t happen either.
In August I was training another new starter, which was a struggle. The TL allocated her to me because she wasn’t sure about her, and wanted a second pair of eyes – the training was hard going because she was very quiet and it took me at least a week to get a conversation out of her. Things were also delayed because we had a nightmare week of chaotic meetings / cancellations; for anything that was cancelled on the day, I made sure we remained in the conference room so she could sit and absorb the ambient discussions, but whether that was helpful I don’t know.
September; a brief respite!
I went away to Bulgaria in September – on my own, as Paul had a Blood Bowl tournament in Alicante. It was my first time flying solo and I went from Birmingham, which was a bit more expensive but considerably less stressful / time consuming than going from Luton, who are an omnishambles. We also had a day trip to Turkey where we were almost arrested at Border Control for smuggling cigarettes, but luckily they realised it was a genuine mistake and let us off without a fine. (Apparently the 200 cigarette limit is only when you’re flying, not when you’re driving.)
We went to a town called Edirne to do some shopping – there’s a huge mosque there which is really impressive, and the little bazaars are really interesting. I bought a painting for the bathroom and we had kebabs at a streetfood place which were amazing (I may never have a chipshop kebab ever again, they absolutely do not compare). We also went to find the local mall to have a look around but it was mostly expensive clothing shops and incredibly boring, so we left again.
From mid-September onwards things have gotten progressively more irritating. I haven’t had any more new starters to train (luckily) but it’s been so busy that we physically can’t cover all the meetings. Instead, we have been mostly doing post-conference support, which means the Chairs do their own minutes and we do all the associated admin – which is mostly impossible because the Chairs never communicate. At one point, my week comprised two actual meetings and six post-conference meetings, to the point where I completely lost track of everything.
It didn’t help that my steroid jab wore off in mid-October, so I’ve had intermittent brainfog and have been pretty much exhausted all the time, plus the added bonus of my anxiety acting up whenever anything pisses me off (and my default anxiety reaction is usually rage).
October onwards
We have a new Head of Service for CP and experience so far seems to suggest that he wants the service to fail. I have been assisting with an Eclipse project to update all the worklists and forms for the service, which has been fine except that the business analyst apparently didn’t listen to some of what I said and ignored me when I sent her a question that apparently was too complicated to find an answer for (see above re: they ignore us when we raise things). Whilst all of this has been going on he has been trying to update the minutes template.
Myself and a colleague (one of the two remaining in CP) had a meeting with the HOS early in the year where he asked our opinion on what we would want the minutes to look like. After that, I sent him the slides I’d put together after my report writing course, which I’d done with a view to eventually sharing them with the team except (as with everything) it drifted to the point of never happening. The only reason I sent them is because I felt they were supporting exactly what he was telling us in that meeting about how to record the information. I didn’t get any response.
Since then, he has apparently been doing a “pilot” in the background with some of the PO’s and some of the new starters, most of whom have now moved on as they were agency, and a new template was introduced in October. I actually had sight it a bit earlier than that (August I think) because I heard two of the PO’s talking about a new template and asked the question – one of them emailed it to me, even though she probably shouldn’t have done, and listened to me ranting about it with great interest.
Reader, you may recall that when I did my last big rant about the restructure, I surmised that the previous pilot in May 2021 was done with the purpose of simplifying the minutes for incoming, lower skilled staff. That predication may well have borne fruit but apparently the new HOS wants to make them even simpler.
The new template is a clusterfuck. It has basically no information on it because we are only supposed to record “information not already in reports”, which is frankly as clear as mud, and the only guidance we’ve received is to ask each Chair what they want – which is not sustainable and also not helpful, as the Chairs have no idea what’s supposed to go in there either. The rest of the template is the child and parents’ views, and the Chair’s summary, which is supposed to reflect the information they’re recording on the Strengthening Families board under the heads (risks/strengths etc) – the model we have used since 2016.
In the meantime we have also opened our shiny new building where the PO’s are being encouraged to use a digital pen to write on the board (as opposed to typing the information), so we are seriously at risk of losing a lot of very important information. We actually received a “Good” rating from Ofsted this year – enjoy that while it lasts, I guess.
To me, the new templates feel unsafe – it feels like a serious case review waiting to happen. For all of us “old timers”, they are incredibly unintuitive to use, because we’re used to listening to all that information and analysing / making sense of it, but that’s not what they want under the new arrangements. For me, the final nail in the coffin has been a subtle but nonetheless telling change to how we are referred to – we are not minute-takers, we are note-takers. I’ve always argued that what we produce has never been “minutes” in the first place. Now they really do just want notes.
According to one of the Chairs who was also part of the so-called “pilot”, they also only attended one meeting to discuss the new templates – it seems the HOS was going to push ahead with it regardless and only involved staff as lip service. To me it almost feels as though he’s pandering to the head of Business Support, who has a ridiculous expectation of staff doing six meetings a week, rather than pushing back against this insane decision which is quite evidently failing the service.
They went live in mid-October. About a week before that I’d had my appraisal meeting with my current and new TL to set goals for the new role, when they said I would hear about my start date a week later (you can probably guess what happened). The new templates went live about a week after that and at that point I requested to be moved, because I didn’t want to use them, and I was told it wouldn’t be possible.
So since mid-October I have been feeling increasingly despondent, because the new templates, coupled with the fact we are mostly only doing post-conference tasks (i.e. monkey work), and a couple of Chairs who have decided to manage their own diaries rather than allowing us to do it, makes me feel that we are basically surplus to requirement. If not for the fact that initial conferences have to be minuted by law, I fully suspect we would be going the same way as the IRO service, where the Chairs do their own meetings and manage their own diaries… which was an abject failure when it was first introduced.
The frustrating thing is that the Chairs quite clearly do appreciate us, but there’s nothing they can do about the situation. I knew the restructure would fail the service and oh, look, it has. My mantra lately has been “Either this is a Grade 2 role, or it’s not – and if it’s not, what the fuck are we doing?” Some of the Chairs have been rather more bluntly putting it as “you get what you pay for”. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Alongside this, I also got nominated to be a “building champion” by my TL, because they decided the Gr3’s should be doing that in our service area. I was told that this would just be around supporting new starters i.e. where to get their badges done, where everyone sits etc. What it turned out to be instead was doing inductions/tours for groups of staff. I had to attend a training session with the HOS for Business Support (where I had to pretend to be nice for an hour), and then spend two days at the building doing tours – by the end of it I was physically and mentally exhausted. If I’d realised that was what the role involved I would have declined – my other colleague dropped out for personal reasons and I wish I’d done the same.
My colleague (F) who is staying in CP often emails me and we send each other rants/essays back and forth for the day. She is having second thoughts about staying even though she wanted to, because nobody is really clear on what the role will involve and things just seem to be getting worse. The TL keeps telling her things will get better, which is patently insane – the current situation is the direct result of 13 years of Tory rule, where public services have been decimated and nobody has any money – short of a sudden and immediate change of government, things are not going to get better – and even then it will take years, if not decades, to repair the damage.
Oh, and I also had to attend MORE mandatory training in October (on my birthday) for “Supervision Skills”, even though none of us are quite sure if we will actually be supervising staff or just monitoring work. This was also a ridiculous situation because they didn’t put on enough training sessions to ensure all staff could attend, despite it being mandatory.
The Incident
So, bearing all of this in mind, this is the context in which the incident on Wednesday occurred. This month has been extremely stressful, with the culmination of all this nonsense as well as having to deal with Paul almost getting dismissed due to ill health absence (he wasn’t, thank god). Last week my stress levels were higher than they’ve been for a while and I spent the best part of two hours after my conference just offloading at my Chair – she only started this year and apparently even she could tell that I was considerably more stressed than a few months ago. TBH I have been offloading at every Chair I have meetings with, because sometimes if you shout loud enough at the right people, something will change.
Anyway, on Wednesday I had a conference at our south venue, so I went there in the morning like a good little admin lackey. At 9.30am, half an hour before we were due to start, the allocated social worker arrived and informed me that the Chair would be attending virtually.
I should probably clarify, this Chair is dealing with some family things so has a hybrid arrangement in place, and she is only supposed to be doing initial conferences on the days she’s not working from home, as it’s been agreed they shouldn’t be held virtually. She has attended virtually before but I knew in advance because I’d informed her about having a new starter observing. Apparently she assumed it was “common knowledge”, and it may well be within the booking team but they should have made it clear to me/my TL that it was happening. The point is, if I’d known I would also have attended virtually.
She had sent the social worker an email with instructions on how to get the hybrid tech working, but all the screens were blank so I had to go and find te BITSO (at the other end of the building) to reset everything. Even if I’d known how to do that, it involves turning everything off at the wall and they’ve installed the sockets about 7 foot high (presumably to prevent any children in meetings from messing with them).
The BITSO then advised that someone would need to plug into the tablet that we use to control the meeting link, and that someone ended up being me as both of the social workers looked blank. That seat is usually where the Chairs sit to manage the meeting. While I was moving all my stuff, one of the reception staff came into the room and advised that she remembered the family from when she worked at the access centre, and told us that the mother was particularly volatile / unpredictable so would we like a panic alarm. At that point, I voiced that I felt the situation had placed me at risk.
The meeting was huge (the room was full) and as a result the Chair (obviously) struggled to manage it because the sound quality is not that great and because there were so many people. The mother was sat two seats away from me for the duration, but luckily there were some other family members and some very good professionals in attendance, who were able to keep her calm. It went on longer than it should have done because of the difficulty in managing it, and I somehow managed to stay focused despite a background of anxiety.
At one point, another Chair poked her head in the door asking me to turn the volume down, when she would have clocked the unusual set up. I only managed to turn it down a little bit because I was conscious that otherwise the Chair could not hear the discussions.
I had a post-conference chat with the Chair afterwards, though it mostly comprised her having messed up the worklists – this was frustrating enough because she was literally sat next to the trainer when he was going through the new plan and should have been aware of what was involved. Once that was done, I intended to head home, type the plan up and then inform my TL about the situation.
What happened instead was that two other Chair colleagues were sat in the kitchen. They were trying to have their lunch as my meeting was kicking out – due to the lack of proper management, everyone was milling about in the meeting room and taking their time in leaving, and that room basically exits into the kitchen, so they would have seen the set-up from their position. As I came out they both looked concerned and asked what was going on, and because they were nice to me I fell apart and started crying as all the stress and anxiety came crashing down on me.
They were both really supportive – one of them gave me a hug (TBH that just made things worse) and the other offered to drive me home, with both of them telling me firmly not to do any more work and they would tell my TL what had happened.
My TL called me a couple of hours later and I broke down into hysterics. I can’t really remember now what I said, but I laid out that I wanted to move because I couldn’t do the job any more not least because it’s obvious they don’t want us, and the incident that morning had finally broken me. She had to rush into another meeting so the conversation was cut short, not that I was really coherent to start with.
I went to have a nap and woke up at 5.30 to a missed call and a text saying I could move the following week. I was going to see the week out off sick, but she encouraged me not to due to the impact on my sickness (which is just more stress), so instead I worked Thursday morning and took the rest as leave.
Evidently, it was that easy to move me this entire time, but by that point I was too exhausted to be angry about it. The matter has been escalated and some processes have been put in place now to prevent it happening again, but the point is that it should never have happened in the first place and it could have been avoided with clear communication. We should never be in a position where a minute-taker is sat in a conference without a Chair being present, especially for a potentially high risk case. We are not conflict trained and my physical location within the room made me an easy target. It could have been one of our new starters in that position, not that it makes it any better that it was me. I told South colleagues about it on Thursday and they were all in agreement that the situation was unacceptable and they would have reacted in a similar way.
I have now put the TL in a very difficult situation with minuting cover as she is waiting for more new staff to come on board, and for the next three weeks I’ll continue to support the CP team with post-conference tasks and doing the minuting rota whilst the TL is on leave, which TBH I half expected. Alongside that I will be getting to know my new team and their various processes, but I’m hopeful that I can finally get a proper hybrid working arrangement in place rather than ad hoc building attendance for meetings, which has been the case most of the year and is frankly knackering.
Essentially, my entire life has been on hold for 11 months whilst this nonsense has gone on. I’ve fluctuated so much over the new role – I was eager to move back in January, but there was a period where I was seriously considering asking to stay. I have deliberately not mentioned the move because I was under the impression the team leaders were trying to sort it out in the background, but it seems that wasn’t the case after all. Whilst I’ve been waiting I’ve been trying to get things in place that I would have sorted out if I was staying in the team, none of which have happened because of the instability in staffing – so anything I’ve tried to achieve just hasn’t gotten anywhere. It’s just been absolute chaos now for months, and at some point I gave up on giving a shit any more.
It’s impacted on my work/life balance also, as due to a combination of being on holiday and being too ill / exhausted to attend, I had to send apologies for my November concert. I decided to go back last week for Messiah because I thought the serotonin might be helpful, which was at least partially accurate, but the rush lasted precisely as long as it took for me to go back to work and then… well.
On the plus side, I now feel 100% saner than I have done for the past month. I knew things were getting to me but I didn’t realise quite how much until this incident sent me off a cliff. I wanted to leave on a more positive note, and I’m sure the rumour mill is turning at this point (which is why I wanted to tell my colleagues on Thursday) but maybe it will make people think a bit harder about remembering we exist. The booking team are always kept in the loop but for some reason the minute-takers are invisible.
I think that’s about everything. I probably should have updated about these things along the way, but most of it ended up in Twitter/X rants despite my best intentions. I will hopefully have more spoons again now so I can start looking at an alternative.
Anyway, I will obviously post the year in review meme next month, which will now be much shorter as I don’t have to rehash all of this stupidity!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-11-29 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-11-29 09:29 am (UTC)The thing I forgot to mention is half of the reason we're not able to hold on to staff is that they have literally no concept of what they're going to get exposed to. Most of them are quite young / inexperienced (in work as well as life, and potentially from fairly privileged backgrounds which is also an issue we have with some of our newer social workers), and they are coming in to what they think is a cushty admin role where they get exposed to some of the absolute worst of society on a daily basis. This is not the kind of role you can do short-term, hence why most of my colleagues have been around 20+ years.
And that's just the thing, by disbanding us all to different teams they are losing so much knowledge. I had a case with the same Chair earlier this year which was one of the worst we've seen for a while - I'm not exaggerating to say it was like a Netflix true crime documentary waiting to happen - and we've known this family for over 10 years. I was able to give the PO some vital context from back in 2014, because I remembered the Chair at the time telling me about it (the father complained, and the shit Assistant Head at the time backed him up). When my colleague sent me the new minutes template I was telling her about the previous pilot, which completely predated when she started with us - she was fascinated to hear my perspective on it.
The problem is that the Head of Business Support doesn't see that longevity as being loyalty or dedication, he sees it as a lack of ambition or drive to try new things. Never mind all the knowledge, skills and talent we are losing as a result.
But yes, you are right: I had somehow managed to put my own wellbeing on the back burner out of loyalty to my TL and the service, even though for the past few months I have felt more and more despondent and hated the fact that I still cared so much. We have always cared too much, unfortunately.
Well, the ship is clearly intent to sink, and it's the captain's job to go down with the ship, so I hope the new Head of Service enjoys his failing service! Doubtless in a few months' time he will have conveniently resigned.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-16 05:12 pm (UTC)The problem is that the Head of Business Support doesn't see that longevity as being loyalty or dedication, he sees it as a lack of ambition or drive to try new things. Never mind all the knowledge, skills and talent we are losing as a result.
This reminds me that one of the things that often breaks autistic people in work settings is that they do a job very well, and the reward is an offer of promotion. So they find themselves suddenly at managerial level, no longer doing the thing they were skilled and efficient at, but expected instead to manage people (and former colleagues at that, so there's a distinct shift in the relationship - or there should be one, and that's not explicitly stated), something they may particularly struggle with, and often with no specialist managerial training and often the skimpiest onboarding.
But as you say, there's this weird corporate culture, even in non-corporate settings, where everyone is supposed to want more, and to get higher, so not prioritising those things or actively rejecting them is seen as suspicious or lazy.
Yet I've been receiving healthcare services for decades (and over here, health and social care have been integrated for as long as I can remember, so the two are nearly one thing in my mind) that it's really apparent how valuable longterm staff are: and yes, some of those are nurses who've become specialist nurses or Nurse In Charge of a given ward, but there's also plenty who haven't and are no less effective for it. Having people who've known me since I was seventeen, in the context of a progressive illness and, uh, a family that is often the interpersonal equivalent of one, is gold.
So what these decisions also point to is the service failing to effectively do user experience work. Granted, coercive control perpetrators probably appreciate high staff turnover as it can only aid their manipulations of the system, but I would guess that the majority of service users would very much feel the benefit of longterm staff presence - even if they don't always know that your specific knowledge is the reason that their direct case workers have the insights that they do.
But this feels like a problem in a lot of professional contexts - institutional knowledge can't be accounted for on a balance sheet, so high-level decisions that result in its dissipation aren't seen as the threat they should be.
And again, the whole influence of corporate culture in H&SC also colludes to keep people in the dark about the kind of job they're walking into. Honest job ads would call for a very different kind of person than often ends up (briefly) in these settings.
I've got two autistic friends who work in, respectively, a care home and a supported living institution for autistic people. One is a support worker who at the first place they worked was promised training (in the personal care tasks) which never arrived, so they were actively doing stuff like lifting people they'd not been trained for, and the other is in a purely administrative role, but what they weren't told is that in practice, the residents interact with them all the time. And mostly that's okay and their insight as autistic people is valuable, but it's in no way the "just paperwork" job that was advertised - they've had to be trained in restraint techniques and have witnessed violence at work.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-18 11:12 am (UTC)This is one of the many bugbears I have with the restructure and I think it's particularly pertinent in our team, as until very recently the team has comprised new starters on a lower grade alongside old-time staff a grade higher, and the new staff must be aware of the situation given that people have slowly but surely moved to their new roles throughout the year. If that was me I would be questioning my own worth and that of the job, knowing that higher-paid staff were doing it before me. I suspect in many teams the staff have all been working alongside each other for several years and there will be a definite shift in dynamic if the higher grades are now expected to supervise the lower grades, which is good for neither morale nor relationships!
And yes, you are correct that service users feel the benefit of longevity in staff - there's one particular (geographical) area that has a really high turnover of social work staff and families regularly complain about having to retell their entire life story to another worker over and over again (and it's particularly hard for young people trying to build that trusting relationship). Families just find it really frustrating not knowing who to contact / where to go for support, particularly in our Tory-led dystopia of decimated services. Quite often the social worker is the only person still left supporting.
And again, the whole influence of corporate culture in H&SC also colludes to keep people in the dark about the kind of job they're walking into. Honest job ads would call for a very different kind of person than often ends up (briefly) in these settings.
This is of course the other problem with "generic" job descriptions under business support. They like to think every role is the same (admin is admin is admin) but they really are not. I've been in my new role about three weeks now and when I look at what the Gr2's in my team are doing (monitoring inboxes and booking in meetings), compared to the Gr2's in child protection where they have to sit in long, complex meetings, listening to horrid information that they have to note down and then type up with barely any time to process it... nope, they are really not paid enough for that, and this is why sending off a set of minutes as part of the consultation was essentially pointless. Does the job description say you need emotional resilience made of iron? Of course not, because HR/senior management have no concept of what we do, and apparently Gr2's can "take notes of any meeting".
Your friend being expected to lift people without training is horrific, and quite possibly a health and safety issue for all concerned! It feels to me like once upon a time these jobs were indeed "just paperwork" and there were would have been other staff available doing the actual patient / resident interactions, but decades of cut backs have resulted in every job being everyone's responsibility.
For our part, the issue is more that conferences have gotten more complex, there is no such thing any more as a "single issue" meeting because everything is intertwined, and the issues that we see are a direct reflection on whatever is happening in society. So we get lots of neglect cases linked to poverty / insecure housing, or unmet health needs, or domestic abuse cases because of dickhead men who never get challenged because, well, look at what we've had in power for all these years. I think essentially my political ennui coincided with the fact that I lost all my professional curiosity, and the anger only sustains you for so long before you burn out...