I’ve really messed up at work

You are not being unreasonable but maybe the big manager now thinks that you don’t grasp the full extent of the role or maybe she’s angry at your predecessor for fooling her?

You need to come to my department as definitely not underworked.

We need more people like you x

If you’ve been moved to this ‘little role’ it could be because your manager is hoping you’ll get made redundant.

As this is a new responsibility, is it possible you just haven’t picked it all up yet? I get this with new starters. They want to make their mark so like to think they know it all from the beginning when the truth is they’ve only just gotten started and the work will increase as their knowledge increases/ more people come to them/ they realise the work is more complex than they originally think.

However, notwithstanding the above, I think your “big manager” is unhappy because she feels she might have egg on her face.

Realising they’d potentially let the last person get away with doing half a job can’t be comfortable.

Good managers would take it in their stride though.

I think it’s because people get criticised so easily, it puts them on the defensive. Public sector is very high stress because it’s public money and public services, so there’s a lot of scrutiny. This makes people get stressed and before they know it, certain people end up “fuming” as a defence mechanism.

Were you asking to have control of another department? Were you asking to gain experience for your personal development? Were you seeking a promotion by taking on additional departments? It sounds like possibly your manager needed to ask you these questions first before going upwards.

It is also possible that a restructure is coming up and the big boss is worried about fairness of giving everyone equal chance to go for roles.

Surely OP is saying that work she’s expected to do for the area she’s in charge of is not enough to keep her occupied, but other teams in the area need support which she can give.

The worst times I've ever had at work was when I had nothing to do. One time I was employed as an office temp to cover someone who was on holiday. At no point did anyone give me any instructions as to what to do, despite me asking. I was so bored I decided to do their huge pile of filing and had to go very slowly, with lots of loo breaks, to make the task last for 2 weeks (this was a private company). Utterly soul destroying.

And years ago I did a summer job at a large pharmaceutical company and the amount of clock-watching/abuse of the flexitime system was so depressing.

Well your big boss obviously construes it like that, otherwise they wouldn't be fuming would they. The title of your post is actually "I've really messed up at work". So you clearly have some fundamental grasp of what you've potentially unleashed. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just pointing out the bleeding obvious.

I’m confused. You’ve said there’s no work to do, but now there’s an excess of work 🧐

This is endemic in the public sector. I worked in a LA for 8 months and was utterly perplexed at everyone being ‘busy’ but there was nowhere near enough work. There was one period where, I kid you not, I did pretty much nothing for two weeks. That was the impetus to get a new job.

Manager after manager were not held to account for inefficient teams and projects not moving.

The number of people castigating @ohbuggera is really frustrating. Where is the desire for fulfilment? To make a difference?

I don’t think anyone should be worked into the ground but what OP describes I saw everywhere and it hurt my leftie brain as I so wanted to love the public sector but was disappointed at every turn.

I suspect front-end services are swamped and back-office is bloated and the comments on this thread show how many people really don’t want to work to close to capacity.

When I joined the Civil Service 40 something years ago, I took over a job that had been done by 1.5 people. I then took over the admin of another section which was merged with mine and the full time role of their admin. After a while I went to the boss of the new section and asked if there was any more I could do for that team, as I was still a little underutilised despite having taken on some basic PA type duties for the big boss as well as the team admin.

However in another roles after promotion (same department, very different area of work) both me and my boss had worked so much necessary overtime that when they asked if we wanted to take it as flexi rather than paid overtime, we both worked out we had around 2.5 months worth of flexi in hand built up over the preceding 6 months (loads of evening & weekend working away from home).

Where I am now in local government we were one person down out of 5 for around 9 months and 2 of us ended up signed off with stress & exhaustion, but the council wouldn't break their money saving recruitment freeze even in those circumstances.

It can vary so greatly between local and central government, and from department to department between them. But in local government they are much tighter now about staffing as they are all broke.

I completely agree. No wonder productivity in the UK is so far behind most other western countries

Output Levels: According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), UK output per hour worked is roughly 15% to 20% lower than the G7 average and significantly below the United States, France, and Germany

I’ve not worked in the public sector but a family member was a consultant for few different departments and the gist is that efficiency and productivity are frowned upon. They try keep as many people in employment as possible and protect headcount budget.
i remember my family member telling a story where he suggested an automation of a big process that in essence would replace 4 people and be done in hours instead of weeks and was told by the department manager that’s a no go as people would lose jobs and would cost too much to make them redundant.

Only deeply insecure managers with dysfunctional personalities think like this.

This is appalling. All the comments saying this is commonplace and everyone accepts it. No wonder our country is as fkd up as it is. Where have peoples morals gone?

Sorry but this is a boss with a fragile ego.

Pointing out you don't have enough to do and would like to do more is a positive attribute in a member of staff, and only really shit managers would think otherwise.

We recently had a senior manager leave and at her leaving speech she was praised by Directors for speaking up when she did not have enough to do rather than keeping quiet and cruising to retirement.