Walked into a shit show

[Melony17]

I’ve started a new job recently. Honestly, I’ve come in as the manager and staffing is diabolical. People are just going off left right and centre and not just for a day. For prolonged periods. I’m honestly losing the will with these people.

I don’t want to divulge what I do. But it’s a proper profession whereby attendance shouldn’t be this poor. It just feels like I’m managing a mess. I have nothing but hassle from the moment I walk in to the moment I leave. I left my old work place for this reason. And now I’ve picked up the same shit in a diff place.

Here’s a great opportunity to make some real change. Start with an anonymous survey looking closely at areas for development, strengths, ideas for the future, moral, stress levels, work life balance, how to improve moral. Are there any easy quick wins? The poor attendance is a result of something. The SMT around you may not have the capacity to reflect and make changes.

I've worked in NHS (non-clinical) with an identical situation. It was very, very hard not being exasperated and showing it every day.

I had people off long-term sick (e.g. two years following a parental death) and attending for the requisite time to ensure full sick pay. All on around 50k salaries.

Meanwhile the remaining staff were run ragged.

I ended up managing OUT one employee (but it was horrific and we had to get the police involved - that's how hard it is to get rid of shit NHS staff) and capability managing another (who was actually good but took the piss because that was the culture of the team).

Any kind of capability management in the NHS is likely to end up with a grievance against you and potentially a tribunal. The unions are basically in charge. But it CAN be done, if you have enough HR support. It depends on how much you love the work itself and whether you are up for a (long) fight.

Good luck.

@Melony17 I read your post and thought sh*t I don't remember starting a thread 😅 but honestly, that is my life. To make it worse, I feel like I'm constantly under a some kind of test to see how I handle the next challenge. It's so draining, and I'm beginning to think it's not worth it. I have given myself 18 months, and if there is no improvement or support, I'll leave. Speaking to others it seems this is the new normal.
Are you able to set a time limit and then move on? Hopefully things will improve for us.

Foot right in mouth... It just didn't occur to me that it could be anyone else.

The NQT was a blonde, the woman in the café was a blonde, the wife was a blonde...All different shapes and sizes, however.

When I finally saw the actual wife, she was significantly shorter than the other two.

When I started my job, one of the staff members was a NQT (not the affair partner) who had not had professionalism modelled and wasn't used to having a line manager. I had to make it clear that there's no such thing as a 'duvet day' in teaching.

Part of the problem was that the kids were used to having the run of the department - literally. They were running right through the corridor and so on and the boys had an extremely misogynistic attitude.

I bought myself boots with 3 inch heels to wear with my trouser suits so that the tallest boys couldn't tower over me and made a point of supervising the corridor at class changeover and breaks.

I also had a problem with dirty tricks from predecessor. My classroom keys had 'gone missing' before I started and I'd find myself mysteriously locked out. I saw my HT and had the locks changed.

I thought that he'd think me insane when I told him...but he didn't. Turned out that the SLT had goofed when they'd accepted the former HoD's resignation. According to policy, he should have been offered counselling for his stress, so he was then treated with kid gloves and was taking every possible liberty.

Go back to basics - check their job descriptions, objectives, KPIs bla bla bla.

Any pips in place?

If they have different line managers, meet with them as an action learning set

Is management & leadership training needed for them?

What does the staff handbook say about this?

What are the actual rules?

If you have a training team, what learning & development could you put in place with them?

Posted in error

Oh come on!

And your employer will have been well aware of that and of course your absence was more than justified. I’m clearly talking about those who have far less serious issues and who choose to continually go off without real justification and those who therefore raise the suspicions of their leadership teams. Some, not all, are committing fraud. I dread to think what the true cost is to the tax payer.

Well people wanted to live with COVID and this is what it looks like.

Genuine question, I’m not sure what you mean by that?

Sounds like you could be the cause of your teams sickness…

They pay tax too..

I’m in a really tough school and we are haemorrhaging staff and students. I decided after a year I just couldn’t cope with the chaos and I’ve got a job in a bigger and more stable school. It’s so difficult to stabilise when you’re in such a vicious cycle.

That would suggest this is a toxic environment with people going off sick because of work-related stress, poor management and so on.

It’s huge in education and not ok.

Is that you, Lee?
I am not one of the absentees, and anyway, we are not that bad.

“But guess what, as soon as the full pay runs out, they reappear.”

I was signed off work following a breakdown, I returned when the full pay ended because I was making myself more ill worrying about the possibility of losing my house due to the drop in income.
Three weeks later, I had another huge breakdown that resulted in me being sectioned for 4 months. I was off work for a further 2 months after being discharged and of course, I ended up losing my house. Happy days!

I have a broken arm. I currently cannot type or use a mouse. I cannot lift items, connect cables, or unfasten screws. I cannot pipette, open sample containers, or load and unload the autoclave. Explain what I'd do at work?

I am sorry that this happened to you. I hope that life improves soon.

I think I will click the "save" icon on your post to give an example of what workplace stress can do to people for the next time we have a sicknote-bashing thread.

It's not a cop out. I know two people with long COVID, both with pre-existing conditions. Neither are lying.

staff were unhappy, started going off sick, then everyone else started doing it because they felt why should they not be able to

It's more likely that the increased workload caused by the first people to go off sick increased the stress on the others and made them sick too. Otherwise known as cascading failure or the domino effect.

must provide a doctors cert on day 3

You work in HR but you don't know that GPs won't write a sicknote until day eight now?

I was ill all the time in my retail job that gave only SSP with no pay for three days. I am off a lot less in my current job that has full sick pay and a decent OH scheme that helped me to manage my migraines better, including a recommendation for prophylactic medication, when the NHS had just shrugged.

Being ill isn't a choice. What happens in jobs with crap sick pay and punitive absence policies is that only people with excellent health can afford to stay in the job, whilst people in worse health go elsewhere, leading to high levels of staff churn. If your workplace is retail, you can get away with constant churn. If your employees are skilled graduates with niche STEM skills, you will find it worth the higher sickness rate to keep the staff.

Guessing that the poster refers to the people who whinged about the lockdowns and argued that we should just get back to work and live with the virus circulating.

@NCIRL, you might want to take a look at this: OECD, 2024.

Some outtakes:

While a precise estimate of long COVID prevalence is still emerging, current research suggests that up to 10-30% of people who contracted COVID-19 exhibit symptoms corresponding to long COVID in the weeks and months following acute infection. Across OECD countries at a minimum, this would represent upwards of 39 million people.

Even conservative estimates of long COVID prevalence would indicate that long COVID may be reducing the workforce by nearly 3 million workers across OECD countries.

Studies from across a range of OECD countries suggest that one sixth to more than one-third of people may have persistent cognitive symptoms, often lasting more than 12 weeks, after a COVID-19 infection.

The economic and social welfare costs of long COVID are dramatic: Even excluding the direct costs of health care, long COVID is likely costing OECD countries as much as $864 billion - $1.04 trillion USD per year due to reductions in quality of life and labour force participation.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/06/the-impacts-of-long-covid-across-oecd-countries_f662b21c/8bd08383-en.pdf

You can't make it go away by pretending it isn't there.
All previous epidemics/pandemics have been followed by similar issues - populations don't bounce back unharmed, as nice as that would be.

The Lancet (Americas) recently reported that those who've had multiple Covid infections are more likely to suffer long-lasting sequelae:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(24)00311-9/fulltext

But what the OP is mentioning doesn't sound like 2.1% of her team being long term sick with a certified illness. I'm not denying Covid is serious, I had family members who died, and I'm not denying that some people have long covid. But again, that doesn't sound like what the OP is describing.

What I was trying to say was: It seems to me the issues in schools and the NHS run far deeper than "it's because of Covid" and using Covid is an easy excuse in this instance because it means no-one is looking deeper to see what the real issues are. That's what I meant by a cop-out. Not the individual people who are genuinely ill.

( 2.1% is the 39million in relation to the population of 1.83 billion. Of course, the proportion is likely to be higher in certain professions, statistical distribution and all that.)