The working world has become ridiculous

[Rothschild]

Recently a manager at my company attended an online meeting in tears because of a minor issue regarding her child's school. She excused herself from the meeting and took a mental health day.

I can barely get hold of anyone at 3pm in my (large) organisation because everyone is doing school pick up. I don't believe they're getting much work done once they've picked up because they become hard to contact, don't respond to messages and won't attend meetings, despite it being their normal working hours.

It's ridiculous. When our children were small we paid for wrap around childcare or for someone to collect. We were available to work between 3 and 4pm and afterwards.

I'm not talking about anyone who has negotiated flexibility or finishes at 3pm, I'm talking about others who are, frankly, taking the piss.

And if I had taken a mental health day every time I'd had some difficulty in my life I'd have hardly worked.

This is what I mean. Managers who are doing this. As long as everybody can do it that's fine. It's when the lower paid are being made to come in whilst the higher grades are at the gym, dog walking or training for something.

Blimey
When I worked for others it was one day off for a funeral and even then it had to be a very close relative

We couldn’t afford to be paying people not to work. How much we price a job is based on the hours needed to complete it.

Unless they have flexible hours in their contract they are taking the p…

I’m with you OP
It’s not right and if your office was smaller would have been stopped

Complain or go home at three to look after your cat who misses you

I've just moved into the public sector having only ever worked in the private sector (where I used to have to bill/account for every minute of my working day) and it's very eye opening.

I'm still in a training phase so I work my hours, plus a bit extra here and there if I'm working on something tricky - my manager keeps telling me I'm working far too hard, that I need to make I'm taking time for me, don't work too hard over Christmas etc....I'm just doing my job, for which I am well remunerated and get told I'm "too keen" and should be ''taking it easy''. 🙄

I don't understand this holier-than-thou attitude about work. Research shows that people only do effective work for an average of 2 to 3 hours a day. The rest is taken up with looking busy or socializing. We pretend to work 8 hours a day, because we are paid by the hour, but even if you worked with flow and got a lot done, your concentration can't last beyond the 5 hour mark anyway and not 5 days in a row either.

Instead of being honest about how the human mind even works and how we can get the most out of our lives, working or otherwise, we preform business and martyrdom. Some people manage to actually work like that for a while, before they burn out and then can't work for months on end, which only costs and employer more than some work during the day.

Unless there is an emergency, I can't get mad about people being less available in the late afternoon. Good for them. Some flexibility is required. We are not robots. Heck, even robots need maintenance and downtime. Literally.

@Rothschild

could you not sell your clothes, car, furniture etc, OP? And then maybe get a loan? Or a second job?

I was always in awe of the mumsnetters who worked full time with three children… I envisaged them leaving the house at 7.30 having been up since 6 am and not getting home till 6.30, then doing dinner and seeing to the children.

Reading this thread, I can see how some of them do it!

It's kind of a joint pile of work ( referrals) that we take from. Some get away with taking nothing.

Often depends on the culture. We had someone escorted off the premises recently and he announced he hadn't done anything for 6 months. Cue his manager gets looked at and there has been no reviews, 1-2-1,etc. So he was gone as well (on about 80k). But usually they just get pulled up and a finger wagged. The head of the dept wasn't having that so this one had to go as he hadn't been doing the job.

Part of the problem is that employer's cannot give a negative review, so nowadays tend to just provide brief, factual reviews confirming job titles and work dates.
If you could provide an honest review without fear of repercussions then employees would be wary about taking the piss with slacking or excessive sick time.
That being said, my employer runs a pretty tight ship. Anyone care to tell me where I can get one of these jobs where I can wfh permanently and do nothing?

Absolutely this, I have a workload and it’s my responsibility to make sure it gets done in the time available. My workload is matched to my working hours so if I was sitting scrolling SM the work wouldn’t get done and someone would notice pretty quickly when I started missing deadlines or not turning up to meetings. I have a lot of flexibility in my working day but can’t just not do stuff.

Possibly because employers don't grant MH days for 3rd parties.

This is very true of my work as well. If I go to book meetings people have blocked off time in their diary quite blatantly for school run until 930, then nursery pick up at 1 ish then school run at 3 ish, sometimes clubs. Makes it hard to get things done! Like an earlier poster said this isn't an agreed thing it's just flexibility within the day. I had a colleague that worked from something insane like 630 until 230 just because he wanted to so between that and the school run diaries things felt impossible.

I completely agree OP. I retired earlier this year, however before I did I took the view that if you'd have needed child care if you were in the office, then you should use it at home too. I softened a bit on this and thought for secondary school children it was fair to assume that they'd look after themselves while the parent worked in the late afternoon, but no one can work properly and look after younger children at the same time.

I might as well have been talking to myself for all the difference it made. Not helped by a conflict avoidant CEO who was more concerned with people bringing their 'authentic selves' to work 🙄

Such a reaction suggests that the person's mental health was very poor. I think you need to do some training on this.

Are you 100% sure it wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back? I cried about something really ridiculous (and felt like a complete twat) the other day but I'd had a horrendous week.

I work pretty effectively over an 8 hour day. Yes I have work that needs my full mental focus, I also have meetings where I need to actively contribute and some where I need to be there but they don’t take the same mental energy. A shift in activity and focus gives that bit of relief.

I’d worry about someone only being capable of 3 hours productive work in a day, keeping in mind productivity looks different depending on the task.

UK workers are among the least productive, that's the root of your "effective work" stat.

Many UK employees, particularly in the management grades, would find themselves rapidly fired if they brought their UK attitude to work in France or Germany.

As I said in my original post I work for a charity. People donate money for me to be paid to do my job. therefore I have a conscience .

We do, but it’s difficult to enforce.

our policy is that more than 10 days sick per year would trigger an intervention with a manager but even that results in a lot of work for the manager and even then, they could do it again without any major repercussions.

Those that take sick days for spurious reasons regularly get away with it because you can’t challenge anybody for mental health (for example). A family dog dying I would actually have a huge amount of sympathy for because it’s devastating. But, not when it’s your mums, cousins, friends, next door neighbours dog.

Agree

Perhaps we should all be suing hospitals and schools as their staff hours put people at risk

Typically they just lay people off to protect profits.

I don't slack at work because I don't work in one of those jobs so it wouldn't be my managers who suffer.

In my line of work it's not uncommon. The work I do requires a lot of focus and tires your out pretty quickly.

My issue is with people that need the extra support and flexibility to do their jobs but that ends up making my job worse. Two people are assigned a task to do in a given time frame, but one is on flexi so has a day off or is doing the school runs. Yes, it should be down to the manager to manage to ensure this doesn’t impact the other person but often they don’t want to rock the boat and just expect the task to be done.

We have a case whereby a recent addition to the team has been on a probation period, as are all new starters, and has struggled with basic time keeping and turning up to meetings on time as well as not following instructions which has made other people’s workload significantly heavier having to pick up the slack. Yet they’ve now become permanent. Again, this is down to a manager who doesn’t want to manage and expects the rest of the team to pick up the slack instead.

Most issues are due to poor management by lazy managers who don’t want to deal with stuff.

It's not just the UK. I wasn't referring to stats of any particular country.

Are you for real? I agree with this poster. This is why people get annoyed with people at work and isn’t a MH issue it’s taking the piss. Not every issue in life is an automatic MH issue, or catastrophe, or need to take time off, or emergency, or the end of the world: