To think that work in the UK didn't always used to be like this & wonder why it changed?

[abualb]

(name changed as I've posted on here for a while and i'm pretty sure you could figure out my employer. Cheeky fuckers, send them a cheque, toasters, and all that.)

I'm mid-thirties and started working in a semi-professional role straight from uni. So did DH, who's 5 years older than me (41). no DC yet.

Over the last year i've become really disheartened with my job, and at first i thought it was my employer - i've realise it's not, i've never had what i could call a "good" employer, and nor has DH. and year on year it (working practices) get worse. it just seems to be that the accepted way of working that we've experienced is fairly toxic/on a slipping slope. maybe it's the sectors but i'll give you some examples.

• expectations around 'always on' availability. I've had a work phone since about 5 years ago, and more than ever there seems to be the expectation that you're available outside of normal working hours (emails flying back and forth in the evenings, requests for info before a 8am meeting on monday sent at 7pm on a friday, whatever). text messages, calls once or twice most weekends. neither of us are in critical, non-office hours jobs like hands-on healthcare or shift work or anything - it's normal, non-urgent work part of normal work activity. no such thing as 9-5 any more like in our contracts, it's 8am 'oh so you're coming in late tomorrow' to 5pm 'leaving early today' attitudes.

• expectations around having no personal life. example: i'm never really ill, and the one time i recently tried to get to a GP was in the last appointment they had, at 6.15pm. meaning i had to leave work at 5pm. the pressure i was under because i was not available to be in a meeting was immense. it was just a recurring internal status meeting.

• no one taking actual lunch breaks. we have meetings with people eating sandwichs in them, if they managed to get away to get something to eat at all.

• recurring team meetings starting at 7.15am & 8am each day of the week, not time-urgent critical ones, again, just normal ones, meaning mornings are even more hugely stressful than they need to be. a constant drive to go in earlier to "get ahead"... but that re-sets expectations about when we start, so team meetings move 15 mins earlier.. a horrid cycle!

• massive communications overload. we have people sitting in meetings doing work, half listening, half working, because by the time you get out, you'd arrive back to 40 emails to wade through if you tried to actually switch 'off' for an hour. constant phone calls interrupting people at work.

I'm convinced work didn't used to be like this, and i've seen similar patterns across 3 different employers in the last 8 years. DH is recently experiencing similar, over the last 2 years pressure on him to get more done, work longer hours, has increased unsustainably.

i don't know what to do about it - my colleagues seem to deal with it by doing half-arsed jobs of their work to cope, OR enjoy it (feed on the chaotic buzz), OR collapse and go off sick, OR resign to take up different careers. i don't want to leave but i can't see how i can continue in this working culture as it continues to decline.

AIBU to think this is one of the most damaging outcomes of modern technology, as wonderful as it is? i sometimes feel like throwing my work phone into the sink to get a couple of evenings of peace before it got replaced, but then i'd probably just have to stay at the office late to take conference calls anyway, so not solving the problem.

Lozmatoz which industry sector do you work?

I don't recognise this either. Everyone in my office takes a lunch hour, leaves roughly on time and no one has a work phone.

I recognise this too from Financial Services! It's the culture of the industry as much as anything else. I was experiencing pretty much all of your post OP when I was a mid level manager on £34k. Toxic environment.

I'm a SAHM now, but when I do eventually return to work I won't be going back into financial services.

Yep, FS - I hear ya.

In other sectors too.

Sales, IT, recruitment,.

If you add up the time worked and the time travelling to and from work and take off the cost of getting to and from work from your net salary I wonder if these jobs are worth it and some wouldn't be better off getting a job stacking shelves

When I had my kids that was it- no going back.

I have worked in Financial Services for the past 30 years and yes this has come in over maybe the last 5-10 years. Seems to be tied in with tech changes (work emails on smart phones, WFH setups that mean that it is normal to go home, go done family stuff then log into your virtual machine and and start work again), outsourcing to cheap offshore locations in different timezones and regular culls of permanent staff. I get round it by taking only contract roles and not having work software on any of my personal devices. I am happy to work very late in the office if needed, for people to call me on my mobile if they need to speak to me out of hours, and to work extra days at the weekend (for my standard daily rate) if we have a deadline coming up but I am not prepared to always be 'on'. If I were permanent, I would be seen as 'lacking commitment' despite usually working 50 plus hours a week.

I think MousseMoose is right - staff are just seen as a commodity by a lot of employers these, like a piece of plant or equipment. And the erosion of employment rights means that employees have to take all the shit that's thrown at them for the first 2 years, by which time they see it as normal because they've been acclimatised.

When I started work, a 35 hour week was normal for "white collar" jobs. I went into local government, and my father was shocked that I had to do 37 hours. Now, being contracted for 40 hours pw is quite normal and being expected to do unpaid overtime is commonplace.

I have the pleasure of working for a not-for-profit employer which has won awards for its family-friendly policies and for being among the best employers in the country. I don't take calls or read emails after hours. I only check my phone first thing in the morning to see if a client has cancelled.

I answered my phone when my manager rang at 8.10 a few weeks ago because it was so unusual that I knew it must be something major. She was ringing to tell me that a (much-loved) colleague had died, very suddenly and unexpectedly, at the weekend. She even apologised for ringing me so early, but she wanted to speak to me before I left home in case I was too upset to come in and told me to take the day off if I felt that was what was best for me.

The team were so well-supported by colleagues and management that I still find it hard to believe. We were offered compassionate leave, to cancel visits and just do admin from home or office, all spoken to individually and collectively, offered the services of a bereavement counsellor, got cards and flowers from other teams and all sorts. And what did we do? We all worked as normal and took on all the clients of our late colleague.

We all could have taken a week off on full pay if we wanted, but no-one did. Employers get so much more out of staff if they treat them well imo.

I recognise all of it OP - my last job was exactly like that. I left after 12 years and took a step down in salary to something less senior but it's still the same.

I'm now leaving that and heading off to the public sector (and another pay cut) because I've had enough and am worried I will burn out. I'm 41 now and I am done with living like that.

I don’t work with that pressure. However my daughter has just started secondary school and is able to email her teachers about homework all evening - and gets a reply! It leaves me thinking if all the kids they teach are doing the same when does the poor teacher get a break?

Yes, a lot has changed.

I was a SAHP for a few years and people were asking when I was going to get a job.
When I was working part time and raising the little ones I was ask when I was going to work full time.
Now I work full time, there is an expectation to take on even more hours.

Included in all that, is the expectation of working at home for free and no lunch breaks. Granted, we do get half an hour but if I am seen with the phone checking my personal emails with a sandwich in my hand (lunch break) I am asked if I am OK - uh, I'm just having my lunch?! If I go out to my car to have lunch I am asked what is wrong, and where were you?
The default position is to be typing away at the keyboard fervently, staring at the screen, all day.

When I was younger, virtually every work place had a lunch room where you could sit and chill out - now it's all offices and no lunch breaks.

Oh well, at least the offspring will have a payout from the insuarance when I drop dead from overwork... :-D

That sounds like a horrible environment and not one I recognise at all. Perhaps some elements are familiar - I see some emails I've received were sent out of hours, but I certainly don't look at or reply to them outside my working hours which has never been a problem. I also see some people not taking lunch but I always take mind and again, that's never been a problem. I would never accept a 7:15am meeting. I do well at work with good feedback at appraisals/reviews etc and an on top of my workload so it's not that I'm lazy.

I am comfortable saying 'no' and managing expectations which I think helps. Often people don't realise how pressured or snowed under others are but it doesn't sound like you work in an environment where this is the case, it instead seems to be the accepted culture. I'd get out.

I work in communications and earn marginally less than your DH, but I'm a few years younger than him.

I don’t work like this at all. It must depend on sector. I work 8-4.30 and most are 9-5.30. At end of day people just leave and there is no expectation to stay behind. This is the norm in offices I have worked in as also from what I heard from colleagues. I set my team’s recurring theme meetin at 10.30 because one of the team member can’t make it to the office till 10am. Unless it’s an exceptional circumstances such as a production system problem. For example I got an email at 5pm on Friday saying something isn’t right on production. I replied we will look at it on Monday as it’s not a blocker. Sounds like your sector has a toxic environment.

My friend who is admin for a local charity has this problem.
Staff are expected to eat lunch at their desks; they are expected to attend events at the weekend/after work to show an office 'presence'. No pay for attending the out of hours events, and these are lowly admin people on £8/hr, not high fliers!! Although the senior management are expected to do this too.

They have even been pulled out of work to attend events for the charity, so are being paid but are in supermarkets bag packing when they should be at work doing the job they are paid for. They then have to go back to work and try and catch up with the work that hasn't been done in their absence.

People replying to emails in the early hours/staying at work until midnight.

It's become the norm and Laurie nailed it I think.

I know what you mean and see it in some companies I work with. I work for myself and (after getting advice on this exact issue of chaotic comms) now with troublesome clients I use a time tracker per task to bill them, including switching costs (starting up different dev environments etc). Often when they see the chart with the bill and realise and how much money they has wasted on hassling me to no purpose, clients reform their email practice with me, at least.

I don't use a phone, and at this point almost none of the devs I work with do either. Though we all develop for mobile, we just have them in a drawer/ browserstacks. I could get nothing done if I had a phone going off all day/night. Those things have some dark patterns!

Technology was supposed to free pp but in fact it’s just made pp even more enslaved than they ever were.

Because it's being used in a peculiarly British way. And getting more so.

These are small companies and businesses I'm talking about btw. So really, you know, they're not actually doing anything important. No lives are on the line!

Technology changes are the main cause I think. So anyone starting a new role needs to set boundaries and expect the same of others. Easier in some jobs but not others. If you are consistent and work hard when in the office, much easier.

There are of course some people who are addicted to work or think it will increase their chances of advancement. Or some for whom work compensates for other things in their life which are going badly. Technology for them has been a support to this.

Technology can be like fire, a wonderful servant but awful master.

I recognise this work culture and I think it is encouraged by certain managers. It is not necessarily all managers but it does seem that the ones who treat their staff this way are increasingly the ones promoted to senior positions, then it trickles down from the top.

I left my public sector job because of it. Anyone working less than full time was seen as a slacker no matter how hard they worked during their contracted hours, only the full time staff who had no non-work commitments, like family or hobbies or friends, would be groomed for promotion.

'Flexible working' has ceased to be about the employee being able to adapt their working hours to improve their work/life balance, and now means the employer expects the employee to be available to work at any time 24/7, often with little notice.

It's definitely worse than it used to be in the NHS some sectors.

I worked in financial services for over 10 years and I do understand what you are talking about. I worked on a lower level than the OP so I didn’t have a work Mobile but still enormous pressure to come in early and stay late. Impossible targets to meet, no lunch breaks etc.

For example I done a stint on night shift. It was a 12 hour shift (7pm to 7am) with pretty tough targets to meet. The problem was to complete the targets we often had to call customers before we could close down the casefile. The only time we could call customers was during the first hour of a shift - you can see the issue. I would do the work to the point of calling the customer, then draft out 2/3 possible outcomes of the phone call and save them as a draft for later. I had to stay late to complete the files - we could call customers from 9am onwards. Then once the customer was called I had the issue of finding a spare computer to use to complete my work using the drafts I had made earlier. Day staff took back the desk as they were deemed to have priority over the desk. Some would come in early and be annoyed I was still using the desk at 7:30 (start time for day shift is 9am) but then they would stay late in the evenings so if I came in early at say 6pm to try to get on top of my workload they refused to move until 1 minute to 7. I left after 6 months and can understand why there was such a high turnover for that job.

I also used to work in financial services and I recognise what the OP is talking about - and I left 10 years ago to be a SAHM. To be fair, the last few years I was working in the US where the culture a lot more full-on and competitive than in London, but since then it's become the norm in London too. Smartphones, IMO, haven't made that much difference, because everyone had a mobile and a Blackberry and was therefore available at all time. My DH is certainly expected to be available from about 7am-10pm for work calls/emails. Getting to work by 8am is also the norm for a lot of people in financial services, because that's when the European and bond markets open. As for a holiday where he doesn't have to check in with work, make and receive calls and emails - ha ha! That would be nice and NEVER happens. Every single holiday we have to factor in his conference calls and other work commitments. It's the same in legal. My DB is a commercial property lawyer and he takes his laptop everywhere and always has to work while he's away. You get paid good money because your life is not your own.

Christ alive. I work in the public sector. I get in at 9.15 and leave at 5. I work from home quite regularly. The money isn't great - £50k currently - but the conditions are great.

On your salaries you are probably working working for less than minimum wage per hour!

"The money isn't great - £50k"
That's a huge amount, more than I can ever hope to earn (in London). I'm in the private sector and am middle management. I do work through all lunch breaks, but my out-of-office reply goes on when I finish at the end of the day, and I don't look at emails again until the next day when arriving at work. I sometimes stay late, but not by more than 15 mins, unless it's arranged earlier.