What's the biggest challenge of your job?

[AjasLipstick]

Mine is that there are long periods of time where I have nothing to do and nobody to talk to.

Also that it's in a lonely area and I get a bit freaked out sometimes. I work in an arts centre in rural Australia.

Smelly feet and having to be polite or say 'no, they don't smell!'

The pressure of safeguarding responsibility. Working in a boarding house (independent school), it's a terrifying responsibility being 'in loco parentis' for children. Hugely rewarding, but yeah, I feel the pressure.

Recruiting staff. I manage a care home and should have 18 full time day staff to fill the hours to make sure people get the care they have been assessed for over any one week.Ive currently got 4 staff and one of them is off sick. I'm relying on agency workers, some of whom are great, but with the best will in the world they get sent wherever they are sent and it's hard for them to get to know the service users, let alone help me do any of the longer term projects.
Chuck all the paperwork I have to do in to that mix and I just feel like I've got no hope of managing the service to standard and at times tbh safely.
Work in care is so under valued and under paid and I can't see it getting any better any time soon.

A work culture of people not talking to one another. Suspicious, gossipy, silo working. Creates totally unneccessary drama and makes progress on anything important really fucking infuriatingly complex and difficult.

Also specific colleagues who are actively obstructive due to their self centred, controlling behaviour. It's a job not the meaning of life. None of our jobs have any significant impact outside of the organisation. Just the pettiness and sense of "but this is MINE". ARGH!

Managing people - it's exhausting.

Dealing with the chaos and extra work that is caused by the Senior management being disorganised and not thinking things through. I'm fine with working hard a juggling a heavy workload, just not when something is sprung on me and needs sorting instantly because the SMT have decided that something would be "fun" or have forgotten to do something.

Definately being a woman in a male environment. I embarassed some contractors yesterday as they assumed the Kitchen Manager was male and made some off-colour comments about female bosses.

On a less serious note, customers who send their food back with ridiculous complaints such as my 'garlic bread is floppy' or 'my steak is the wrong shape' and 'I wanted it cooked medium with no blood'. I could go on.

The degree of understaffing that means sometimes you can't provide the level of care you want to.

Micromanaging to the nth degree..... makes me hate life right now

RideSallyRide76

Do you work in my team too???

Dragging myself out of bed on a Monday morning to face a week of reporting and spreadsheets that in all honesty don't add value to the company or its processes.

Reason why I'm looking for a new job!

Lack of support from senior management. Not being listened to.

Understaffed, the one other member in the team is hopeless. Lovely person, just doesn’t listen and is incapable of remember things we’ve gone through many times before. I’ve mentioned this to our line manager but their solution is bar shit crazy.

I need a new job

Not killing my job share partner.

I work in childcare - maintaining staff to child ratios is a huge pain when there’s a bug going round and 4 staff call in sick last minute. Also government funding being ridiculously low meaning we are losing money on every funded child we accept.
And parents who have unrealistic expectations of their children!

Austerity, which makes it impossible to get clients the help they need. Benefit cuts, no access to specialist advice for housing and benefit matters, staff cuts at the councils making it impossible to speak to anyone or get decisions made, even reduction in library opening hours which makes it harder to find places to meet clients in the community all conspire to make a difficult job almost impossible.

The scheme I work for is now facing cuts cuts of 25% (on top of 10% a couple of years ago). Demand is likely to be managed by only taking on the most critical, urgent and complex cases. Managing a workload where everything is critical, urgent and complex is very stressful and just helping people to manage a crisis rather than achieve sustainable, long term change is not really why I do the job.

I'm looking for something else, and wondering how I can get through the 3 years before I can get my pension and jack it in.

Today my biggest challenge is :

FUCKING “JOBS FOR THE BOYS” CULTURE