To think a company can't demote you after stress leave?

[GreenHeritier]

Hi all, posting here for traffic and have NCed to protect friend's anonymity.

A close friend of mine has been on stress leave for 5 months following a burnout. Her role was a high-pressure, high-responsibility managerial role running a large team. She is now feeling better and had a few conversations with HR about returning to work.

She has requested that they make some tweaks to her role so she can avoid stressful, high-pressure responsibilities like dealing with well-known difficult people or particularly stressful projects.

HR has now said that they can't accommodate her request and that they therefore don't think she is fit to take her original role back as she can't perform the duties the role requires. They have offered her a smaller, low-responsibility role with no managerial duties, but with the same salary as before.

AIBU I think what they are doing is illegal and she should speak to a lawyer?

@9ofpentangles

It sounds a bit too good to be true. How long would she be in the new junior role before the position is made redundant? I would be thinking very carefully about the offer.

I don't see what's wrong with suggesting delegating parts of the position to other members of the team as this is done all the time in the event of restructure or when the role becomes too big for one person, which could be what's underlying her stress.

It's all very well to say someone else is up for it but they have only been doing it for a short time and may end up in the same burnout situation long term.

Definitely seek legal advice.

The possibility of future redundancy is exactly what my friend is worrying about.

However, friend suspects that there is no real business need for the role and it is more of a "nice to have" job that they are creating just to park her somewhere.
Very probably? What's her issue with this? . She's been offered this because she can't do the job she was hired to do.
This is baffling.

But if she is made redundant that gives her a better point to get another role than having been managed out. And her package would not be affected as same pay. To be honest this buys her time to consider her options. It is very difficult to return to work after a long break anyway.

your friend really can't see what a great offer this is? She has failed at the job she was promoted to. Could not handle the duties that came with the pay and the title. That, as it would, caused her great stress, so much so that she went off sick to recover.

Lots of people that get promotions turn out to be unsuited - even the best of workers may not be a natural manager. In most companies, you'd be simply offered your old role back (if it was available) or fired, for failing to meet the duties and obligations of your role. Not many would be so generous!

Grab this offer wtih two hands.

However, friend suspects that there is no real business need for the role and it is more of a "nice to have" job that they are creating just to park her somewhere

There’s no business need for what she was proposing either.

@GreenHeritier
The possibility of future redundancy is exactly what my friend is worrying about.
But better that than being sacked for being incapable or not fit.

At least with redundancy, she'd actually get a good payout if she's been there for some time. So they may actually be doing her a favour if they did make her redundant.

The point is more that it depends if her suggestions impact negatively on the business? It's difficult to say but I'd fathom it's doable but maybe they don't want to bothered with the hassle of making the changes- especially as they have someone to cover now

The company are clearly being more than reasonable. She can’t just pick and choose bits of her job to suit her and expect everyone else to fall in line.

The possibility of future redundancy is exactly what my friend is worrying about

So better that she continue to take the piss and the company has to indulge her?

Harsh

It sounds completely reasonable. She isn’t capable of doing her current job if she wants to opt out of the difficult bits. It’s unfair to dump the worst bits of her job on junior colleagues, so reasonable that she can’t remain in the job if she can’t do it all.

If she has a reasonable proposal for reorganising the work then they should explain why they don't think it will work I wouldn't know whether to be in awe or appalled by someone who could actually go to their employer with the suggestion they keep their job title and salary, but someone else does the work and expect the boss to explain why they couldn't do this!

[quote GreenHeritier]@paralysedbyinertia this is the company's proposal.

Her proposal was to continue leading the team but with those modifications I mentioned, and hands-on support from someone else in the team for the bits she couldn't do.[/quote]
But anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that what she is asking for is completely unreasonable.

"I want to manage the team but only people I deem easy, I want to be on strategic high profile projects but with the stress removed" what she is saying is "I'm not capable of managing a team or high profile projects" and they are helping her with that

No they can absolutely do that and it sounds like a good solution Tbh.

I think your friend needs to have a think about what success means to her. Is it doing a job that looks good on paper but is making her ill or is it being happy in a job with less stress? She can’t have it all ways. Her employer is being more than reasonable.

I think you need to read back what you wrote! She wants to avoid certain people and certain projects - effectively asking the company to assign part of her current job to other people. Of course they want to change her job role! The fact they have offered her the same salary for a lower job role is amazing! They sound like a good employer to me.

There's absolutely no way the company will risk setting a precedent that managers can demand to only manage the easy people and hand off any hard bits of their jobs to random other people.

It may be the job she wants and has worked towards, but if it makes her ill then she'll have to accept that maybe its the wrong job for her to have as a goal. It's not all about having a high-status job if that job destroys your health.

@C8H10N4O2

*Would you be OK with doing your bosses hard parts of their job, while they get the pay and prestige of the job and you get nothing extra?

That's effectively what this woman wants. It's kind of no wonder that hr said no. Imagine the hell they'd get from the poor person below her that gets that deal

We don't know what she wants because we don't know the details. We do know that employers often have very rigid ideas about roles when they could be more flexible or deal with them in other ways.

She has done the role for a number of years, so presumably either its burn out from a long term mismatch, or specific issues which rose last year or the role was fundamentally overloaded. We don't know which.

As for the "difficult' bits - who says the difficult clients are the most difficult? The solutions/project designs or a bunch of other things might be the really complex part of the role, whilst dealing with awkward sods is just a noise issue which don't need expertise.

We don't know enough about the job and the friend to assume one way or the other.

Op did state that her friend wants to drop the difficult people and the stressful projects. So those jobs would go to her lower paid team members.

Would you accept that in your job? Doing your bosses work because they can't handle it, for free? I certainly wouldn't and I'd be furious at my boss for even suggesting it.

Hr are doing the right thing. They will face hell from the lower team members if they suddenly have to pick up the slack from their boss. It's bad enough when it's a team member of equal status.

Well a job shouldn't be so stressful that someone has to take 5 months off work to deal with the fallout.

So I don't see it as some individual failing of her being unable to cope with the job.

It is more likely an indication that there is something wrong with the role/company if they are not making sure that the work is not going to harm their employees' mental health.

There are some inherently stressful jobs. E.g. many healthcare roles, because even in good working conditions, there are going to be some violent mentally ill people, or traumatic situations to deal with (though there should still be various ways of mitigating those harms to staff).

But most jobs shouldn't be like that, and it's a sad indictment of society that people feel they have to put up with it.

I agree with others that she cannot cherry pick the bits of her job that she finds less stressful and expect others to do the tough stuff that I'm guessing contributed to her stress leave. She has been offered a very reasonable solution, which she may not like, but it is a good compromise considering her problems.

Could she perhaps suggest that she does the alternative role temporarily with a view to returning to her current role in a few months? That way she will have time to ease back into work while keeping the door open to her current job, but also have the chance to see whether the lower graded job would perhaps suit her better.

Regarding her ambitions, it's no use saying she's ambitious and thinking that taking on a lower graded role would curtail her opportunities when the pressure of the higher responsibility role caused her to be off work for months with stress.
It's not a bad thing to know your personal limits, and she can still be ambitious while recognising that some things may be too much. At the end of the day we work to live, we don't live to work, and her mental health has to come before her career aspirations.

She’s being very unreasonable. She’s been offered sn alternative. If she can’t do her original jib she had no choice 🤷🏼‍♀️

@rosiejaune

Well a job shouldn't be so stressful that someone has to take 5 months off work to deal with the fallout.

So I don't see it as some individual failing of her being unable to cope with the job.

It is more likely an indication that there is something wrong with the role/company if they are not making sure that the work is not going to harm their employees' mental health.

There are some inherently stressful jobs. E.g. many healthcare roles, because even in good working conditions, there are going to be some violent mentally ill people, or traumatic situations to deal with (though there should still be various ways of mitigating those harms to staff).

But most jobs shouldn't be like that, and it's a sad indictment of society that people feel they have to put up with it.

Most management roles have the potential for stress. People can be difficult. Projects can be challenging.

The fact that someone goes off with work related stress might indicate that there is a problem with the role or the workload, or more generally with the organisation itself. However, that isn't necessarily the case. Some people might feel excessive stress due to a skills deficit, e.g. poor time management or and inability to deal effectively with difficult people. Others might have lower resilience and/or poorer coping strategies. For some people, work stress might simply be the tip of the iceberg, on top of health issues, family worries etc., and it just tips them over the edge.

Obviously, organisations can help with some of these issues. They can provide training or coaching to help address any skills deficits, but this isn't always enough. They can encourage healthy habits, like taking lunchbreaks or leaving the office at a reasonable time. They can offer employee counselling services and other benefits to support staff wellbeing. However, even if they do absolutely everything that they could possibly do to support staff, some people will still struggle to cope and they will still go off sick for long periods.

We don't know in this case whether the job itself is unmanageable, or whether the OP's friend just couldn't manage it at this particular point in her life. However, the evidence that we do have suggests that the organisation is being reasonable and supportive.

If the person is worried that this will damage their career in the longer term when applying for other jobs they can simply describe their initial role in the company when moving on. No need to go into detail about stress related illness. Been there, done it.

However, friend suspects that there is no real business need for the role and it is more of a "nice to have" job that they are creating just to park her somewhere.

That's exactly what they're doing, and she should grab it! The alternative is that they declare she can't do the job and they dismiss her. Nine pages in, only two people have said that what your friend wants is reasonable. She needs to be made to see, by you, that what she's being offered is a good thing. Show her this thread and let her see all the explanations that the employers are in the right here.

I do think it's reasonable for her to be concerned about a potential redundancy situation further down the line, but she can at least prepare for this and start looking around for other roles etc. And she would get a decent payout if she has been with the organisation for a while.

The only alternatives she has right now would be to go back to her original job without just cherry picking the easy bits (if she can persuade her employer that she is actually well enough after essentially telling them that there are aspects of her role that she can't cope with - could be tricky if they have now lost confidence in her capability) or to walk away with nothing.

She needs to take the role that is being offered.