To think my new job is a huge mistake...struggling in my 50s

[Redqueenheart]

I started a new full time role with a national charity a few weeks ago and I hate it.

I now dread the idea of working like this every day for the next year or so.

To put this in context I have worked part-time for the last few years, often doing project management contracts.

The reason for taking this full-time role is because it is a remote role and I am planning to relocate to a totally different part of the country. The full time, permanent contract would else help with taking on a new mortgage or rental in the new location that I am moving to.

So from a practical point of view it made sense but I just am not enjoying it at all.

It has all the bad points of many charities: endless meetings rather than a focus on completing actual work, messy processes, crap IT and unclear expectations.

I think at 52 I am just struggling to cope with the constant demands of a full time role. I am starting to have difficulties sleeping and have a long term conditions which is aggravated by stress.

So what do I do? suck it up for a few more months until I make my move to a new location and find a job there might seem like the most reasonable solution.

My other thoughts were to try to ask whether I could switch to part-time hours (4 days a week) doing my probation meeting.

It is a shame because I really relate to the cause that the charity supports but the rest is just not for me.

Any advice? as anyone else been in the same situation?

I have already mentioned to management that the amount of meetings that I was expected to attend every day hardly left time for work delivery and that a better balance would need to be struck.

@Floweryflora what a pointless remark. Many women with children work part time. What's the problem ? I'm a bit older and work 30 hours p/w, on my feet for 12 hours, in a physically and mentally challenging job. Could I like hell work full time.

68% of women 50 - retirement age are still in employment. Just over half of those are in full time employment.
ageing-better.org.uk/work-state-ageing-2020#:~:text=The%20employment%20rate%20of%20women,%25%20to%2077%25%20for%20men.
There is definitely an issue.

If you really hate the job it will be very hard work. Either learn to care less or look for a preferable job.

I'm in a similar position at a similar age. Role not set up for success with huge expectations and no resources. Induction very patchy. Internal processes in disarray and contradictory decisions all over the place. I'm 4 months in. Here are the things that help:

I'm booking tasks into my calendar as if they were meetings to protect delivery time, and reformatting meetings which don't work (or the ones I can, anyway).

I recognise that my inbox is other people's priorities, my to-do list is my priorities, and allocate time accordingly. I currently have over 1000 unread emails and no bombs have gone off.

Working from home means I can pace myself to some degree and get a stroll round the block at lunchtime. I don't always manage this but it really helps when I do.

I have been browsing job websites in stressed moments but would look like I haven't passed probation to a future employer, so wl hold out for a year.

Good luck!

I had my dream job with a big local charity, think human patient facing.
The reality was hours of meetings, being micro-managed by a team who were mostly less qualified than me.
Patient care was dreadful, I was lucky if I had 30 minutes with each on my case load per week. The wasted hours were shocking. The meetings we sat in just to talk about patients....would have been better if we simply sat WITH patients, as nothing really got done.
I left within a year.

Thanks everyone for the great feedback so far.

I went for a walk to clear my head and I am 100% sure that this is not the job for me and that I don't see myself working there long term.

But I am going to be smart about it and stick to it a bit longer until the sale of my property is confirmed at least, rather than quit now in a huff and use having. full-time role to my advantage when it comes to renting or buying somewhere else, then I will quit for sure without any regrets.

I am also going to keep applying for remote part-time jobs in the meantime.

I will also adopt a more relaxed attitude about the fact that I did not create this mess and there is only so much I can do as a new starter and will be strict about not being swamped with meetings and reform what I can reform to bring better planning.

I think I will cope better if I tell myself this is just a temporary situation rather than a long term role.

Where are you getting your statistics from though @Floweryflora if you're so sure?

@Brotherlove ''I had my dream job with a big local charity, think human patient facing.
The reality was hours of meetings, being micro-managed by a team who were mostly less qualified than me.

Patient care was dreadful, I was lucky if I had 30 minutes with each on my case load per week. The wasted hours were shocking. The meetings we sat in just to talk about patients....would have been better if we simply sat WITH patients, as nothing really got done. I left within a year.''

That's very interesting because I had a similar experience when I was managing mental health projects and projects for homeless people for charities. All my time was spent on pointless managerial meetings, attending ''committees'', writing reports that no one would read or attending irrelevant at NHS meeting. I never had time to actually do work with patients or develop the project and my team. I lasted less than two year in most projects. It seemed the charities just cared about getting and renewing the funding more than anything else rather than looking at doing the best for the people who used the services.

Could you go through your calendar of the meetings so far, note which ones actually had actions you needed to be present for and which didn't?

As you have little to lose, I would then draft an email to say you have identified a significant number of challenges requiring immediate attention, that you will be concentrating your immediate focus on these (explaining they have been neglected and the issues that could bring for reputation or stakeholder management... whatever the panic buzz words are!) And will not be attending x,y,x until the immediate crisis can be contained.

Often with these jobs, you can shape what the role actually is to some degree.

I would keep putting it all in writing that way you also have a trail of your concerns.

The poster who says put what went before in a box is spot on. Doing it the current way has clearly not been successful so don't carry on with it 'because that's the way we do it'.

Being tough like this is also often easier at distance as you don't have to see or hear the reaction to it!

I think you’ve had some sage advice here…I would just say think very carefully before requesting to do a FT job in 4 days. Of course the expectation from your side is the workload would be reduced, but that isn’t always necessarily the case, and in reality you might end up with the same amount of work to do with less pay and less time to deliver.

Is the employer flexible? Could you, for example, ask to work a 9 day fortnight? So you work 1 extra hour each day then take every other Friday off? A few of my colleagues do this, and say they don’t notice the extra hour a day but certainly notice the extra day off. It might protect you from total burnout while still enjoying the full time salary.

@Gemstar2

I know that going full-time was a mistake so there is no way around that. I now realise that won't be able to sustain it.

I prefer going back to a part-time salary to risking affecting my health further. I have felt so bad this week, from sleepless nights to worsening pain (I have a condition that causes chronic pain and need to avoid stress). Today was truly awful.

I have made the decision not to stay in this job as it will never be the right job for me but I will not quit until I have sorted out my exit strategy (by finding an alternative job and finalising the sale of my current property) although walking out now is very tempting so I will probably stick to it up to Christmas then leave.

Is it Macmillan ? They are renowned for this kind of thing !

You sound like a very organised sort of lady, working for a charity who couldn’t organise a knees up in a brewary. I really do feel for you and understand the frustrations of having meetings upon meetings and even meetings to discuss the formats of other meetings. It’s a colossal waste of life.

I think that your plan of looking elsewhere, sorting an exit strategy and leaving on good terms is a good one. I am fully remote and loving it, although the training is a bit odd at the moment with trying to pass assessments on stuff that we are not learning until next week. I guess, what I am saying is, not all remote jobs are terrible and that I believe, from what you have said about your working experience, that it’s just a matter of time until a new job pops up and that they will be lucky to have you. Wishing you all the best.

I don't really want to name the charity because I know they actually do some good work on the frontline when it comes to animal care, but I am just not impressed by the team/department where I work.

It is actually really disappointing because I do care very much about animal welfare and always wanted to work in that field so it is all very disappointing.

Right cause but wrong job it seems.

These things happen and I think it is a good reminder to know my limits. Full time work is just not for me anymore even with remote working options.

I could not access all the files and drives needed. That has been going on for three days now.

3 days?! omg, I thought you were going to say 3 months, or maybe 3 weeks. 3 days is too early to give up.

It has all the bad points of many charities: endless meetings rather than a focus on completing actual work, messy processes, crap IT and unclear expectations.

Life is too short to put up with all that if no prospects to improve it.

@YeOldeTrout

I have been in that role for longer than 3 days.

The point is that IT support can takes 3 days (and still counting...) to sort out something as simple as giving me access to a specific drive or file. I reported another simple issue a week ago and it still has not been sorted.

Surely you don't think such a simple IT issue would require 3 week or even 3 months to fix? that should be sorted on the same day...

Frankly I also think that when a role is just the wrong fit you actually know fairly quickly. There is a difference between feeling a bit nervous about a new role which is quite normal and usual and feeling like this is completely the wrong job.

This is not the right role or company culture for me and I actually feel so much better now that I have realised that and made my decision.

I think i would

decline as many meetings as possible
focus on what you can control, not what you can’t
think big picture, what you need out of it
block your calendar out to work or walk or whatever
be honest about the issues but as a PP said, they’re not your issues

and if it’s short term to achieve your aim, so what? Stop worrying so much and cross off the days, but get what you need out of it first

I'd style it out until you're ready to leave. You are doing it for the money remember. of course it's nice it you are enjoying what you're doing but look at the bigger picture. You want a remote job so you can set up your life somewhere else so if this job helps you achieve that, then stick at it.

As long as you're not getting it in the neck that tasks are not being achieved, and if you are you can easily explain about the IT stuff and the amount of time you're spending in meetings as there is proof of all that, just do what you can and look at it as a means to an end.

Well I'm now 60 and to be honest if someone is daft enough to want to pay me good money to sit around in meetings all day contributing suggestions and ideas but without much delivery - then I'm more than happy to do so- more fool them. I've got to that stage where nothing suprises me and as I'm beyond feeling the need to progress, but still good with ideas, I'm happy to take the cash (and coffee and biscuits)

@Crikeyalmighty
But the point is this is a role is about delivery so the way they work with a meeting every five minutes actually makes it impossible to fulfil that role.

Working for a few charities colleagues did dish the dirt on past jobs. Same complaints too many meetings, micromanaging from HO not understanding regional differences. It's exhausting unless you say no. I wasn't sitting on a train for nine hours to attend a one hour meeting. I wasn't going on a three day jolly for team building. I stood my ground. They probably thought I was eccentric but I was in my fifties and done with the nonsense HR and superiors younger than my children came up with. They moved on so quickly to a better paid job in London anyway. Rarely travelled to our Welsh Hicksville set up 😜

Am I right in thinking you've moved from a corporate environment to voluntary? If so that might be the source of the culture shock. A lot of charities are under resourced compared to corporate equivalents so find it difficult to get really efficient systems in place quickly. I do think it takes a good 6 months to fully settle into a new role and make it your own so if it were me I'd try to give it that time and in the meantime try to be solution focused and keep note of the things you'd improve/ change because those are probably really valuable contributions that the charity would benefit from. Then I'd start bringing those ideas to the meetings and try to bring people along with you. You clearly have life goals this move will help with so try to focus on that as well reminding yourself why you took on this new challenge and once you've moved and settled if you still hate it you can always move on. The stress I'd be honest with a manager about- you might find the expectations on you are different to what you're used to and some of that stress is being placed on you by yourself unnecessarily. The start is always really hard but I'd be inclined to still give it a chance. I really hope it gets better and you start to love it.

I appreciate the advice about giving it a go but I have made my decision.

I absolutely have no interest or the energy needed to start reforming an entire department. It is not what I was hired to do, they are certainly not paying me enough to have to faciliate that level of change either and I am not enjoying the job in the slightest.

So there is no point of wasting anymore of my time beyond using this job for a couple of months while I look for something that will actually suit me.

Quiet quit and use the free time on your own hobbies/interests, learning skills or towards your own enterprise or applications for new jobs

Surely you get benefits too, if your health condition is bad

@Nsky62 No I don't claim any benefits. I have always tried to work and have savings but it is getting more difficult.

I thought working full-time but from home would be fine but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case .

Any stress makes the chronic pain a 100 times worse and my health his starting to be affected even after short time in the role.

Hence why I will get back to part-time and give this job a miss. My health is more important than anything else.