To be utterly fed up of what UK workplace culture has become?

[ExpectationManagementCharm]

I'm a middle manager in a large UK firm. I am not a new manager; and I'm not young, late 30s. I am generally perceived to be at the "laid back"/supportive end of the management spectrum (but I'll fight tooth and nail for one of my team if I think they're being asked unreasonable stuff/being treated unfairly).
However, I'm tearing my hair out at being at the "crunch point" of upper level expectations to get on and deliver stuff vs. how my more junior employees expect to work these days. I'm so exhausted and getting no support from anyone. I can no longer see if it's just my workplace or the norm.

Example1: Junior staff expecting to not dial into team meetings beacuse of trivial reasons - some of which are downright unprofessional (i have my weekly run with a PT booked then- but this is within normal work office hours e.g. 2pm on a Thursday). While my HR policy states that I need to be "flexible" for personal reasons, which means I then need to follow up separately with that person each time. Result - less work for employee, HR is happy, senior management say no problem, more work for me.

Example 2: Junior staff (especially our newly graduated colleagues) expecting to be able to get out of (reasonable) work deadlines by using the word "anxiety" all the time. "I couldn't deliver a client item/I was feeling anxious" (meaning I had to pull an all nighter to get it finished to meet our deadline). I try and escalate to HR - but I need to be "understanding". Result - employee's piss poor performance slides, HR are happy, senior management say no problem (because client delivery didn't suffer), I get to work an all nighter to cover the gap.

These are multiple examples, across lots of team members over the last ~ 5 years, but it's definitely got worse over the last year or so. The concept of "my word is my oath"/reliablility seems to have completely gone out of the window.

Yet my employer's HR team just turn it back on me as a team manager to manage, leading to more work, which means I just have another thing to do.

I'm currently pursuing performance improvement plans with 2 of my team at the moment, whose hiring i was not involved in, and i'm going mad trying to fit in what HR expect (to follow the process) alongside juggling my own actual workload. I'm not just a people manager, yet HR seem to think i have free time to spend doing delicate, intensive people management activity, despite my already crushing workload.

Does anyone else recongnise this or is it time to look for a new employer?

FWIW, i love my team (in general) but the recent piss taking has really taken its toll - I feel like no one at work has my back at all.

Nocutenames you are only 43. What sort of work are you seeking?

my sister said she's had more headhunters call the last month than ever before, she's 50.

bestie is 52 and just got a new job.

This. This is completely unacceptable, they need to be told to cancel it and show up to the meeting, or face a written warning.

You need to be a lot more strict, and use PIPs. It sounds like several of your team need managing out.

Thanks for your kindness. Oddly enough I have been WFH ever since, but with tasks that fit my temperament more, and without time pressure from high-level clients... and of course I am allowed out to see friends now LOL.
I have never been under performance management before or since, so I guess I'm not completely toxic. 😊

I felt so alone in this! My (newly graduated) trainee texted me with "Anxiety levels are higher than normal today. Would you still like me to come in?"
I answered "Yes, let's see how it goes". I honestly didn't know how to respond!
We have not mentioned the text since...3 weeks and counting.

YANBU. It's been shown time and time again that middle management is the most stressful position in any organization. You get it from the top and bottom. Your stories sound so similar to situations I experienced the last time I worked FT for a company. I was miserable. The last straw was when I had to fire someone who I didn't want to hire anyway, because she was so sht at her job. I didn't even work with her, I was just her line manager. I had to deal with people complaining about her for months, and then finally upper management deciding to get rid of her. She became verbally abusive towards me and threatened a personal lawsuit until HR finally intervened. I quit a few weeks later. I went into business for myself and never looked back. Much happier and healthier!

When you say 100% flexible -what does this mean? I would take personal reasons to be a hospital appointment or similar not a run!

I would be asking the person who didn’t complete the task whether they had worked their full hours or if they had signed themself off whilst being ‘anxious’.

I think managing people remotely must be very difficult. I would be having a team meeting & tell them they are taking the piss & it has to stop. If you’re uncomfortable being direct, tell them that after a meeting with senior management, it’s been noticed that standards are slipping & you need to start tightening up. You don’t need to say that it was you that raised the problem & solution with management.

Good luck, they sound hard work!

Is it any wonder these young people are like this, you only need to read the posts on here from parents of older teens wrapping them in cotton wool to realise why. "He/she has anxiety" some other random bunch of letters so can't go to school/work/do anything.

Someone I work with had a physio appointment last week on her wrist and took the entire day off as the appointment tires her out 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 paid I might add. I laughed so much. When I was pregnant I used to dash there and back to appointments, I dashed too much one day (actually ran from the car as I'd stayed to finish something before I went) I then ended up in hospital sat on a trace thing as the baby's hr was high. I explained I'd ran quite far to make it, but nope (it was fine once Id sat down for a while). My colleague (she's early 30s) actually asked me what did I do for maternity appointments, did I take the entire day off 😆, erm no.

Is it catching?
I know someone who has children that age who is like this. She's up front about it too. Says that if she's pulled up then she'll go on sick leave with stress and then does. HR are afraid to touch her which means she's bullying and causing issues and if anyone complains tells them to be sympathetic. Don't envy her work colleagues. Although a fair number of them won't be for much longer as the ones I know are getting out.

OP, sorry but you need to get a spine where your employees are concerned. You really shouldn't be back filling their work commitments because they say they're anxious or whatever the excuse is, because that's what it is, excuses, and the result is that you have no life outside work by covering up for them. You are not their mum!
I'm wondering if your HR department have copped onto this and are covertly measuring your effectiveness as a line manager. If I was you I would be watching my back with HR.
Before everyone jumps in I've been an LM for almost 30 years in 4 different organisations, and trust me, I've heard and seen it all.🙄

Just to give a flip side to this.

My boss is mid 50s.

His perspective on the amount of work a mid management level employee should get done is based on his own career, whereby:

• he assumes someone else (sahp/Grandparents/nanny) is dealing with children and that staff will regularly start at 8am and be happy continuing til 6.30, having dinner then working a bit more.
• that its fine to be away from family mon-fri and often some weekends, predominantly working
• that no one ever gets ill, and if they do, work will get done regardless
• is apparently oblivious to the fact that part time work exists & seems to think staff on reduced hours will magically get the same done as everyone else
• thinks overseas postings/secondments should be seen as "opportunities" and doesmt understand why people aren't willing to simply leave family at home for 6m/a year, visiting every few weeks.

He thinks our (mid thirties) team are "unproductive". We all have children, we work our hours (9-5.30, some on shorter hours due to working 3 or 4 days etc). We try not to work evenings amd weekends except for our two busy periods each year when we all pitch in.

He talks about young people having no drive and ambition, thinks people aren't prepared to put enough effort into their careers these days. We think he's a workaholic who did nothing for his family.

Different perspectives.

It doesn’t very frequently get acknowledged on here but managing people remotely is very challenging and a completely different skill set to managing people in the office. Unless you have an authoritarian style, which, let’s face it, many women managers don’t cultivate, or deal with the team who do very repetitive work, it’s very difficult to keep tabs on people.

I don’t know what the answer is OP but feel your pain.

I found after I sacked a couple of piss takers the rest bucked their ideas up.

See those PIPs through to their natural conclusion with your eye on that as the prize. Do not be swayed by appeals to be kind.

It's nice to be nice but sometimes you have to be a cunt.

Sounds about right - from when I was a team
Manager. You're responsible for getting the work done - if your ream don't do it then it falls on you. Great if you don't have much of a workload or have great team but there is usually the one...... the only way to avoid is to
work your way up to the next level of management so you manage managers or move into project management.

I hated middle management …sht from above and sht from below ….( excuse the language ! ) work hard and get promoted then you too can avoid dealing with the 5% of the staff that take up 90% of your time ! Seriously though, l always found the only way to manage it was to document everything and strive for fairness. Being popular by being nice and understanding only works so far .

I work for somewhere that is very flexible with no core hours as such, but people are expected to be available for meetings in the afternoon, as we work with the US.

There's flexibility within that - if you have no meetings, you can go for a run etc. No-one is daft enough to book in a regular PT session as they would know there is a good chance they would have to cancel it as we have so many meetings.

I work with a lot of young people, they are all great, very hard working. All the recent grads though are non-British, I think the youngest British person is 30.

I'm in my 50s - I have bad anxiety, but don't take time off for it and only ever mention it to my manager when it's intolerable. So not just a young person thing.

You have my sympathy. I’ve found that Covid and the legacy of remote working has enabled a minority of colleagues who are inherently idle to do even less and to feel justified to go AWOL for hours at a time or to shamelessly excuse themselves from meetings to get on with their own life admin. Not just younger colleagues either! Should add that remote working CAN be manageable but only if perameters and expectations are clearly laid out.

I do think some of the attitude has come from young people going from poor schools where expectations are low and any kind of minor achievement is lauded, to university courses which are not particularly demanding, perhaps while still living at home in their local city and so not even having to acquire the life skills which goes with living away from home and having to manage bills/house share etc.

I really think we have made a HUGE fuck-up in this country by encouraging far too many young people to go to university at 18 for undemanding courses which don't lead to a graduate-level job, and keeping them as cossetted children for far too long whilst landing them in huge amounts of debt at the same time. It is time we went back to encouraging A-level pupils to go straight into jobs and working their way up. Why are we not doing this? There is so much to learn from working alongside older people when you are 18. You are exposed to different mindsets and vastly more experienced people. Colleagues who are role models and who you can really learn from as to what the workplace "etiquette" is.

We have innately talented young people in this country. But we are destroying that talent by mollycoddling them and keeping them young for far too long. We need to encourage the independence, the work ethic. Give them a purpose in life, to feel a sense of place, and achievement and self-worth from 18. Let them learn from their colleagues when they are at in impressionable age.

As others have said, remote working is allowing this to happen. No-one is learning workplace etiquette from their colleagues anymore. People are in a comfy little bubble in their own online world at home. If they want to be a slacker they don't notice that they are the ONLY slacker, because there is no-one else around them that they can see in person working hard. This won't change until people get back into physical workplaces and mix properly in teams so that the weak links become apparent early on.

I agree that the days of working all the hours God gives and more being over is a very good thing, but there does have to be a bit of balance.

• Checking your phone briefly every hour or so - fine. Spending more time reading & posting on social media than you are actually working during working hours - taking the piss
• Working round school pick up & drop off times, and the work being made up around those times - fine. Never being available for calls before 10am or after 3pm, taking a full hour at lunch, and not responding to emails except between those times - taking the piss.
• Being late occasionally due to transport problems or other issues - fine. Being consistently late, even by just a few minutes but every day, then out of the door bang on finishing time every day - taking the piss.
• Missing an occasional deadline due to other work, or unexpected problems, or just too much to get done, fine. Knowing a deadline is likely to be missed and telling your manager as soon as you realise it and the reasons, fine. Not telling anyone until the deadline is reached (or nearly) then using a non-excuse - taking the piss.
• Working from home, when you don't need to see anyone to do your job, and when there aren't people needing your guidance who ARE in the office (e.g. new starters) fine. Insisting on working from home 5 days a week when there needs to be someone in the office every day e.g. for training people, controlling supplies etc, taking the piss (as in you need to take turns for that, not have some other poor sod always having to be in)
• Having time off for the occasional medical appointment, fine. As a pp said, making all appointments during working hours when you only work part time, taking the piss.
• Having a genuine, diagnosed mental health problem, and having some adjustments made for that e.g. more WFH time, more flexible working hours, being able to have headphones on in the office etc, fine. Crying "anxiety" every time there's any sort of pressure that is a normal part of the job, either taking the piss or clearly medically unfit to perform their job adequately.
• Wanting to be left to do your job in peace when you know what you are doing, are performing well, and are hitting deadlines, fine. Screaming about being micromanaged when you are still learning, keep making mistakes, take forever to do the most basic tasks (after months in the comparatively simple role), not fine.

All the above I have come across over the years, in either same level colleagues or staff I've managed

Sorry haven’t read the film thread. I am having similar issues - not sure when flexible turn into entitled.

my main issue is the afternoon school run. I have full time employees at middle
management level who refuse to attend meetings during the school run. So basically 2pm to 4pm. Bonkers. I work in a sector where a lot of business is done by meetings. The burden falls on those who don’t have school age children or those who pay for childcare.

Can you work in your job as a freelance? that way you're not beholden to a boss or a HR department avoiding its responsibilities in quite the same way.
When I was a freelance I had a short-term job when I was very young where I was employed because of a skill for a specific job needing more than normal skills and qualifications. I was asked to go easy on the person who normally did the job but who in this case would be working for me. I did, I was tactful and flexible, but though he was basically a nice chap, he took advantage; disobeyed an instruction because he thought he knew better, or maybe wanted to assert himself, and showed signs of getting slack. I just had to learn how to put my foot down- which is harder once people have got away with things first. I calmly but firmly insisted he did the job the way I had specifically told him to do it (the designer wanted it that way and I had explained this before), and I stopped being as flexible as to working hours. He got the message. And it settled down to a good working relationship. But in that case, I didn't have HR breathing down my neck.
I learned from it and never cut anyone any slack again right at the start- not those below me, or those above me, mark you. Later, when I had established my authority and it had been accepted, yes, when I thought it was fair and necessary. But not until it was clear I was in charge; I had accepted the responsibility for the job being done right, so I insisted on the authority to be able to do it. This lesson served me well when I went into teaching - and in other aspects of life as well.

Someone else just posted what I’m going to suggest go freelance! Managing people is a blooming nightmare I’ve heard every excuse under the sun! It’s time consuming and a real pain. Get out and go freelance and don’t take on people management it was bane on my life!! Dealing with excuses and no shows it’s draining ...

Interesting and I have experienced the same.
My work is quite stressful and we really need everyone pulling their weight. There's a couple of youngsters that just feel a bit flakey.

@Stripedbag101 could you tell them to nominate a couple of days a week when they do the school run, but other days they need to be there? We have to put all that kind of stuff in our calendars so it's easy to see if someone is taking the piss.

I sacked two people in my first six months in my current job. Then another two. It made people realise that the days of Liberty Hall were over. They were performance managed out, with HR support. It is tiring, time consuming and thankless but the only way to do it. And you need HR on your side.

I became quite directive and gave them proper time limited objectives - I want to see the paper on X by Friday, and the spreadsheet for the project showing where we are and what needs to be done by when on Wednesday. Not done? Anxiety? Mental health days? Oh dear, well we should refer you to Occupational Health for that. All refused OH. Some bucked up their ideas and the others were managed out. And were shocked when they were.