Desk and office given away

[Proseccoprincess33]

I am due to return to work following maternity leave next month. I am anxious about going back but this has been further intensified by the fact my office has been given away during my time off. This has been my office for 5 years. Not only has it been given away permanently but I have not been allocated another office or even a desk. I only became aware of this because some colleagues alerted me to it and I then contacted my manager to discuss it.

She is off site and very hands off so we rarely see her if at all. In fact I have never met her. So had I not been given this heads up by my colleagues I would have been coming into work to see my office and desk occupied and no place for me to sit on my first day back.

I am part of a multidisciplinary team and I manage one of the departments. Therefore having my own desk and office is so important to supervise staff and the nature of our work is very sensitive so privacy is a vital. But at this stage I'd settle for a desk of my own.

I am having a meeting with my manager about this very soon and have found out she has invited 2 very senior managers along also which is intimidating and not helpful to the anxiety I am experiencing. I think she fears I will be very unhappy and so has her reinforcements ready to tell me tough sh1t.

Her solution so far has been that they'll slot me into a desk somewhere when other staff are off....ie hot desking.

AIBU that I am so upset about this and want to fight for a resolution? Any advice from anyone who has been in a similar situation would be much appreciated.

Thank you 😊

@OnGoldenPond thanks for this. Yes if hot desking was done office wide I'd he happy enough. But it is only me expected to do this currently.

@rc473 thank you for this. It's very helpful 😊

So sorry you are being treated this way when all you want is a suitable space to do your job! I have such admiration for people like you in the NHS trying to do your best for patients in the face of appalling management. Thanks for all your efforts

Definitely take your union rep into the meeting with you. The fact that senior managers are being drafted in points to your manager wanting to intimidate you. Make sure you have your own support.

Ignore the posters trying to minimise this. This definitely isn't hot desking! I hot desk at work and I book my desk two weeks in advance so I go in every day knowing my workspace is ready for me. With access to meeting rooms if I need them. You are expected to arrive every day with no idea if there will be anywhere for you to work and the added complication of needing a space for sensitive conversations. They are making it impossible for you to do your job effectively.

Good luck I hope you manage to find a resolution.

I have supported OP that being singled out is unacceptable and she has responded and liked my post, so not sure why you need to repeat it.

@Codlingmoths thanks for this 😊

@pootlin

It's very important not to call this arrangement hot desking as if management get that term accepted OP could be painted as an unreasonable Luddite refusing to accept a working arrangement that is accepted in many offices now. Specific language is everything in these disputes which could go legal.

This is pure and simply a failure of management to provide the OP with the means to do her job. This MUST be kept front and centre.

Not sure what you mean by that OP has "liked" your comment. This isn't Facebook and I can't see that the OP has responded to your comment at all

Given their immediate response to the problem hasn’t been to ring you and apologise for the oversight (which is what any reasonable manager would do!), I would involve union if you have one and ask them to attend with you. If the meeting is on zoom, let them know you intend to record it for your records. I would also ring pregnant and screwed for advice ahead of the meeting.

People can like posts on here. You get a notification

@lateatwork I wasn't aware of that function. Can you do it on the app? Is it a sort of private message?

Sorry @pootlin I stand corrected!

It's called a 'thanks' and it's underneath all posts. Only the poster can see the thanks received. Kind of a strange feature but nice to know when other posters agree with your response, or if it's helped the OP.

@ClaudiaWankleman thanks.

I'm on the app and can't see anything under the posts so maybe this is only available on the full website.

Yes I am in a union and was tempted to bring them onboard. I suppose I wanted to see how this meeting went first before I went in all guns blazing but maybe i should be protecting myself. You must have someone, preferably union rep, in the meeting with you, otherwise it’ll be 3 against 1 if there’s any disagreement about what was said.

Sending important emails to an account you have no access to is a serious issue, and something to bring up should you raise a grievance. (Ok, it could be an innocent mistake)

I would be annoyed, but the needs of the service come first and so they must have had a reason for it.

why would they let you know if you were on maternity leave? Unless they were involving you in all matters concerning your team whilst you were off, I wouldn’t think they would involve you in this.

Are you the only person moving because you were the only one with an office and the only one working part time? If so that makes sense. If someone else works part time can you work the days they are off and desk share?

I understand it is annoying, unsettling and inconvenient for you But the office belongs to the company and not you. That’s the reality.

I would just go along with it. I wouldn’t want to go back to work with this as a situation. It will create tension and your team will wonder why you don’t want to sit with them.

It’s 3 days a week. Keep a list of anything inappropriate like your confidential staff conversations being over heard. After a month or so go to your manager and let her know it’s not working because such and such overheard you talking with blah blah about private matters. Make a case to work from home and go to the office one or two days a week.

even if you do work in palliative care, everyone there works for the same company as so it doesn’t matter if they hear your client conversations. It’s the private staff ones that matter and for that you would book a meeting room.

post Covid a lot of places have this open plan, hit desk situation

good luck with it all anyway. Try to enjoy the rest of your mat leave

As long as there is a consistent hot desking policy for all staff I am not sure why a desk and office is vital anymore - I do confidential calls in one of the meeting rooms and we all have a locked space we can keep private documents.

However, our arrangement applies to all even our CEO so any protocols in place around this have to be fair/ have parity for all.

Edit - as just seen OP is a palliative care team, I am a senior nurse too and all our palliative care team follow the process above - they work in a shared, open plan space and conduct confidential calls/ video calls in the meeting rooms. General
advice/ signposting calls are made in the open plan office aa no confidential info is shared.

@zeibesaffron But the OP has said that she's the only person expected to "hotdesk" I.e. find a desk that belongs to somebody out or sick every time she comes in. She's reiterated this several times.

It must be very frustrating when people can't be bothered to read your posts but have to have their totally irrelevant word.

Irrelevant information. OP's office does not operate hot desking.

I am fully aware of what had been written- all I was doing was putting forward the view that this could be a way forward and that a hot desking process for all could be part of the solution when OP meets with her manager!

You will see that I also said it had to be fair for all!

It certainly is frustrating when people don’t read your posts properly.

In my experience, most workplaces are moving away from personal offices with seniors instead sharing space with their teams (possible exception being Exec level). This is designed to foster a closer relationship as a team and make the manager / leader more approachable/connected.

Can you ask about feasibility of blocking out /book a meeting room as a project room for your team to use for any sensitive conversations?

Regarding a desk, absolutely a provision should be made for you to have a space to work from. In the move to hot-desking, sometimes businesses don’t make allowances for all hands meetings where full teams will be on site and needing somewhere to sit and log on.

May sound a daft question, but what type of desk is it? Perhaps time to suggest a move to a project collab desk set up similar to this, where you don’t have workstations in the usual way, but just network cables and power sockets and you can get a good number of people in the space that 4 normal workstations would occupy?

@OnGoldenPond thank so much that means a lot 🥰

@zeibesaffron that is not easy but it is acceptable if everyone has to do that. But in my place everyone has their own desk and space. I'm the only one who doesn't sadly.

@gillefc82 they are big fixed desks with ancient pcs on them lol the trust won't fork out for new desks sadly. I'd be happy if hot desking was an office wide policy but it'd not and there hasn't been a desk space identified for me.

@WhistPie thank you for your support 😊

@Dancerprancer19 thanks for this. I will contact them forsure. Appreciate the advice.

@MereDintofPandiculation thanks for this. When I addressed with my manager that I couldn't access the email sent to the trust email and she completely ignored that element of my email. She responded to me asking if we could invite my job share along which thankfully she has now agreed. So that will be support for me.

All she wrote was 'great idea I'll invite her'. If she had said sorry or acknowledged the error i would have been absolutely fine but it's just again that total lack of respect.

@Kattiekat I would happily sit with my colleagues but I don't have an identified desk. Everyone has their own work station and I do not. I am fighting for a work desk within the building so I can be close to my team. But no solution has been given. Just a 'we will see on the day where is available' kind of attitude. Which no one else deals with.

Also the people in my room are not part of our service. I am lead to believe they have been problematic in the managers building and this has been a great excuse to ship them out. Of course this is all through the grape vine so I would never say that. So their presence in our office is no benefit to our service. If anything it is detrimental.

Thanks again for everyone's responses. No matter what the opinion I do appreciate everyone's insight xx

As manager in recent jobs I have been expected to hot desk and prioritise permanent desks for junior staff. Manager can and should be able to tough it out.

Definitely get your union rep along - I did this in a reshuffle (NHS) as I have a disabled child I need to support so was working part time and flexibly. I did not warn them in advance I was doing so (as per union advice) and the manager's face when I walked in with the union rep was a picture I have remembered for a long time! The union rep was excellent and knew their stuff and helped on my behalf. They also advised me to draw up a list of issues in writing. I think the management were expecting me to roll over and instead I ended up with an addendum added to my contract to support flexible work patterns. After that I always asked for union rep support - they know their stuff and managers suddenly realise they can't get away with all the s**t they were going to pull.

Doesn’t the op state that there are 4 of them and only 2 desks? If so, they are not the only one hotdesking. As for the confidential phone calls, there is no reason they cannot be conducted in an open office with other healthcare professionals. Not ideal, but if there’s nowhere else then it is acceptable.

Op, what dept did the office go to? If you are job sharing, where would your colleague work from on the day they are in?

It seems like you might have to find a different way of working. In our organisation nobody has office anymore and most of the floors are hot desk areas. Works well if you have meeting / breakout rooms

You are not the first I heard of, coming back from mat leave, having their desk taking away, being the only one to hot desk and then following a series of micro aggression and mobbing. Pls contact pregnant than screwed they will have heard loats of similar cases, they have support and advice. Better than unions sometimes as they actually deal with these things only! And they are much more frequent that we know (unfortunately!)