Doing very little for this salary? Panic

[Greenwip]

I’m earning close to 70k. I do have times where I am worked to the bone and very stressed (maybe 7 days since start of the year so averaging one day a month). The rest of the time I work 90% of the time from home and have naps, a bath, food shop etc in between a few emails and remote meetings. It sounds great and sometimes it is but I am constantly worried about job security. I wonder if this is more common than I think?

Ha! You having a laugh?
I am in the civil service and earn 38k as middle management and I am flat out busy all of the time with a fairly pressurised role. Have another 2 people the same grade as me in the team and they're the same, even work split and those in the grades below us all have full days of tasks.
To be honest, my senior team are flat out too so I can't say it gets easier for them as they move up the ladder either, although I know that's not the same across all departments.
If the shit hits the fan, it would still come back on me as I manage my own mini team.

Oh poor thing.

I’d style it out as long as poss. Don’t be surprised if they announce redundancies. Just make sure that you keep your skillset relevant if you need to job search.

Realistically, some corporations just need someone in a job for those few busy days when your skillset is required.

You’re probably cheaper for them than hiring a consultant for those busy times.

Why oh why do people think being a Dr is a good job. It's not it's a mugs game.

I really wish someone would pay me a decent salary for a few hours work a day instead of flat out all day every day to the extent you feel guilty about going to the toilet.

Honestly I think a fair amount of mid level office roles are like this - some (not all of course) comms, marketing, PR, content type roles can be a matter of approving bits of content written by someone else, fielding some requests, replying to some emails, writing a short post to go online, checking things other people have written. And occasionally it's super busy or there's a chunky bit of work to do, but most of the time it's small tasks and waiting for others to get back to you. Even if it's not constantly busy you can still play quite an important role in keeping projects moving as you're the contact point for various people.

TBF, there must have been an awful lot of managerial sitting about waiting in the days before electronic communication when most things happened by post and when you didn't even write your own correspondence.

I AM bored.

So I skive a bit, fulfill myself creatively, and do a bit of housework.

I got sky-high praise in my last appraisal, which is naff really. I've been far more fulfilled in work, but right now the work life balance suits me.

I have loads of experience and skills but the NHS do not appear to want to pay me for just being there not using them

@dontcryformeargentina

Must be civil service, council or NHS management. Lucky you !

I do wish people would stop coming out with this out-of-date view that for some bizarre reason managers in these sectors sit on their arses all day doing the square root of FA. Civil servants work extremely hard and managers are under an awful lot of pressure. I’ve known 4 managers go under with stress in my time. One never fully recovered.

I work as a civil servant and I love my job because I get to work with people who want to make a difference & we enjoy pulling together as a team but it is very taxing sometimes on my mental health. It’s hard graft. I don’t have an idle day.

Same with the NHS. It’s fashionable I suppose to sneer at it - but I do get tired of the joke after a while

Exactly, I’m in the civil service and a G7 in an operational team and it’s mad busy. My role was so busy they brought in two more staff same grade to help me out and I’m still mad busy. People in my team are not sitting around bored, can’t speak for the rest of the civil service but apart from one temp job I had I’ve always been mega busy, and I prefer that.

I think the opposite (in my own career) - the hardest time is the first year or two, then you get a handle on it and become much more effective. Things usually repeat - annual events, say - and each time you're more prepared. I mean yes, the first few weeks of a job should be gentle too, but I don't think the OP is still in that phase.

I'm not quite in your position OP, but my job can be a bit like that - as in, you've reached a level where you are paid for being there when it matters, showing leadership and originality, and making the right calls; not for completing tasks for 8 hours a day. It can only be unnerving if you feel like your superiors don't really take an interest in what you're doing and are underusing you. If they're engaged and happy with your work, and you feel like you're still building your CV and learning things, then thank your lucky stars that you've landed in the right place!

I'm the same, I work from home and only go into the office once a month for a one hour team meeting. Good money and also get bonuses and private healthcare etc. I know what I'm working on every month and I do it all within 2 or 3 days and then sit at home for the rest of the month. My manager reassured me that I'm being paid for my qualifications and experience.

Seriously all you people who work these few hours for high pay need to tell me what jobs you are doing!

😄

I'm on closer to £90k and when I started in this job - which holds a lot of pressure and responsibility but is full time WFH - I pottered about a bit in the beginning and reassured myself that I was paid to take the responsibility and as a reflection of my experience of managing risk, so I was worth my salary.

4 years on I am doing the job of 3 people with no support (tiny firm with fewer than 20 staff), and every day is spent dealing with shit that I wasn't employed for and making decisions on everything because there is no one else, as the big hitting things on my task list just get bigger. I feel like I'm walking a tightrope. I was going to post in the Work topic but wouldn't know where to begin!

I earn about 13k a month after tax. Some days I do 2 hours work, other days I'm at the airport at 4am. I'm always available though.

If on those avg 1 day a month the thing you achieve and the skills and experience you put into achieving it add around £7,500-£10,000 to the company's bottom line in a way that couldn't be achieved if they didn't have someone with your skills and experience on standby to leap into action then it's fine, you are earning your keep.

Only be worried if what you achieve is of little value or could be readily achieved by someone cheaper or someone who was managing a full-on-workload (ie if other deadlines would be missed if you had to drop stuff to clear time for the once-a-month things)

If you are worried because my second paragraph looks more like an appropriate description then a person worth £70kpa should be capable of analysing the sphere of their influence and identifying some long-term project that you could readily make progress on during quiet times but no harm will be done if you drop it during busy times.

Absolute joke, if you're so experienced/ highly skilled, why aren't you using your time teaching/ passing on your skills to new staff. Teaching, coaching, supervising are all things you could be doing with your time if you have nothing better to do.

I have experienced this mainly in corporate sector, standards were higher in the charity sector when I worked for a very well known large humanitarian aid charity.

That said in the corporate sector when s**t hits the fan you are expected to know what you are doing and to make strategic decisions that are in the best interest of the company which is what your paid to do.

My first job in the corporate world I had a boss who gave me nothing to do and did my work for me, he told everyone I was great though. When he went on leave I spent the whole time having to hit the ground running to sort out whatever he had left behind often with no handover and often a big mess, to be fair I got a lot of positive feedback from the leadership team.

My current job is entry level management and I have manager who really works with me. At the start of each week we go over our diaries and plan our work out so she can see when I need more and tell what she needs. She also updates me on her week and what she wants to get done, I work flexibly and work around my children within reason. I'm mainly busy but not run in to the ground, I do go to our different office though and sometimes thats a night away.

My current job is certainly not as quiet as this but I definitely don’t do overtime and never really have done (maybe 40 hours a week instead of 35 is the max!). I work on projects for internal stakeholders so basically set my own timelines, we save the company loads of money. I work in data science, at a bank but have worked in other sectors and it’s been similar.
Data analytics/data science is a great job if you have a STEM degree and are logical and analytical. Interesting, great work-life balance and flexibility, can walk into any vacancy by basically being not totally shit and having a pulse.

Only if you want busy work and to do unpaid work that isn’t part of your remit - I’d advise losing this mindset if you want to get on. Men don’t think like this.

You assume there are people at her company who want to learn her skills and have been given the time and incentive to do so. I can promise you, if I stood up at work and said "who wants to learn my skills, I've got the time to teach you", the few people who stepped forward would then not really have the time to do it, or the remit to use those new skills. It's up to the company to identify skills gaps and develop a training strategy, a culture of learning and all that. It's not the OP's duty to go round trying to shop this to all and sundry.

I feel like many kinds of project/ long-term-task orientated jobs can be like this - periods of slow work doing bits and bobs, and periods of stress

Busy work?
I have never worked in a job where there is not more you could be doing if you used your initiative.

this sounds like creating more work for other people