To think I have at least some sort of case against my employer? Or am I being deluded?

[Galllp]

Length of service is 9 years. New manager arrived while I was on maternity leave. I came back from maternity leave a year ago in Feb and it’s been pretty awful ever since. I’m in a mid senior role.

Since returning I’ve utilised the flexible working policy as I am alone with my DD in the week (husband works abroad) and I do all nursery runs and so on. Manager is aware of this and there is no company policy that dictates number of days in the office. I tend to go in fortnightly. I feel my choice in doing this is relevant.

Since returning I have been given absolutely minimal work. I’ve been given trainee tasks and tasks that relate more to administration like amending a spreadsheet for example. I have had some decent work from seniors who aren’t my manager and had good feedback. But from my manager it has been fragmented and very inconsistent. We had a six monthly meeting in September where he said overall he was happy but we’d look to promote me next year (this year) and some waffle about pay when I said it felt unfair I was the only one not included in a proper pay review process when returning from maternity leave.

Fast forward to this February and the next six monthly meeting takes place. I’m told he wants me on an informal PIP. I was quite shocked by this but went along with it and he put in weekly meetings to discuss my ‘progress.’ Since this has been in place he’s given me a total of 9 hours work. Two tasks he hasn’t fed back on at all and one task (a draft of a document) he changed everything possible in it on a stylistic basis. He even changed certain wording that he himself has previously used.

The weekly meetings have been a total waste of time. He’s spent perhaps 6 minutes talking each time and essentially saying there’s no improvement as far as he’s concerned. I don’t know what to do from here as I am utterly confused by it all and looking back he’s made comments like I work from home too much so I’m not getting the work (this is utter bollocks as one other woman in the team works from home almost exclusively and he’s extremely (too!) close to her). She is given plenty of work.

He’s said i am too focused on home life which is ridiculous. Clearly i have responsibilities as a mother but i am dedicated to work, always available and will happily work well beyond 5:30 into the evening where needed. He knows this.

I feel like he very much wants me to leave and is picking at any small thing to make life hard for me. I know when you’re in the middle of something like this it’s hard to know if you’re not seeing both sides. Am I feeling victimised unnecessarily? I’ve never had any issues at work before.

Well to get a Fit Note which allows you to stay off work, you have to be sufficiently incapacitated by your stress for the GP to certify you are not fit for work and that there are no adjustments the employer can make which will enable you to work. And this Fit Note needs to be reviewed regularly.

The role of OH is to support the employee with strategies to return to work safely and if the stress is caused by the fact that a PIP is pending, then the OH adviser is likely to say that the best way to resolve the stress is to get that PIP over and done with. Because until that is done, the underlying stressor will not change.

The strategic sick note became such a trope that employers have had to develop their own strategies to combat it - and these are what they are. But OP can of course give it a go if she’d rather be sacked for “medical incapacity” rather than have a protected conversation or be made redundant which both seem more realistic options are. And assuming she isn’t prepared to meet her employer’s work expectations so won’t pass a PIP

but what good work have you done OP? (I don’t mean that nastily as this could be the fault of the manager).

looking at this from an outside perspective and assuming I’ve not seen your posts and don’t know your view that your manager isn’t giving you work, what other people will see is this:

-hardly ever in the office
-hardly ever doing/producing any work

therefore they’ll be questioning whether the baby is in nursery and you’re actually looking after it rather than working and questioning where your priorities are as we all know a mother puts kids first and not work

you either need to leave or to make sure that you resolve points 1 and 2 which means more time in the office and making sure you do more work (you’re aren’t mid-senior if work is allocated to you).

I've read this whole thread and even if you aren't officially 'management' I don't understand how your role could be mid-senior and you'd need to wait for task allocation, or why if he wasn't allocating you tasks, you wouldn't just naturally collaborate with colleagues to share the workload, so I imagine it's a very specific industry that might be worth sharing.

Its not the PIP which is causing the feeling of being victimised its the managers ongoing method of management.

The PIP the manager is attempting to do is putting his organisation at risk. He needs to be removed or at least supervised by someone who understands what they are doing.

Her staying in work/ return to work would include an obligation on the employer to manage her stress. Expecting an employee to continuing a PIP under a manager not competent in the process becomes a wider organisational issue. To use a poor example if the OP had a fear of dogs and another employee has a service dog. Expecting her to work in an office with a service dog is unreasonable but both (OP & dog) can work on site by moving her to a new office where she will not cross paths with the dog. For the PIP process to be seen to be fair the employer needs to take account of the broken relationship which at least in part is down to the managers poor management style.

If the manager is creating a problem to force her from the role once she is moved to a new line manager and a normal work relationship resumes (as the OP has stated she has sucessfuly finished projects for other managers) the stressor is removed.

@Galllp your manager doesn’t have the initials DM does he? I was with my company for 10 years - I had been at exceeds expectations at the year end. My manager changed. Within 3 months of the new manager I was at below expectations and having everything micromanaged and watched over. The next thing I knew I was being invited to a disciplinary over it all. He never even put me on a PIP. Literally bypassed it all. Over the space of 9 months that man pretty much broke me. I’m still not sure how I survived it, but I fought my corner, took a previous manager in to the disciplinary with me (my current manager moved the fate multiple times because he couldn’t make it, then made it a day my former manager wasn’t working and tried to insist it had to be that date…. Luckily she was all over it and told him he couldn’t do that! I still think he was deliberately trying to make sure I couldn’t take her with me. I got signed off sick after breaking down in my doctors office. He hounded me with daily phone calls. I had a pre-booked family holiday which we went on. I wasn’t in sick leave for the holiday, I took it as holiday. But my doctor did sign me off for 2 more weeks after we got back because she could see I was still struggling. When I went back in (I had 4 weeks off total, the most sick I had ever taken in my entire adult life - more that everything combined in fact) he produced photos and posts from my personal Facebook page (private posts, I didn’t have him as a friend on there) and put me into a disciplinary for taking a holiday when I was sick!

Now I fought it all and I’m still here and he’s long gone. He was an awful man, a terrible manager - pretty sure he felt like he had to show what he was made of and picked me as someone he thought was weak (I had confided with him that I had depression and it was right after that all of the above started) to basically push out.

I will say this - if you choose to fight it, it can take a long time to get over it. I’m at 21 years now with the business and I still struggle to trust. Although my last line manager really helped me to start to overcome that. I removed all of my work colleagues from Facebook and pretty much stopped using it, despite having previously loved it as a way ti connect with people. For a long time I didn’t know who I could trust as one or more of my colleagues had to have given him those screenshots and I just didn’t know who.

So you can fight it if you want to stay there long term but it might take a lot out of you.

if you aren’t prepared for that, ask him for your compromise agreement. In the meantime, get your cvc updated and start looking for jobs.

It’s a horrible position to be in. I generally like everyone. I try to see the good in people. That former manager is one of two people in this world that I genuinely HATE. When he hugged me at Christmas right after all of this I could feel my skin crawl.

Good luck and so sorry for that huge post. I wanted you to know you’re not alone and there is a way past it.

I have a colleague on sick leave now because one of her parents is dying. She needs to be there. Her GP presumably thinks the situation is stressful enough to warrant a sick note so it's not fraud.

"For a long time I didn’t know who I could trust as one or more of my colleagues had to have given him those screenshots and I just didn’t know who."

Something similar happened at my work, but the person who snitched was stupid enough to have her name on the email/printout, which another person was then stupid enough to show to the person being snitched on.

I’m taking my employer to a tribunal but honestly it’s not worth the stress. If you can keep him compartmentalised whilst securing alternative employment you will ultimately be the winner.

get a new job ASAP. Never seen a more clear cut case of getting managed out....

Well unless she pre-planned her stress related leave it’s clearly not fraud is it?

The issue with what @Galllp posted was not that it was not possible that she could suffer mental illness as a result of stress in the future but that she was conspiring with a third party to claim she was mentally ill at some point in the future irrespective of whether that was true or not. That’s what was potentially fraudulent

I think that maybe there is more to it.

Indeed.