Is this normal for the public sector? Feels a touch illegal

[Nightingaleuk122]

I am four months into a new director position within a UK FE institution, after ten years in the private sector. I am gobsmacked by the chaos, lack of focus on the most basic areas of business and treatment of staff, including me, which includes:

I have an autistic daughter and, as agreed with HR, it was written into my contract that my on site hours are 8.30 until 4 with remaining hours completed at home. Since starting this has been entirely ignored, no accommodations have been made and I have to stay late approx 3 times per week.

I have been included within the duty manager rota, that includes regularly staying until 9pm. Responsibilities include suspending students for poor behaviour (including violence), fire drills and lock down procedures for if there is a threat to student welfare (not unlikely given the location). For this I have received 45 minutes of training on lockdown only, with the words 'just use your common sense' used. I feel utterly unprepared for if the situation occurs.

Last week duty managers were called upon to go to the car park to deal with gangs. I am a petite woman with zero experience in this situation. I feel like they are putting me at risk.

The workload is off the scale because it is not managed. Despite a busy week with a large project I needed to deliver, I was given a written report to prepare for Monday entitled 'ideas', which just seemed so utterly thoughtless and not strategic. I will now be spending my Sunday completing said report.

The structure seems chaotic. The CEO asked me to design a project plan which they then agreed to. I started to implement the project but was called out by the other members of the SLT team for not running the project past them first. I now have no idea who I'm supposed to check things with.

The organisation has a huge HR department, yet their focus appears to be small, inconsequential projects eg arranging menopause meet-ups, instead of fixing the fundamental issues like the above training issues or recruiting crucial staff members.

The problem is, I think I'm the only one who sees this as a problem. So the question is, is this normal? And if it isn't, what the hell do I do about it?

I left a job I loved for this.

Cos it’s not their money probably - they can take a nice top $ salary and aren’t at risk of losing their business. It’s a fucking shitshow

This thread has got under my skin (not sure why). Yes there’s waste sometimes in public services. There are a lot of rules imposed by central government which make this inevitable. Yes, there are people who aren’t performing - some of them absolutely should leave, some of them are burned out after years of working 60 hour weeks on a pretty low salary. But a lot of very skilled and dedicated people do a lot of very good work.

I’ve worked in central London and the north east. In the NE it’s not the case of the brightest always going into the private sector - the public sector is seen as a decent job (what’s the alternative unless you want to work for yourself?). Until recently I would say things were run better in the NE. In London I did notice it was difficult to recruit/retain people with the skills and temperament needed. I can see this issue becoming more common in the NE now too.

Charity sector was great 20 years ago
However over the passage of time it has moved more towards 'corporate' management and just become all about cost cutting (even with millions in reserves).

There will be no appetite for change because the chaos will serve certain leaders who will be getting away with doing very little.

Sounds about right, totally the same in the NHS, it is shambolic.

Actually surprised it only took that long, I hope you ran it past the Equality and Diversity team and the puffy people were politically correct and represented minority groups and you didn't forget to include people with protected characteristics.
Also bet the printer was broken or needed a new printer cartridge and nobody knew how to order one (or fit it when it arrived)!

And there you go OP this comment sums up everything which is wrong with your organisation.
You are a director with 3 levels of management above you, only in the public sector! 🙄

In the public sector most people are directors or Leads or Heads of, or Chiefy in charge of paperclips!!!!

I believe you implicitly, Pushmepullu (and won't ask how many committee meetings it involved )
There's a reason for the old aphorism about any public service project:

It'll take five times as long as said
It'll cost ten times as much
And it won't work

I worked in private practice law for public sector clients ant times (NHS Trusts, NHS property, NHS Business, Academies, GPs) and it sounds so similar. I always offered to help with public sector work, but refused to become a staple on those files when people left the public sector dept, as I knew I wanted to do private commercial work. (I loved charities work though!)

It’s interesting to read the insights some people have provided - that the public sector fails to have the competitive edge/pressure of private, because in most models it’s guaranteed funding (council tax) and doesn’t have bonus structures to show progress. It then also struggles to recruit experienced talent due to the pressures involved and lack of bonus/performance (while also struggling to work in a more “corporate” manner, because the work involves real people and real issues you can’t just ignore). It’s a rock and a hard place!

For your position OP, you need to read your employment contract and work policies around the out of hours “on call” work and working late. I’d suggest if you want to keep people on side, you enforce not working late (citing it was agreed and your daughter has additional needs) and look into the on call policies and make a decision on that later.

I can’t comment on the day to day. Sounds like a nightmare and meetings for the sake of meetings. I am a team of one who is professional qualified - if a non-specialist (even the CEO) tries to butt in and comment on something I’m specialised in - I’d tell them to back off. 😂

the private sector doesn’t do everything well. Eg childrens homes that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, are badly run and owners making a fortune. I work for a well run public sector organisation

I did over 15 years in FE in directorship and other leadership roles. Duty manager was not in my original contract but when I changed job titles HR popped it in there and suddenly I was in charge of the whole college from 5pm until 9pm with no training, I tried to argue that I was not teaching leadership and did not directly work with students (HR and even FD had to do this duty on a half termly rota so I lost that argument ) no guidance on what to do or who to call if there was an incident was provided and I insisted that I needed a handover document flagging anything I needed to know and where to go for help and if (when to escalate to the police etc), my colleagues on SLT were all old hands in FE and considered me as some kind of alien when I would question some of the working practices. The principal was a bully but had a persona that he could turn on and off to make himself appear likeable and reasonable. He’s now in FE recruitment and making a fat living out of providing emergency cover for burnt out managers who go on long term sick or simply leave because of the culture.

It’s very much a who you know environment if you want to get on, with references done via sneaky telephone calls (which are not logged and so never appear in writing on files) which often expose you if you are trying to make a secret exit and have a new job in FE lined up before resigning.

Look at your contract carefully, that duty management bit gets sneaked in under the “any other duties commensurate with the grade”. Nonetheless, I would try just saying no I can’t do that day and keep saying it every time the rota is published, someone who is trying to get in the good books of the principal will usually step in (and you’ll be reminded of how kind they are…). As others have already said FE is the poor man of education and it relies on a large part on the goodwill of staff. If all those goodwill hours were paid the colleges would not survive. People do it because FE students are some of the most vulnerable, let down and marginalised groups, school has already failed them and FE is supposed to pick up the pieces and make good the lack of five years of secondary education.

They live in terror of OFSTED, and I believe that this is to a large degree what drives the hideous culture.

If you’re working at Director level, then kindly, I would expect you to be taking ownership and dealing with quite a few of these issues yourself.

Eg. Managing your time and coming up with a plan to implement your working arrangements, chasing training up to the point you feel it’s adequate, taking time to understand incident response plans and procedures, saying no to unrealistic requests.

I worked in the public sector for 10 years and never experienced anything quite that bad but what I can contribute is this:

• were the on-site/off-site hours specifically discussed and agreed with your immediate superior before you accepted the job, or just with HR? If just with HR you need a specific conversation with your immediate superior asap about this.
• once that arrangement is agreed, it is up to you to enforce it. You don't expect other people to know about it and accommodate it, you just have to say "no". I am not coming to that meeting (or I will attend remotely from home) as I am not on site at that point. No I am not on the duty rota until 9pm as I work off-site after 4:30pm.
• yes it is normal to expect a collegiate approach to implementing projects. Part of any new project is considering the impact it might have on other teams, and understanding that you might not in yourself know all the impact that could happen so you discuss your plans widely before implementing them so as to give any team who will be affected by your project an opportunity to raise any concerns

I moved into public sector 2 years ago. What I find is that no one cares about outcomes, just process. It seems everyone is accountable for following a process, but no one is accountable for an actual outcome.

The public sector is bloated and wasting money. It’s also creating more and more useless regulations spinning out of DEI and human rights, etc. that apply to the private sector. Soon the private sector will collapse too.

This explains why everyone in the public sector feels stressed and hard done by, while the tax payers look on and windershy nothing gets done.

The turnover of staff in the charity sector is awful now. But understandable. Between the trustees (mostly badly picked) and the sucking up and general laziness of the top tier many become disillusioned. Many events are tired now but set in stone, any new events, better systems take months of discussion and are eventually turned down. I'm glad I'm out of it.

I worked in FE for a year, a quarter of a century ago. I was very happy to get out of it. Utter chaos. I see nothing has changed 😕 You can't change the whole system, so protect your own stuff as much as you can, while looking for opportunities to move on. Good luck 👍

No experience in FE but I’m someone who moved from SME private sector to public at a junior level and found it a much better place to work because the risks were real and about people. I can well believe though that FE has become a real dumping ground and it sounds like there are massive issues with the leadership at your organisation.

If you’re thinking you’re going to leave anyway, you’re going to have to stand your ground about your hours. Do it and see what happens. If they’ve got minutes being written, work off them after the meeting. If nobody’s writing decent minutes, say so. Also don’t underestimate the impact of making the decisions you can make, it certainly causes problems in the public sector when nobody will make decisions. My guiding principle is ‘what would the coroner say’ so if I think I’m being sucked into a dangerous situation that I’m not equipped to handle I absolutely will dig my heels in, but then I will go looking for ways to equip myself in the future. Yes call the police if you feel it is justified - if the coroner would say to you ‘so you understood that there were gang members on site? What risks did you identify and what did you do about them?’ an answer of ‘I seemed to be expected to go out there and so I did’ is not going to make you feel too good. Make the call.

For sure go looking for another job, but do the best you can with it for your remaining days or weeks.